Textures in FS2004 Kill Frames or are Blurry

[tomascubero]

Hey guys at SPS,

I have visited your site before and have found many important tips and tutorials but until now I really need your help.

I am a novice repainter with around some 15 repaints or more which I have ALWAYS had a problem with.

All my repaints are done with the respective layered paintkits from the aircraft designers and produced in Photoshop CS3. After making the proper textures, I am saving them as BMP and as 32bits.

I know that FS2004 can use either 32bits or DXT3 but I rather use 32bits due to its increased quality.

If I try loading the 32bit textures saved directly from Photoshop, FS crashes. If I try opening the textures with Imagetool and saving them again in 32bits, I get them blurry even without mipmaps.

So finally I decided to download DXTBMP and opened up the Photoshop .bmp 32bit textures there and re-saved them as Extended Bitmap in 32bits. After loading up my sim I was verry happy to see complete textures without crashing and no blurriness.

It wasn't until I started to fly that I noticed all my frames were being killed, so I went back to step 1. I either get blurry textures or heavy textures which the sim will run at 2-3fps.

What I am possibly doing wrong here? I have downloaded tones of 32bit textures and ran them with no problems, it has to be such a simple fix but I'm not finding it.

Thanks in advance for any help!

Tomas Cubero M.
San Jose, Costa Rica

[AGNT_Matt]

ok, 32-bit textures are very frame rate hungry, as is saving without mips, what you need to do is find a balance, most FS9 repaints are in DXT3 format which allows an alpha channel and also allows for quicker texture loading due to the textures being more compressed than 32-bit where theres little to no compression. I am second in command over at AGNT and i know from experience that DXT3 is the repainters favourite there are a few exceptions however to this rule, things like the latest IRIS Sim PC-9 use 32 bit textures, even on my system shes a heavy bird to use. so my advice would be to choose DXT3 over 32-bit, there will be the tiniest modicum of loss of quality but balances out on the performance side.

Hope this helps

[adlabs6]

Hi there,

I agree, give DXT3 a try. On my computer, I tested 32bit textures with some payware addons which offered them, and I had lower performance.

[tomascubero]

Hey Guys,

Thanks for the replies. I actually found out what was happening, for some reason my video card settings went back to factory default and any 32bit texture was killing all my frames. I loaded my previous settings and now its working fine again. I agree with DXT3 but I prefer to have fuselage and tail textures in 32bits and the rest DXT3 so for now I've solver my problem.

Thanks for the help!
Tomas.