Those of you who've tried to port the FS9 Big 'E' over to FSX will have noticed holes in the deck textures which are a little unnerving to say the least... that is, those of you who selected to have statics on deck. I've posted the following over at Alphasim for the benefit of their forum users so thought I'd post the same here...
If you're dead set on having deck appendages in FSX (ie statics).. try this as a temp workaround.
Was talking with a mate recently (a bit of a texture man as it happens) re the odd see-through bits on Enterprise in FSX and he'd noticed similar things happen with other scenery imported into the new sim. His fix was to find all the shadow textures (as this is where the problem in daylight occurs) and convert them to DXT1 with Alpha. This sort of thing isn't my particular 'bag' but I've tried it and bless my soul.. it works!! You still get a big hole at night but hey.. it makes the daylight Big 'E' a much more 'lived in' looking place to be during the day ;-)
You'll need something like DXTBmp (freeware.. available from all the usual places) and that's it.
First.. open the Enterprise texture folder and make a new folder inside called Shadow textures (or whatever you see fit). Then find all the static textures with shadow in the title and copy them to the new folder (just in case it all goes wrong). Once thats done, open DXTBmp then open the first of your static shadow files (they'll be DXT3 format). Untick 'save with mips' and save as.. extended.. DXT1 (the first option is DXT1 without alpha.. don't use that!). Close DXTBmp down then open it again and select the next shadow texture for conversion. Things to look for are everything that sits on the deck.. F15.. S3.. various trucks e t c. Once you've done that.. start FSX.. go to the Enterprise (whichever one you've just converted) and in daylight hours.. you'll find your decks with the static aircraft selection you've chosen and NO HOLES underneath them
I'm not sure about the night problem and I never thought to ask but until an official fix comes along.. I'm happy with this setup
...There you go. It does work ;-)
ATB
DaveB :tab:
