Textures not appearing

[jgf]

In all my years of painting aircraft, making panels, etc. I've never encountered this issue.

 

An ultralight with paintkit included;  paintkit files and default liveries are all 1024x1024, 24bit, 200dpi, standard bmp files (not extended bmps, which will not load directly into any of my software, except DXTBmp).  I do a quick layout of my livery, create new folder, add section to cfg file, go to sim ...no texture, just plain grey aircraft. 

 

Load my files and a default in editor and compare.  Aha!  PSP saved my files as 500dpi instead of 200dpi, would that make a difference?  Don't know but it's simple enough to resample to 200dpi maintaining image size.  Back in sim, still no textures.  Compare again, all files - default, paintkit,and my files - are 1024x1024, 24bit, 200dpi, standard bmp.  Rename my files, copy pertinent files from default livery into my folder, they display normally in sim; repeat, copying my files to default folder, no textures in sim.

 

OK, let's take a roundabout solution.  Rename my files, copy paintkit files into my folder, open paintkit file in DXTBmp, export to editor, open my file, copy into normal.bmp, save, back to DXTBmp, reload after edit, save as 24 bit bmp.  Back to sim ... no texture.

 

I'm at a loss.  None of my software shows any difference in these files, but obviously FS disagrees.  What, probably embarrassingly obvious, item have I overlooked?

 

 

[PhrogPhlyer]

14 hours ago, jgf said:

An ultralight with paintkit included;

Which aircraft, I'd like to download and take a look. Thx.

[jgf]

Today found it isn't confined to one aircraft, but to any that use normal 24 bit bmps for textures.  The two I'm working with are the "Microleve_ML-400" ultralight and Dave Copley's P-38J.

 

In each case I can ascertain no difference between my bmps and the defaults, but mine do not display.  I did get my textures to display, but now am even more confused;  convert my textures to extended bmp and they show in FS2004 ...but the default files are not extended bmps and they display fine.

[PhrogPhlyer]

4 hours ago, jgf said:

convert my textures to extended bmp and they show in FS2004 ...but the default files are not extended bmps and they display fine.

This also occurs with some of the FSX repaints I have done. I don't know why this is so. Sometimes I just have to keep trying different DDS DXT formats until one works.

[jgf]

I guess I should be happy that my paints are appearing in the sim, but as an engineer I want to know why something does or doesn't work.

 

A couple of years ago I was converting some skins from one race sim to another, both used DDS files but different types.  Several days of inventorying my vast stock of unacceptable language before success.  Neither in PSP nor Paint.net could I do a straight conversion from one to the other, but I found if I opened the file in PSP and converted to an intermediate format, save and exit, then open that in paint.net and convert to the final format it worked (doing the two steps in opposite order - first conversion in Paint.net, second in PSP - did not work either).  It still irks me that I've no idea why this particular sequence worked, when logic, and documentation, say either program should have been capable of the conversion from the initial format to the final in one step.