Well, it's not.

When you mix the pilot jargon with the computer jargon and plus, the graphical designer jargon, then you can find something like Mips.

We all know that one of our top needs when we use the Flight Simulator is the visual smoothness. If you pick the external view, you can choose to see your own plane very near or very far, using the + or - keys.

Of course, when you select the farther view, you don't need so much detail. Same if your plane is been seen on a multiplayer sesion. As a way to improve the frame rates, the DXT3 textures (the most actually used) include Mips. The help of the DXTBMP program says, textually:

But, what if the Flight Simulator, for any unknown reason, decides that the plane is farther away than it is in the reality?

Well, then the plane is loaded with a wrong, reduced size of texture. Instead of a 1024x1024 very close texture, the computer selects to load a 128x128 one...and you can see my very blured dhc6ah65 file (right). Not the plane you could want to fly every day.

Of course, I have seen that before, but not so ugly. Worst than seeing "Predator" on your bed after a wild party night. The only solution I knew was to press the 4 and 6 keys very fast on the numeric keayboard to "force" the "camera position" to pass through the fuselage. Doing so, the Flight Simulator graphics engine resets the distance... and the plane looks mutch better, like my second, focused picture of the same plane (left).

But recently I was downloading an A300 from the SGA group, when I found a fix for this one telling: "The file included should fix the blurriness that some users were having with their textures."

Whoa! Great! Yupy!

Of course I put the file on my DXTBMP, which is another acronym that maybe very few flightsimmers will know. This is a very useful program made by MW Graphics, freely downloadable and easy to use. Using this you can convert the special textures used by the mayority of the Flight Simulator planes to normal BMP files and back, and if you don't know what is a BMP format then go and ask your little kid.

Well, my DxtBmp program told me that this "anti-blur" texture has no Mips. And it makes sense because, if you don't let the Flight Simulator's graphics engine make a choice, then it can't make a wrong choice.

So I loaded my own DHC-6 texture, saved again without Mips, and voila! I get a very detailed fuselage surface.

You can imagine that I converted immediately all the texture files of all my planes, don't you?

Well, no. And for a good reasond: frame rates. Remember that the Mips were invented to decrease the amount of work that the flight simulator must do when the plane isn't near the "camera". And, in a multiplayer sesion, it will increase the graphical load of our fellow simmers' computers.

So just take on count that there is another trick on the repainters bagagge, and that sometimes, you will be forced to turn off the Mips when saving your work.

If you want, you can compare the before (dhc6ah85.zip) and after (dhc6ah86.zip).

Postdata: Recently Mike Stone's hangar closed. It was a sad day for the Flight Simulator community, and in my next flight, I will shut down the engine and keep a minute of virtual silence as a signal of respect.

Alejandro Hurtado
dracosist@cantv.net

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