Just to chip in some things I've noticed.
I try to avoid DXT with alpha because of the "bleed" issue, but by bleed I mean how it draws MIPS in sim. With the DXT formats you can still be quite close by & the aircraft (or ship - especially ship) textures suddenly looks blurry & blocky as the sim redraws & chooses to downsample (MIP).
Try the same thing with 565 etc. formats, & the effect is still there, but
much less noticeable.
Over the years my format choices with DXTbmp for repaints have become:
uncheck the "include MIPS" button - with faster processors these days the sim can do this on the fly & it will make better choices than DXTbmp.
Make sure you have the latest version of DXTbmp & the latest dlls
Texture formats themselves:
- no need for an alpha channel (eg. normal undamaged fuselage & wings, usually DXT1 no alpha) - use 565
- simple pure black alpha (eg damage textures, usually DXT 1 with alpha) - use 555-1
- partial, graded alphas (usually DXT3) - 444 or even 888 - depending on the application (prop blurs or windows) doesn't always give acceptable results, so sometimes only DXT3 will do, but sometimes these formats will improve appearance in the sim.
However, don't use these formats for bitmaps that don't require an alpha, something I noticed when using 888 format for bitmaps where you don't need an alpha channel. They can look downsampled as though they've gone to 16 bit colours. Saving with a pure white alpha seems to improve things, but 565 format actually appears better. So although 888 is able to use 32 bit colour, the sim seems to take it back to extended 16 bit colour.
Hope this is useful
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