FSX Aircraft - To Mip or Not To Mip?

[DB93]

Hi all,

I've done a couple of repaints recently, and am currently working on a new one. The first two I did, I did not include mipmaps for the textures because I was under the impression that the textures remain sharper if there aren't mipmaps on a player's aircraft. On the paint I'm working on now, I've experimented both with and without mipmaps, and I don't see a difference except that the version with mipmaps is around 1MB larger in filesize.

I'm using DXT5 .DDS files (mostly 2048x2048) and am compiling them into that format using imagetool. Since I don't notice any difference between using mipmaps and not using them aside from filesize, is there any reason/benefit as to why I should include mipmaps for aircraft repaints, or is the generally accepted practice these days to just not use them?

Thanks for any info or tips.

-George

[pilotwing]

Mipmaps are created automatically when you convert the bmp in dds, i might be wrong, but explains why you don't see changes in the textures

[Moparmike]

Mip levels are triggered by the viewing distance. So if you're checking something out up close, you're probably not seeing any shift in mip levels. Try zooming out farther or switch to tower view to increase your distance from the model.

The theory behind it is when an object is farther away you don't need to see that nice big 1024x1024 texure since that detail won't be resolved at distance anyway...so depending on how the end users graphics settings are, the appropriate mip level will be automatically selected and displayed. 256x256, 32x32, etc...

[Mathias]

What Mopar sais.
One thing to consider when stripping off mipmaps:
As you zoom out you can get awfull jaggies, the dreaded flickering stair effect, and there's no way to get rid of them other than using mips. I find this particular annoying in VC's that have no mips.
The downside of using mips in conjunction with 2048 textures is that you need to tell your user to edit the FSX.cfg and to adjust the graphics card properly, namely setting image quality to at least "quality".

[DB93]

Happy New Year, and Thanks for all the information. I can see what you mean about the textures getting the jaggies when they're not mipped when I zoom out. They look so much better when viewed from a distance when the mips are used that I think I'll be sure to include them in my future repaint projects.

Thanks again.

-George