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    • defaid,   I've now done some tests with three different flyable aircraft, each of them fully DXT3 textured and done with and without mips. However, I did not see the crispness differences as in your two pics above. So, the only thing I can now think of is that you and I have different graphics cards and/or display screens.   My graphics card is an AMD Radion HD 7900 series, which outputs to a large Panasonic TV set (resolution 1920 X 1080) connected up via a HDMI cable. However, I must also admit that this very modern TV set has a whole series of it's own built in adjustment possibilities and some of those include picture "sharpness", colors, contrasts, etc. etc. All this is most probably the reason why I was originally not directly referring to flyable aircraft texture mipmaps but far more to those of scenery textures about which I've had my own mipmap theories for many years.   One of these theories is still that the highest possible frame rates should always be sought after and mipping scenery and AI plane textures were one of the surest ways to attain this but a few display problems remained here and there and the questions I had about these were the subject of my original posting in this thread. However, judging by your reactions and those of Alan, I have now understood that my few scenery problems still remaining are not very easy to rectify but because they are so few, it doesn't really remain a problem.   Anyway guys, thanks for your reactions, I learned a lot from them.   Regards   Hans            
    • Check out JoinFS, which has a recorder function that might work for you. https://joinfs.net/
    • It's somehow limited to only 2 aircrafts. 1 is me, the user, and the 2 is the cloned aircraft which I pre-recorded. I used the version 1.331 because that's the only version that works for my FSX and laptop. I tried to download versions that are made before and after 1.331, all failed because there is something wrong with the "FSRecorder.dll" file. Does anyone know how to make it have unlimited clone aircrafts? Or better, have an AI Traffic tool that lets you have AI Aircrafts, or a newer version of the FS Recorder that works in FSX:SE. Thanks!
    • Thanks you all. It's true, by reducing another point in the static_cg_height, the nose gear seems on the ground. I really appreciate your comments and suggestions. Have a nice day and "flight"
    • Boeing 767 UPS Cargo (N-391UP) taxi (close up) and takeoff (short) at Manises Valencia Airport (VLC) with ATC audio included runway 12, on 23 April 2024  
    • From the screenshot above , seems just moved above and all the gears are fully extended. I think better read the SDK and understand which number has what meanings.
    • Except possibly from the subjective perspective of personal preference, that's absolutely not the case.   As I wrote above, mip mapping has no effect within a certain view distance because up to that point, the largest image will be used and not any of the mips. In that circumstance, mipped is exactly the same as unmipped..   Compressing to DXT-3 degrades the crispness by introducing dithering: blurring of edges and blending of colours as an artifact of the compression process. On top of that it seems also to reduce the bit depth of each channel, which alters the colours themselves.   That happens at all draw distances and by the nature of textures, is most obvious at close range.   Here's a snippet of a downloaded Shanghai livery for a Fruit Stand plane. I opened the 32-bit version (the repainter was farsighted enough to include it in the zip) and saved a couple of times as DXT3. Once was enough to introduce the artifacts but I made them more obvious by saving a couple more times.   Whether or not one or the other looks better in game to any specific person is entirely subjective but compressed formats are lossy and degrade the crispness.   D   First the 32-bit original:       Second, the DXT3 format:      
    • FYI, he's close to a solution in the FS2004 forum. He posted all over the place, lol.
    • Have you tried different airports? Not sure but could be an addon scenery issue?
    • Hans,   I haven't noticed any problems and this includes not having scenery suddenly appear.  It's probably something to do with modern processors and video cards, as mentioned by defaid above, not that my hardware is particularly modern.  Processor is AMD Phenom II and video card is NVIDEA GeForce GTX960.  Converting textures to DXT3, without MIPS, usually makes them sharper, particularly when close up.   Alan
    • I don't think that's how mips work. Each grade of mipmap is just a smaller, lower-resolution copy of the base texture in an image. Just as different areas of a single-file aircraft texture are mapped to different parts of a 3d model, so different areas of a mipped texture file are mapped to different distances.   That is to say, each draw distance will use a different part of the mipped image.   If there are no mips, the high-res base image is used at all draw distances so you effectively get full texture detail right out to the horizon.   Image editing software such as DXTbmp doesn't show the whole set of mips in one image but mostly they would look like this:   Unpipped texture used at all distances:   Mipped texture. Larger file but easier on the graphics memory because for distant objects, the graphics hardware doesn't have to load the large hi-res image, just a small blurry version:                                               I strip the mips from all my aircraft textures because high-resolution modern PCs, graphics hardware & drivers, and monitors don't really need them. (As an aside, I also convert them to 32-bit as I sometimes edit them and each hard save of a compressed image degrades it). Stripping them makes the file slightly smaller. (Decompressing them makes them bigger...) The fundamental resolution of a modern monitor is good enough that -- mostly -- the sparkling and the moiree pattern just don't happen. Modern processors and memory don't struggle with the high-res, unmipped textures even when handling hundreds of them at a complex airport with heavy AI.   In the past I've also stripped them from other textures but occasionally came across problems so I leave those as the developer made them.   D
    • alanmerry,   From your reaction above and especially from your "Mip Maps unticked" remark I conclude that you structurally remove scenery/texture Mip Maps wherever you can ??? Does this not defeat the very purpose of Mip Map technology, i.e. that your scenery items/objects are only visible at short distances and that they suddenly/unrealistically pop up when you approach them ? Quite some of my own (airport/airfield) scenery objects keep popping up at such short distances, even although I have structurally added Mip Maps to all their textures ???   I use the same softwares as you evidently do but I ONLY "untick Mip Maps" for my flyable aircraft textures because firstly, these then remain somewhat smaller and secondly, they are never viewed from longer distances.   Keep the comments coming guys because this thread is becoming more and more interesting !!   Regards   Hans    
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