Simviation Forums

DXT or BMP whats better?

Martin Wright is the man who gave us his FREE version of DXTbmp and his webiste explains almost more than one can comprehend regarding all the various graphics' formats for painting scenery and aircraft for FS9.

Anyone interested in these matter should save a link to Martin's page(s) and make a profound study of various formats and how they are used in FS9.

Reading Martin's posts, one soon learns, all files used by FS9 are *.BMP and using DXT3 can reduce the filesize by a factor of eight (as opposed to 32bit Extended). I only use DXT3 for FS9 aircraft repaints.

Well, when working with a repaint, or something that uses DXT3, its customary to use whatever the file was originally saved in.  This prevents conflicts with whatever you are repainting.

As for which one is BETTER: *.bmp (on its own) is just a regular image.  But DXT3, when added to a *.bmp file and compressed, can add reflection (or opacity, depending on the model).  Choosing between them is often merely a matter of what you like: reflections or not.

I would say DXT becuase bmps can take a long time to load.. as somone said it compresses it..

But does compressing the files lose any quality?

Yes you will loose quality using dxt3 compression.

You could always use 256 colours (8 bit I think). Theres no lack of quality, as such, but theres the obvious limit on colours.

If you're just looking for amazing quality, use 32-bit textures.  I'm not sure how to add reflections onto 'em, as I never use them.  32-bit is a little to hefty for my machine, so I stear clear of them as much as possible.

you add reflections to 32Bit in exactly the same way as you do with dxt3, 8bit, and to a certain extent, dxt1, but I wont go into that to keep things simple for now.

I tend to use a mixture of dxt3 for the simple parts that dont have much important detail, eg wings with a single marking or reg code. and only use 32bit for important bits like a highly detailed tailfin.