Recompiling mdls for FSX: how to?

[Rallymodeller]

I see where people have taken FS9 and earlier aircraft and recompiled them for FSX -- adding bump maps, changing textures to dds, and so forth. Does one need the base creation files or is there a way to do this by running them through converter programs?

[roger-wilco-66]

AFAIK, to make it native FSX, you need the original source files for that, and you won't have the FSX virtual cockpit unless you model one seperatly! The easy way is just to adapt the textures and leave the model as it is, if it works. Other problems might be the coding of the gauges and switches, as well as effects.

Cheers,
Mark

[IanP]

FSX will read both DDS and BMP textures - or a mixture of them - on any model, whether it is compiled for FS9 or FSX native. All the sim cares about is the filename and the format being correct.

When people have "changed file formats to DDS" all it actually means is that they have taken the existing (or improved) textures, converted them to DDS and saved them in that format. It doesn't require any changes to the model at all. Adding a bump map would require changes to the MDL, as it s a material setting, so I'm not sure how they'd achieve that without the source model, unless Model Converter X has a method of doing it, perhaps?

The vast majority of "conversions" add a thumbnail, save the textures as DDS and if necessary adjust the alphas on some textures to make the transparency problems less blatantly obvious. They're not actually conversions of the model at all. Some, but not many, change the way the aircraft.cfg is formatted and occasionally even tweak the way the aircraft handles, through the aircraft.cfg file, but those are almost invariably done by the aircraft author themselves and not any of the people that release "conversions" of other peoples' models.

Cheers,

Ian P.

[Rallymodeller]

Okay, cool. This came about last night when I tried to load RealOldSalt's LAS S26 into FSX and the model was rejected -- I was wondering if there was a way to make the model work. But good news about the texture mapping; I had thought there was some sort of trick involved.