Military AI Works

Just wondered what is the best way to save a texture, I am using Dxtbmp.

Kind Regards
Dale

dxt3

There's a consensus these days in the AI community to go for DXT3 with mipmaps for the main texture, DXT3 without mipmaps for the lightmap. Remember that a DXT3 texture MUST have an alpha channel for optimal performance.

I also use DXTBmp to convert my textures. Some painters prefer Imagetool for the conversion to DXT3 and adding of mipmaps, but remember that the latter can't add an alpha channel if your texture is missing one.

I only use extended 32 bit bmp 888 I believe.. It's my opinion that it's the cleanest and nicest looking..most files become 4 mb....I don't like mipmaps or the dxts..they add extra colors stripes around edges and panel lines.. It just bothers me

It pretty much boils down to quality vs performance. Yes, you can chose to have all of your textures as 32bit BMP files, but then you are probably going to have framerate issues at highly populated spots. I personally prefer having all textures as DXT3, purely on a performance background. I realise that the repaints take a quality loss, but then again, it's AI, I'm not supposed to be looking THAT close (note to repainters: Please don't take it the wrong way, I'd love to have all my repaints by 32 bit, but I just don't have the machine for it with my levels of AI)

I'm not sure if it's an imagined thing or not, but imagetool (apparently) tend to do a slightly more aggressive compression compared to DXTBmp. But if you're adding or removing mipmaps from textures that are already compressed to DXT3, you should use imagetool, as DXTBmp will re-compress the texture files leading to additional quality loss.

Flyin Illini wrote:I only use extended 32 bit bmp 888 I believe.. It's my opinion that it's the cleanest and nicest looking..most files become 4 mb....I don't like mipmaps or the dxts..they add extra colors stripes around edges and panel lines.. It just bothers me

Agree about mipmaps but still i like to save it as dxt3.

Mipmapping your textures will seriously reduce flickering in your sim and if your settings are right, you will never notice any loss in detail.

One of the main reasons people get blurry textures with mipmaps is because of incorrect settings in FS. In 99% of the cases it's because the "max texture size" setting wasn't set to "massive". FS will never show the largest (1024x1024) texture on your aircraft in that case.

Another thing to take into account is that people have experienced crashes with AI aircraft wearing 32bit schemes. So by default I always either install the dxt3 or convert to it.

Thanks for that guys

My preference - 32-bit with mipmaps.

Using DXT3 seems to degrade the quality of the texture in a lot of cases.