Meringo

Since around the new fog was introduced, a more severe Dithering was noticable in darker areas. (i think its wrongly implemented and the thresholds are way too high) the Dithering is an ugly old-fashioned Ordered Dither which has a strong checkerboard-appearance. in another thread this was noticed: (btw, the marked solution is NOT the solution) some LCD Monitors have a strange behavior when they show a grey-ish checkerboard-pattern at native resolution. the grey turns greenish in a wierd way. i have noticed this on a lot of monitors, lesser on newer ones. you can test this on this website and see if it has this green artifacts: have your monitor on native resolution (i guess its 2560x1440) http://www.lagom.nl/lcd-test/sharpness.php do you see it there too ? the actual solution would be to have a better implementation of dithering or turn it of completely (but its supposed to prevent banding, which is not quite right dialed in yet) which could be a mod.

As soon you have to use an alpha channel/transparency, paint.net is useless. I dont know affinity-photo, just googled how to separate all the channels... urg way too complicated. If you convert it into png or tiff, then there is this premlultiplied alpha stuff and sRGB you have to care about.... all more confusing stuff. None of these programs are really made for this stuff, they all treat it like images. you wanna treat it like special data, unaltered with sRGB and transparency nonsense those programs all imply. That even includes gimp, which i recommend because it has a fast way of seperating the 4 channels. using it is tolerable to get an idea how all this stuff works. If you wanna do it properly, you would use something like blender, where you have total control over the texture-channels, and you can practically emulate what it would look like in dcs, including normalmaps and material-properties. I use it to explore why in dcs things look the way they do. The reason you "see" nothing in some closeup-textures is that the Alpha-channel is used for Grass-intensity/Grasslength. So if a Material has no grass, it will be transparent in an image-viewer/editor.

Correction: there are 5 Materials available at a time. The splatmap Alpha-channel controls the blend like a crossfader between Material 4 and Material 5. You can see it as a base-layer that is always there. The other R,G,B channels are on top of that.

The agana-airfield i checked has soil, leaves, shoreline, earth - i painted highly visible colored numbers on the closeup-texures to find out. I assumed the other airfields use the same set of 4, but as it turns out - a lot of airfields have their own individual set of 4 materials. Of course you can change the layout - that is what the splatmaps are for. Dont look at a splatmap as a colorful image, see it as 4 separate black&white images. If you use gimp load your splatmap, go to Menu Colors, Components, Decompose then color-mode to RGBA and you get 4 separate black&white images (which you can later Recompose back). Each one of the 4 images represents a material. The intensity/weight of the material is done gradually from none (black) to fully visible (white) There is actually 3D information in the materials-normalmap. for example if you have 2 materials one of them stones and the other sand - a high intensity of the stone and a lower intensity of the sand will let the stone peek through the sand in a very convincing way. Play around with the 4 black&white images a bit and do some test-patterns/gradients - It’ll click, and you’ll get your head around it. There is another problem, though. The airfields are baked in the clipmaps as well. Clipmaps are for further away rendering, looking down from higher up or in the distance. the clipmaps are not editable (as far as i know). they are pre-rendered by the mapdesigner. so if you have a wildly differing airfield-layout with very different colors, it will pop in very visibly when it transitions from the clipmap to the altered splatmap-based render.

marianas and marianasWWII are using a more sophisticated version of the splatmap-technology. The idea is to blend multiple materials together. the materials are made up of textures themselves. they consist of color+alpha, NormalMap, MetalnessRoughness-map. (the materials are in the CloseupTextures files.) the splatmaps are instructions where to put a piece of material and how much to blend it with the others. a splatmap is 4 separate greyscale-maps packed into a RGBA dds file. (A=Alpha) There is a pool of materials available. (36 for marianasWWII) 4 channels means only 4 materials to mix together. Out of the pool of 36 materials only 4 specificly selected materials can be used at a time for a splatmap. The mapdesigner decides which 4 would be a good mix for a certain region/asset and "bakes" this decision into the mesh-data. colorchannel mapping in a splatmap: R for Material 1 G for Material 2 B for material 3 A for material 4 The position and the brightness of the pixels in a channel dictate how much the material contributes to the endresult. For the WWII-airfields the 4 selected materials are soil, leaves, shoreline, earth i think. You could mess with the soil and earth materials in the closseuptextures, but i think they are used heavily in other assets too. but its worth a try. The mask-textures have also all 4 channels in use, even if it looks like the green-channel is the only one, if you look closely, there is data in R and B too. The G-channel intensity changes the brightness of the material-mix and in combination with the gradients in the palette-texture the hue and color-saturation i think. The alpha-channel definitely dictates how the whole thing blends itself with the textures underneath the field. The R and B channels i dont know at the moment. the airfield-NormalMaps are for the macro-details for the further-away-view bumpy-ness appearance of course. if more closeup, the materials have their own normalmaps and add their own micro-detail.

If anyone has been wondering why the blue instrument-lights are always turned on at daylight when starting up - there is a solution. the oh6 coding has a daylight recognition - but there is a little bug which leads to having the 4 light-knobs always on. i have a fix in ...Mods\aircraft\OH-6A\Cockpit\Scripts\Systems\light_interface.lua for lines 110-113: (commented out is the original) now the daylight recognition works and turns the knobs to 0 at daylight times. (this gives a little FPS gain too because the ca. 20 lights are not needlessly rendered anymore) for everyone wanting the fix right now - drop the zip-content into your Mods folder OH-6A_1.5_Lights_always_on_FIX.zip