alanlj44

Ok, so PMDG 737 shows that its textures are DXT1 so you should go for this. I suppose you work on a livery? What is your workflow to do that? By that I mean the exact process you follow. Are you using the paintkit? Are you working on an existing livery, open the dds file, modify it in GIMP, save it by overwriting the original file and then launch MSFS? If not, do you structure your livery project accordingly so it can be recognized and installed through PMDG operations center? I'm guessing your problems comes from there, not from the DDS files. As long as you choose DXT1, they will show up UNLESS something is wrong in how everything is setup so that MSFS understand what is to be replaced by what, and if it's your first time texturing with MSFS and dealing with the modding structure, it really can be puzzling to get it right at first.

Now there's a question I've been longing to ask for a good chunk of time to all airliner seasoned pilots here, since I'm more of a VFR GA at core. Since those planes like the Maddog and the 737 have VNAV and auto-throttle and that all LVL changes and speeds are stored within your flight plan in the FMC and done accordingly with the autopilot, in which case scenarios do you have to use IAS mode like that? Because I often see people talking about it so it seems like a very common usage but I never seem to have to use it so I'm guessing something's wrong in my piloting airliners skills as of yet...

Also, what are you working on? How are you applying the modifications in order to make MSFS take your replacement textures into consideration? When I began editing textures (replacing textures for the virtual cockpit of the justflight's PA-28), rather than permanently overwrite the original texture file, I was creating a separate mod I could enable/disable in order to do that. My textures wouldn't work. It was not because of the textures, but because my mod structure was wrong so MSFS would simply ignore it. ALSO: Are you sure you're using MSFSLayoutGenerator EACH TIME you're making a modification in whatever mod you're working into? Because otherwise, it won't work. The layout.json file of a mod MUST always reflect precisely what files and their respective precise filesize and whatnot the mod contains at every given point, otherwise it won't work. All of this might trick you into believing your textures are the problem when in fact, it is something else. It also has to be taken into consideration that each time you modify a texture and the layout file accordingly, simply getting back to main menu and launch a new flight will not work. You will have to relaunch MSFS entirely for the modifications to be taken into account. It's a pain in the a** given how long it takes, but it is how it works.

DXT1 is usually what is used, at least for anything that is not a normal map texture, but even then , DXT1 seems working just like it should. But some of the other formats seems to work well too. At any rate, I recommend DXT1, this is what I used when working on my MD-80 high res VC mod, as it was also in what formats the original textures were stored into. NVidia has some legacy tool called Windows Texture Viewer that displays the format of a texture you're previewing into. It's there: https://developer.nvidia.com/legacy-texture-tools Just open up some texture work on different airplane you might have in your community and you'll see they're most often in DXT1 format, so I'll go with that. Your problem might be more due to what you're using to edit the image and/or what you use to save or convert it to .DDS What is your workflow? What tools are you using?

Just to give some news, Blue version is coming soon: Since cockpit variations like the blue one are specifically stored in liveries that uses it, you can't make a stand alone mod that switches itself from brown to blue. It's either brown or either blue and/or gets replaced by liveries specific. So I'm going to make an installer that recognizes all your different liveries and will allow you to either install brown or blue and their resolution for each livery. It will allow you to choose your cockpit color for any livery.

Oh an d by the way, if you have a look on his company under which name was used for his youtube account he was posting his SLC videos on, information updates on GOV.UK for Lanilogic Technology Solutions Ltd (how pompous… ), you’ll see that by the 6th of April, he transferred the direction to his wife. Usually not a good sign, it’s often a trick to avoid personal responsibilities. At least, it goes to show the “company” (if you can call it that way) is still probably in “business” (if you can call it that way too… ). How would the only person in a one-person company working on simulation add-on would transfer the direction of said company to his wife who was never ever mentioned as working on the project nor have any active interest in simulation add-on all the while after shutting any means of reaching him and all channels of communication?

This dev is a joke, plain and simple. A lazy you-know-what who plainly and simply doesn’t take responsibility for wanting to abandon his project, because YES IT IS ABANDONNED (stop being naive some of you lol), and not come clean with it. He played on his customers with utter disrespect, constantly promising that 1.6 was “just around the corner” for almost… 2 years now… it’s been almost a year if not more that 1.6 is 98% finished lol. WHAT A JOKE. This is just buying time and nothing else... Also, he had a very bad habit of banning and insulting anyone who were asking for news on progress, stating his discord who barely had much users, was “a time sink which was responsible for the constant delays” (what a joke lol), some people even stated that he wouldn’t respond to them via email for support. Also if you reached to him politely and suggested him to release a hotfix just for enforcing boarding/deboarding in case of broken door management, which was a super easy hotfix to implement, and if you suggested a way on how to do it, you’d get insults in return as if you were harassing him… I’m okay with someone wanting to abandon a project, but you MUST come clean with it, state where the product is currently broken, AND STOP SELLING IT to prospective customers UNLESS you specifically state that it won’t go further AND/OR AT LEAST that the product is nowhere near useable if you’re not on a jetway for both boarding and deboarding for most planes which is a huge deal breaker. And shut the discord OFF and not just put it to read only, because to a prospective customers who is not thinking that there might be a scam behind this, it might lure him into believing there’s an active discord and that nobody complains here. AND OF COURSE, remove everything pertaining to promises on future update to not pull off some marketing ■■■■ and elicit more deceptive sells out of thin air. HE STILL WANT THE SELL luring people and not deliver afterward, it’s plain obvious and it’s called “deceptive practices”, there’s no two way about it! Anyway, in the meantime, PacX made some real progress and has layouts and all and even more than SLC. And now, even the freeware LukeAirTool seems to have almost everything SLC has and then some. It's a shame because there were some neat ideas in SLC Now the dev even have to face a free competition better than him and you expect him to continue working on SLC?? You’re dreaming if you do, he simply vanished, as are all evidences showing now (discord strangely put to read only making it impossible to voice concerns BUT also share soundpack and layouts made by the community which kills the project, youtube comments suddenly put to off) He plainly ripped us off of our money by saying 2 years ago that yes, doors management was broken but we could buy with confidence as he was promising us it was going to be fixed Very Soon® (yes, “very soon” or “almost done” seems to be his trademark lol) I don't care about his wife or kids, it's not my problem as a customer. Those are poor excuses, next time it will be "my dog has eaten my hard-drive on which the 1.6 files were!! Too bad...". If he can't deliver, no problem, it happens I'm ok with that, but come clean with customers, and stop selling it to new one until you eventually come back to the project. STOP luring people into thinking there's an active Discord and the project is well and alive by silencing everyone and taking the money! STOP EXCUSING DECEPTIVE PRACTICES. TO NEWCOMMERS: !!! DO NOT BUY !!! it has now become a real scam unless he comes clean with it. You'll loose your money because soon enough, some MSFS updates will definitely breaks it entirely sooner or later and I guarantee you you'll get no fix. There has been none for the broken door management in 2 years...

The Maddog is a great plane, plenty of systems fidelity, a good enough EFB, VNAV/LNAV/APP working flawlessly as per how the real plane performed (apparently), not too hard on the CPU, hand flying that is a very interesting experience to handle, a bit less automated than the Boeing 737-700 but plenty automated enough that you don't have to manually take care of everything (I imagine it was probably seen as being a very advanced airliner for its time with autothrottle, full VNAV and even autoland). Failures properly simulated as far as I could see, so we're on study level grounds definitely. Where it REALLY falls behind is in the graphical department where the cockpit is clearly severely outdated in terms of MSFS standards and is clearly from a bygone era, especially texture wise, although it is a bit alleviated by the natural beauty and inherent charisma of the MD-80s cockpit where early modern cockpits still clashes with vintage era and looks very atmospheric. That and the subpar sounds. The plane definitely lacks some of the immersive factor of the Fenix A320 and the PMDG 737 but at a higher price.

You have an i7, 64GB of RAM and a 3070ti my friend... ... the only time you should be that much satisfied and be that much enthusiastic with the number 25 is after the well deserved 25th slap in the face you strike on those responsible for that despicable "update" to wake them up, get them back on the ground and speed them up a little so we don't have to wait 2 months for SU10 instead of having a big uber priority performance hotfix ASAP.

The "debate" should be a no brainer: As customers, we should NEVER EVER be happy with lowering settings to accommodate for an abomination of an update. Plain and simple. Yes Asobo, watch where my eyes rest, I'm talking about you, you abhorrent Sim Update 9! Prior to this insult of an update (downdate more like), I never once considered lowering my TLOD under 400. Yes, 400! Because as much as I'm not an FPS obsessed person, I had what I considered satisfactory performances with my Ryzen 5600X and my 2070 super. Sure it would go down to 22-25 FPS on ground sometimes but that was with AIG to 100% and it was a relatively smooth 22-25 stutter wise, and then as soon as I would start climbing, FPS would quickly switch to 30 all the way to 40 at cruise, being airliner or GA. All this with MSFS to its maximum glory in every details of the settings. Now good luck has it that I changed my 2070 super to some 3070 ti during mid-SU9. Guess what? Now I've got to turn LOD to 200 and not launch AIG if I want similar performance and often slightly less except when that stupid update is willing to stop draining the life out of my CPU like a bloody Dracula on a Friday the 13th, and the 3070 ti can at last really kicks in and make the difference it always should through and through. TLOD was fine at 400 prior to SU9, nothing in the graphics department has been added since relative to TLOD so it MUST be back at what it was prior to SU9. Period. TLOD to 25 and marvel at the FPS gain... seriously... what next do I have to do? Turns clouds to medium and fly in cotton fields? No way 😃

I was about to say just that! You stole my very words 🤣 Hint: lower every details to LOW too and experience a true miracle 😱 FPS raises!! I know, it has to be black magic or some kind of crazy voodoo stuff going on... 👀 😁

Try the 16K once, you might be surprised 😉 A lot of people with similar GPU (I myself have an RTX 2070 Super so same amour of VRAM as you) have reported no impact whatsoever, if only an occasional stutter for a split second here and there when panning. 🤣 There's some truth in there 😅 But I still hope that at some point, Leonardo do a cockpit overhaul the real way it should, with next gen texture work made from scratch and not reuse their past textures. There's only so much you can do with an old source of material... my overhaul is kinda "the Poor man's overhaul" 😂. My two cents is that they didn't have or contracted their texture artist for this release and it's old work from the last they did they are reusing constantly. Some things I found were baffling or puzzling, like how incredibly low-res the AO was (Ambient Occlusion are fake pre-rendered shadows that have been baked into a texture, it used to be a thing for optimization back when GPU were not powerful enough to do it on the fly like rendering engines does now, since it has become pretty GPU cheap since like the GTX 9xx/1xxx series). These greyscaled AO looks like an old work that have been reused and tried to be upscaled a lot the hard way, with catastrophic results since trying to enforce upscaling on low res grey gradients usually breaks them into a pixelated mess. How they didn't care to simply delete them like I did and let MSFS on-the-fly ambient occlusion do the work (you just lose a very little bit of depth perception but no pixelated mess anymore) baffles me. Makes me think that the 3D artist was not there anymore and someone with very little knowledge of texturing had to do the porting from P3D the best he could. I don't know why they didn't invest into proper 3D modelling and retexturing from the ground up like PMDG did for example, as it is a huge selling point and hype train. Really didn't do them favor when you see the lack of enthusiasm for the Maddog on the MSFS forum compared to Just Flight 146 and PMDG 737. The Maddog is a great plane!! Leonardo's addon is a gem! But it is obvious it could have sold even better if they cared to hype it more with beautifull next gen graphics. Seems to me a bit like they rushed things to benefit and win the race of being the first true airliner payware... that's a bit sad if that's the case. I sure hope they will TRULY make a cockpit overhaul and not just old textures enhancement like I did, but I'm not sure they are going to do it. It's very time consuming and most of the sales of an addon happens at first release so I'm not sure it will be a viable investment anymore, at least for the time being. I'd be surprised they do, but I certainly hope so! Their addon deserves as much! Oh well, in the meantime at least, we don't have a cockpit painted with pixels anymore 😅 And I'm certainly going to continue experimenting. There's a few things I'm not yet happy with 😎

Me too! There's only so much I can do, it's very limited. At least in the meantime, we don't have that much of a pixelized cockpit anymore 😅

how you like it so far compared to vanilla cockpit?

Lucky you... 😏

This I like better 😎 Great performances! How's the stuttering when panning around compared to vanilla cockpit?

16K worked just fine on my part. I hope it will work for you 🤔

I'm going to try the downloaded version, see if it makes a difference with my own work version but it shouldn't normally

Thanks ! What version did you just test? How were performances so far? What is your ram/GPU and vram? EDIT: nevermind, your specs are in your signature already 😅 with that kind of hardware you shouldn't have the slightest problem running the 16K (I do with my RTX 2700 super and 32GB of ram)

Please do! 👍

The mod is live, gents 😎 https://flightsim.to/file/32666/fly-the-maddog-x-cockpit-overhaul-hires Main file is the 16K version, the other one the 8K. Test it, give me your feedback, do your mad dogs with it and post your impressions and screenshots if you even want 😉 Happy flights!

Mod is pending approval at flightsim.to as we speak 🙂 Thanks for your very kind words 😉 But trust me, Leonardo could find better than me for such a job and I certainly hope they will for the good of everybody 😏 Most of the textures are still theirs and they were nice, simply too low-res for something like MSFS. Ideally, you'd want to redo the texture work completely from scratch and that is what they should strive for! Most of what I did involved a lot of different enhancing techniques, softwares, fiddling with numbers countless amount of time, do some experimentations and testing to enhance the details of existing textures to the most possible way! Of course a lot of time I had to touchup scratches, little details, paint some new to replace what couldn't be enhanced etc. Takes a lot of time if you're not a texture artist. BUT! Leonardo should not rely on their old texture anymore. There's only so much you can salvage... They should work with their real texture artist or hire one to entirely remake the texturing from scratch, including the way the 3D model is UV mapped (create more textures but smaller ones to not cover so much of the cockpit inside a single texture. That was good technique a decade ago but not anymore, using MSFS new decal function as much as possible etc). Repaint everything from scratch and remap the 3d model entirely. Personally, I just don't know how to do that well enough, or it would take me an enormous amount of time that certainly wouldn't be viable 😅 (I'm not proficient in drawing/painting).

Project is about to be released in any moment now at flightsim. Thanks for all the people who offered their help to beta-test, however I found friends close to home who brought along their PC so we could test a few specs live. Admittedly, having 4 PC running MSFS in the same small room was pretty fun and unusual! (and did warm up the room pretty fast lol).

That is good advice indeed! I will ask them right away. Thanks for all the support from everybody ♥

Hi fellow users of the mighty Maddog MD-80 Thought I'd start my own topic to continue talking about my High Resolution Virtual Cockpit project for Leonardo's MD-80. We all know the aircraft is great system wise, but many of us felt disappointed with the texturing not being on par with MSFS next gen rendering engine and GPU capabilities of today. To that effect, I'm actually doing an entire overhaul of the VC textures. I'm not repainting everything from scratch of course, but using a whole bunch of enhancing softwares I have access to and different techniques to higher up the resolution with much greater and finer details. Some of the VC parts/details were so low-res due to too much VC parts that are big on screen and close to the camera all crammed into only two small 4K textures for example, that enhancing techniques failed to give acceptable results, meaning I decided to repaint them from scratch which is time consuming for someone that has knowledge of photoshop and how texturing works but is not a texturer/artist 😅 For optimization purpose, the mod will normally come in two iteration: one with needed textures going as high as 8K and another one going as high as 16K to allow some of our lucky friends with beasts of war to fully take advantage of their bigger amount of VRAM. Work is taking more time than I initially thought but progresses are going well. Some people have contacted me already for beta testing and I expect to send them both version for testing very soon. Here's a couple of comparison shots: Hi-res pictures, be sure to zoom in to the max Managed to get rid of those horribly pixelated faked shadows that were especially bad looking during night time but day also Especially worked on replacing all the windows/windshield seals because originals were too low-res to enhance and looked like snail skin more than anything else lol. Tried to paint the seal/part to the green color you see on a lot of cockpit real pictures. Added some handmade HiRes weathering to them (currently not finished, time consuming) Stay tuned, a first version will be released pretty soon. Subsequent versions will focus on smaller details everywhere (like replacing all the screws by Hi-Res counterparts, replace air masks hose textures, almost entirely remake PBR texturing etc)