Hello forum,


I just noticed that the Intercity Airways texture for Majestic's DHC8-Q400 is much more blurry than stock textures of the aircraft, despite the repaint .bmp files being the same size and equally sharp as stock .bmp files.
Here's an example:





Look at a) the vertical line on the engine cowling, and b) the registration and wing details.


I can't figure out what causes the difference, so I was hoping you'd know...




Cheers,


- Thomas (1195)

That's a good catch.  I didn't notice that before.  But that whole texture looks blurry on that wing, if you look at the rivets on the underside of the wing they also look blurry.


Venture a guess and say something happened to the texture during editing.


Chris Liu, any ideas?

It's probably the way I compiled them, I'm using DXTbmp instead of nVidia's DDS plugin for Photoshop. Only seems to affect some systems though, they always look sharp on my PC  Does anyone want to try recompiling them to see if it fixes them?

I have always used nVidia's plugin when compiling textures, and they have always been sharp and crisp. Will try recompiling with Photoshop...


EDIT: Upon further inspection I've noticed that the ICX .bmp files are 21.846 KB whereas all stock repaint .bmp files are 16.385 KB, so there must be a fundamental difference due to compiling method.


EDIT #2: Using DXT, I saved a stock bitmap as 32-bit Extended Bitmap 888-8 format, and its file size became 21.846 KB and also blurred the texture in the sim. Could be a format issue. Will investigate

Cause and solution found on Majestic Software forums, posted by Lionel. I'll relay it here so Chris might fix the bug:

Quote from: Lionel (Majestic Software forums)The .dds files produced strange results but I managed to have my textures shown correctly. It turns out that you have to NOT include the mipmaps when converting the file within DXTbmp, by unchecking the "include when saving" box on the right of the window.

Ooh right I hadn't spotted that, thanks, I will try it soo. It would probably explain why the texture looks fine on my system, as I have strong anisotropic filtering enabled.

Quote from: Chris Liu on Aug 31, 2014 18:37
Ooh right I hadn't spotted that, thanks, I will try it soon

I have done so already, and it works

Okay I've removed the mipmaps and uploaded the textures, if anyone else has fuzzy external textures on he Majestic Q400 then please download the update one from the downloads page of the Crew Centre