Comments on: DDS Revisited In X-Plane 10

By: Ben Supnik

Ben Supnik — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 23:17:48 +0000

In reply to Heiko. Yes - we need to do a once-over and make sure we have DDS, etc.

By: Heiko

Heiko — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 22:50:38 +0000

Do you plan to provide DDS files for the default planes? E.g. the C172 has only PNG files.

Regards,
Heiko

By: Ben Supnik

Ben Supnik — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 17:40:34 +0000

In reply to Flo. Their recommendation is not necessary; _all_ airplane-attached objects get at least one level of "res bump" relative to the world, so at "very high" (one notch down from max) the airplane is already maxed out.

By: Flo

Flo — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 15:01:49 +0000

I think the idea of allowing different texture resolution options for VC and scenery is a very good one. It´s almost impossible to read gauges and labels and handel switches – i.e. handling the aircraft – without at least high res. Carenado advices customers to set resolution to extreme and to turn off compression. And that’s not just because of eyecandy. But I´m fine with lower resolutions of the scenery, in fact I often can´t tell one from the other.
Good to see that you are really going into VRAM /performance tuning since I´d really like to stick to my rather new 250$ 1GB card instead of burning another 300 $ for a new XP10 dedicated gpu. Would prefer to spend it for some nice XP addons instead 😉

Thanks
Flo

By: Ben Supnik

Ben Supnik — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 13:47:07 +0000

In reply to vonhinx.

Currently no effect. I’m not sure the behavior should be documented. The idea is _not_ to document exactly what X-Plane’s quirky behaviors are; the idea is to provide _general_ authoring strategies that will produce content that works in a predictable way so that X-Plane can evolve while maintaining compatibility.

So: the res box tells X-Plane to prioritize texture res to those particular objects.
X-Plane will use either PNG or DDS depending on settings.

That’s pretty much all you need to know to plan out your airplane.

By: vonhinx

vonhinx — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 02:51:45 +0000

In reply to Ben Supnik. And what if you've checked the Hi Resolution checkbox in Plane Maker's Miscellaneous Objects page? BTW, all this will go in the docs or wiki, right?

By: Flightime56

Flightime56 — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 02:09:40 +0000

In reply to Chris Serio. Thanks Chris I understood that, but what of the textures on the .obj which is the airport flies and if they are very large, i have reduced a lot of building textures (some were 10mb +) to make them far smaller (3mb) than the original files with no loss of quality, surely this would have a benefit, when rendering the airport when you focused on it.

By: Ben Supnik

Ben Supnik — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 01:37:58 +0000

In reply to Bob Marsh. Well, compression and reducing res are two ways to reduce texture res to make the working set fit on the card.

By: Bob Marsh

Bob Marsh — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 21:24:47 +0000

So really, enabling compression is only a mechanism for dealing with objects which would otherwise swamp a less than adequate video card. ( objects which are supplied with only .png or .bmp textures.) In this case, X-plane is the compressor of last resort, and must perform the function in line and with minimimum overhead.

Thanks for the clarification.

By: Ben Supnik

Ben Supnik — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 19:42:46 +0000

In reply to Bob Marsh.

I think you’ve made this much more complicated than it really is. There are three rules in X-Plane 10 governing image loading:
1. Search order is DDS, PNG, BMP when tex compression is on, PNG, DDS, BMP when tex compression is off. Note that we IGNORE the suffix in the art file and simply search for any root name match, using the formats listed above in the order listed above.
2. DDS loader: the file is always compressed because it is pre-compressed.
3. PNG/BMP loader: the file will be compressed if and only if texture compression is enabled; it is compressed on the fly and results are ugly.

Note that you can never have two objects referring to the SAME texture with different file formats because X-Plane ignores the suffix of the file and goes by its own internal search order.