Classic British Flight Sim

Hmmm well what would cause that to happen? Anyone have any ideas ? All my other A/C with wingtip lights are fine....


Techy

Hi, glad your enjoying the T-6, im a beta tester from IRIS. For a start did you install the effects from the effects folder in the zip??? Secondly do you have "effects" turned on in the settings of FS and also where is the postition of the "Lights" slider???

Hello Chris :o Effects folder hmmmmm You mean the effects i put in FS9 folder by mistake and then put them in the FSX folder and everything is fine ?

*cough cough* Lovely model STUPID Guess i am gonna have to buy it now ;-)


Techy

As long as the .fx files are in the folder "effects" in fs route then thats fine...i would say that is a display setting problem...

That problem occurs when you have missing textures in your effects/texture folder.

Basically it displays the effect and colour, but because the textures are missing, all you see is square boxes... I had an unfortunate incident recently where a customer was insistant that it was our product that was defective, yet it was all down to a blotched installation... He'd installed from a zip file and copies the files over incorrectly.. It turns out later that the product was pirated anyway..lol.

Make sure your effects/texture folder contains fx_iris_light.bmp and fx_iris_rays.bmp. If it doesn't either copy them from the installer into the correct folder or copy them from your FS2004 one..

Hope that helps

Helps enormously Dave and thanks for taking the time to explain but as from the above posts i installed wrong :0 But all ok now cheers .... oh and lovely model.

Techy

Ah i forgot about those bmp's... :roll: Glad its sorted... Im going to go hide from the boss now and get back to my IT course :partyman:

Doh! I wrote the below before realizing there was a page 2. I'll leave it up anyway.

Bump mapping is the map you use to control bumps on the surface. Now, to make it easier, basically we have texture maps to paint the aircraft. When you download a paint kit for an airplane, the "square" you're painting on that goes on the airplane is the texture map. it controls where and how the colors appear on the plane. FS9 also had an alpha map that goes over the texture map to control shine. It is basically grayscale and IIRC works in 32bit increments. Meaning if you pick a gray color between 256 and 224, that will give the brightest shine on the plane and if you pic a gray between 0 and 32 there wouldn't be any reflectance. This helps when you're working with paints that are more glossy in certain area or when doing weathering, etc.

Now, with FSX, they've added another map to go on top of those and it's a bump map. By adjusting the grayscale colors on it, you can make bumps on the surface or dents in it. I haven't really worked with that in FSX since I can't run it, but assuming it's 256 then whatever you draw on it at 128, exactly half won't add bumps or indentations. I think the darker you go, the deeper and indentation it makes, and the lighter you go it makes bumps.

So, instead of just drawing rivets on texture maps to show rivets, you can instead paint them on the bump map instead and actually have raised rivets. This way you don't have to 3D model all of the "surface" details which would be really time consuming and add poly's. Instead you can just "paint it" on the bump map and that will make it "look" 3D.

I hope that helps.

Thanks chaps, this is all very interesting. So all you have to do is paint the rivets on, and then if you zoom in close, 3-dimensional rivets appear, yes?

I have to say it seems an awful lot of effort on behalf of MS merely to produce 3D rivets when most people wouldn't look that closely anyway. A row of closely spaced dots would suffice in 99% of instances, wouldn't it ? Or are there other advantages to bump mapping that I'm unaware of ?

While we are on the subject, what is 'self shadowing' ?

Paul, the visual effect is apparent at most *normal* levels of zoom, if you zoom in to the max on one rivet the effect is lost, but in general use you'll see a nice '3D' effect.

Self shaddowing is where parts of a model cast shaddow upon other parts of the same model, such as the shaddow of the fuslage on a low set wing, or the shaddow from the fin falling across the fuselage and tailplane etc..