Anyone having graphics issues with my skins?

[BoNidle]

I have been informed that there may be an issue with my latest skins, (51stFW Generics, "Peg "O" My Heart", F-86A-5 basic, 4thFW generics) causing "shimmering" on other aircraft.

If you are getting similar problems could you let me know please.

The only thing I am doing differently on these is saving the skin layer as a DDS instead of a jpeg as I did in the others. But until I know its a common issue I do not want to have to go through them all and change them to try and nail any potential cause.

I have looked at my own skins in game and so far cannot see anything wrong.

If you can post any screenshots of any issues encountered I would be grateful.

Thanks,

Bo.

[Esac_mirmidon]

Thanks a lot for taking time to adress this issue.

 

I hope i´m the only one with this problem and maybe it´s my fault ( AA, AS, filters, maybe )

 

Your skins looks great and the metal polished finish is superb. This is why i´m using it a lot, i love it.

[The Real Bushmaster]

The only issues I know of creating problems for any skins in DCS have to do with how the description.lua is formatted. It's currently a problem for my wing tanks. what happens is when I load just my skin its fine but when I load a few different skins with mine it causes the custom work I did on the tanks to go back to default at a certain distance away. there's a lot of other weird things caused by that same problem. The only fix I know of is what shahdoh did for his racing series. Basically he went through all the skins that were entered in the series an changed the decription.lua format so that all the diff, spec, bort,... and everything else was in the same order as the rest of the skins and that solved the issue. The problem with this is in our case we would need everyone making skins to get on board with using the same format. I think there's a post shahdoh actually made about this but I don't think much has been done about it yet unfortunately. Hope that sheds some light on your problem an good luck with the skinning looks amazing so far.

[zaelu]

Yes, the skins now saved in DDS format have no MIP maps so when you zoom out from the aircraft the lines on the panel start creating a very unnatural dance (shimmering)

 

Solution to this is very simple. Save the DDS fil using nvidia plugins for photoshop https://developer.nvidia.com/nvidia-texture-tools-adobe-photoshop and choose to create all mipmaps. The result will be something like this:

 

 

instead of this:

 

 

Thus the game will use a smaller already filtrated texture when the model is further away from the camera instead of the big nice one but resized without filtering.

 

I think jpg/bmp/tga don't create this problem but...

 

Jpg is lower quality (you can introduce artifacts directly into original skin ruining it from the beginning and the size reduction is not useful as the graphic card most likely will "rasterize" the image to a full bitmap size texture. BMP is used when no alpha channel is needed, TGA when an alpha channel is needed, both have great quality and don't suffer from shimmering effect (because for these formats the VGA drivers knows to create mip-maps on the fly) that can plague DDS textures if not mip-mapped but the are big in size and slow down the transfer of the textures from storage media to VGA.

 

DDS is basically a optimized format.

 

As for what preset to use... I recommend DXT5 ARGB 8 bpp | interpolated alpha . It will render a bit bigger file but it will not mess with pixel definition and when an alpha channel is present it will automatically define it. You can try also DTX3 if you wish. DTX1 will mess with the quality.

 

One ting I mentioned and I want to repeat it. It is a good thing to do ALL the mipmaps. Many cockpits from ED or 3rd parties have no mipmaps or have not enough. For example Mig-29 new cockpit has just two for each texture iirc. This is bad. The creator thought it will squeeze few useless kilobytes by discarding the smaller MIPs but what he did besides the useless "economy" was to create shimmering in that cockpit (all gauges needles and marks and all the texts inside cokpit dance scratcing viewer retinas :D ) .

Edited October 27, 2015 by zaelu

[Esac_mirmidon]

Thanks Zaelu.

 

I was starting to think about my filter options on Nvidia panel.

[BoNidle]

Thanks indeed Zaelu, it was starting to drive me nuts!!

 

I suspected it had to be something to do with the transition from jpeg to dds but had no clue what as i have never really worked in them before.

 

I will re-do my last releases using DDS and re-release them.

 

Thanks for spotting this issue Esac mirmidon. ( that said, still ensure the RCAF textures are removed from all my skins description.lua or a whole new set of issues arises)

[Esac_mirmidon]

Yes, your new generic packs don´t have any reference to any cockpit files, not inside the folder, neither on the lua