OK!This is the same principle as those reflection screensavers that also add in some cases the ripple effect. It's a flipped image adjusted somewhat to get a reflection effect!What it is not, is a 'reflection bitmap texture'.I'm making all this up! :-)

>Thanks for the explanation. >>So a "real reflection" would not simply be a duplicate but >an actual technique used. Haven't heard of that in any games >so far... perhaps it's a feature not available in videocards >yet. >>-Leon Medado Well no, of course no "device" can make a "real reflection".But there are only two ways. Either by way of raytracing wich is a heavy amount of computations or by an even more fake way by just duplicating the current view with actual duplicate objects Pete

>That is unkind I think ,Maby is the result of artist who >wishes to keep the texture SMALL and good for Frame rate ? >I see a plane taxi past I do not make up my hair in its >reflexion as it passes ,I am too busy :)trying to fly MY >plane. >If it looks ok then it is ok ,130kb textures are good to >store and take less spaces if you has 30+texture folder per >aircraft . >Anniette xxxxxx Well, maybe but not necessarily. Generally the really bad textures are the result of someone who has no idea about compression. Excluding of course those who just can't paint or draw of course.I've downloaded a texture that was saved as a jpeg ant level number 3 wich is pretty bad. If I recall it was left up to me to convert it to DXT but even before that they looked pretty bad.Pete

Pete you are right true raytrace is VERY compute heavy due to the fact that one has to compute all possable paths from every pixel inan image back to every pixel in the "raytraced" surface and that at least for now is far more than any consumer video card can handle.Real raytracing is hard even on work stations with dedicated graphicssub systems.http://members.rogers.com/klasik2/danlogo.gifhttp://members.rogers.com/eelvish/flyurl.gif

Gee pete, you talked about posky people sounding like "punks".. ha! You don't sound too nice in this post pal. Anyway....To try to answer the question... whether a plane is made by gmax or FSDS doesn't affect texture quality. Gmax simply enables reflections and different forms of compression on the bmp files. I agree that DXT3 is bad to use for day textures but it must be used on night textures to get the correct alpha for the night lighting. Besides the texture reflections, gmax has a number of advantages over FSDS but FSDS still has a few advantages over Gmax as well. Overall gmax is the better choice by a looooong shot.Take care,Sherv

>Gee pete, you talked about posky people sounding like >"punks".. ha! You don't sound too nice in this post pal. >>Hey, Shrev(Shrevport?),Uhmm, I didn't bring up POSKY here at all.Pete

Well I'm not exactly sure what you said there but I think I need to clear it up a bit.The size of the texture has little to do with it's quality. You can create a 1024 by 1024 pixel sized 32-bit texture but all it might have is one huge black line going through the middle representing a stripe on the airplane. A lot of freeware aircraft textures do actually look that simple, just some circles, a few dots, some squares, a couple of lines in different plain colors. No bolts, hinges, dust, dirt, rust, gaps, smears, and other little details that MS and some skilled 3rd-party texturers do have. IMO this is an aspect of freeware aircraft that is forgivable since I don't spend a lot of time looking at external views anyway. However since a lot of GMAX aircraft are only freeware it might explain why the original poster thinks that GMAX aircraft look bad.DXT3 compression only has one level of compression AFAIK. And unlike JPEG the final size of the file remains the same for a given resolution and color depth regardless of the detail that's actually in it. So that big 32-bit texture with a simple black line in the middle I mentioned would be the same size and consume the same amount of resources as one that would include all the little details it has in reality.-Leon Medado