converting Ace to DDS

[Motley]

Hi Im trying to convert all my .ace to .dds and it looks fine until the train starts to move then its all snowy. When i use some of the CN Ruel sub trees texture and i keep some as they are and change the colors on the others , the one i didnt change stays smooth and dont flicker and the one i change colors flicker. I tried DXTBmp, convimx, tga2dds and nothing change. Is there a step im missing that im not doing

thanks

[scottb613]

Hi...

The sparkles are because you didn't create MipMaps.

Here's some rules for Vegetation:

We've all seen it - ROW vegetation that flashes in unison for as far as the eye can see... Very distracting, immersion killer, and plenty of routes seem to still have it... We knew it was tied to the ORTS "Object Instancing" setting used to increase efficiency and performance of the sim... Started playing with textures - my forte - the flashing stopped once I removed the mipmaps but that's no good because then you get the sparkles on vegetation - lol - we don't like sparkly vegetation - or moire - or floating cruciforms for that matter - we're just so darn picky... So then I recalled - after hours of trying all kinds of settings - from FS9 that I used to use DXT1 compression to force the textures to use a 2 bit - on or off - black and white - no grey - transparency vs translucency - alpha channel... I used the Nvidia plugin to save my files directly to "DDS with DXT1 compression plus Alpha" - low and behold - it worked - the vegetation still looked decent and never flashed again... Hah - another thorn in my side removed... Now DXT1 isn't the best for quality and sometimes you can get a glowing edge artifact that requires a little extra texture work - but all in all - a fine solution...

Regards,
Scott

[Motley]

ok wow. Im using photoshop 6 and i have the nvidia plugin install in it but after that im lost. when i save a .jpeg or .bmp into dds file i have no alpha and if i try a tga into a dds i get an error with a file-format module interface. How do i save an alpha with it

[geepster775]

Anytime you go from TGA to (anything) in Photoshop, you need the Targa plugin as well. Without it, Photoshop strips the alpha layer out of your file.

[Motley]

photoshop 6 has the targa plugin

[Motley]

got it to work had to download an older plugin. the one that Nvidia didnt fully work for some reason. If someone else is using Photoshop 6 i got it from www.twcenter.net

[pwillard]

You could also use PAINT.NET if you don't have Photoshop