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converting dxt5 to dxt1

H

him225

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123
Is there a tool that can automatically detect when there is complete white alpha in dxt3/5 dds and mass convert them to dxt1? as I found several on my system possibly from a previous batch conversion which could use the conversion to reduce disk space and memory consumption unless they have a specific purpose in fsx/p3d.
 
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Did such a conversion a few days ago. If the alpha channel is pure black and white, such as for most AI aircraft light maps, mass conversion to DXT1 is perfectly possible. The exception is the FAIB FSX models, whose diffuse texture, for some reason, turn out unusable after a conversion.

For user aircraft, I checked each texture's alpha in Imagetool (or DXTBMP, in case of unreadable textures) and ran separate conversion passes (DXT1 and DXT5).


User aircraft textures were converted with TextureManager*, which is a bit touchy though. It's best to do nothing while it does its conversion.

For the AI aircraft, I've used a homegrown batch tool** bacause I found that it was much faster with a huge amount of textures than TextureManager. After doing a manual backup of my entire AI folder, I simply replaced the -dxt5 parameter for the Imagetool command in the batch file with -dxt1 and ran the conversion.


* http://stuff4fs.com/newpage.asp?Folder=TM&Docs=TextureManager.pdf
** http://www.avsim.com/forums/topic/413917-dds-mass-texture-converter/
 
I think it is because many AI light maps have shaded black such as near landing and tail lights which get roughened after conversion to dxt1, hence I was looking for an automated way to leave format dxt5 unless it has alpha entirely black or white.
 
This may not be directly related to aircrafts but I was looking into textures of addon airports and was surprised to find large number of dxt5 with white alphas in many of them. As an experiment I manually converted these of FT OMDB amd T2G OTTH to DXT1 which gave reduction of 130mb and 237mb. An automated tool could be useful with this.
 
As I've said, separate textures with alphas from those without alphas and use any batch conversion tool on the latter. Works well for me.
 
The FSX-SDK contains such a program called "Imagetool". If you have done a default FSX-SDK installation you can find it over here in this folder
- C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Games\Microsoft Flight Simulator X SDK\SDK\Environment Kit\Terrain SDK\

Here's an article on how you can use this "Imagetool":
- https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc526957.aspx
 
I have tried the tools, but as I mentioned I was looking for an automated or faster way to do so when large number ~200 textures present where it becomes long process to open each and check alpha. dxtbmp has an explore window but it does not preview the alpha as then separating those without alphas could have been faster.
 
XnView is an image viewer (which allows you to quickly peek into any graphics file via a thumbnail / full screen view) and comes with a build-in batch image convertor:
- http://www.xnview.com/en/xnview/

XnConvert is separate, stand-alone batch image convertor:
- http://www.xnview.com/en/xnconvert/


You might want to take a look at this thread, since your question has been asked before and solved:
- http://www.fsdeveloper.com/forum/threads/imagetool-converting-mutliple-files.19130/

imagetool_help_ourtput-jpg.7007

All possible commandline options for ImageTool.exe

... so you can build a commandline script to do the conversion for you with Imagetool
 
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I was able to use Windows texture viewer at NVidia site which has option to display only alpha and fast mouse scroll through files in folder, to separate textures for dxt1 conversion.
 
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