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FSXA Forcing a texture refresh in FSX?

Heretic

Heretic

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Can FSX be forced to refresh the textures on an object (i.e. read them anew from the "texture.[xyz]" folder)?

"Refresh aircraft" only works in rare cases; dito for switching to another texture variation and then back to the actual one; dito for loading a different aircraft and then going back to the one to be repainted.


Rebooting the simulator works, but is fairly annoying.


Anything else?
 
Wish I knew...

Rebooting from a saved flight is slightly faster than going through the standard rigmarole...
 
Have you ever tried "Refresh Scenery?"

I assigned Ctrl-Shift-S to the Refresh Scenery command in the Settings/Controls/Buttons-Keys menu.
 
FSX indexes the planes on start-up and unlike scenery, does not appear to have a method to re-index once active. Unless I missed something relative over the past four+ years, only an exit to Windows and restarting FSX will accomplish what you want.
 
I have had customers complain about this, saying it must be my software doing this. Oddly, I think this 'might' be tied to planes with 'alot' of high rez or double size textures. I believe if you boot up the basic 172, and change planes, the new colors appear properly. But with my birds, you select a different paint scheme and it shows the previous one.


Now, there is a way around 'part' of this. Dont have a default texture folder, have all the textures in each texture folder, like in FS9 and it has been known to reload entire textures (on my rig).


Bill, I had never thought to reload the scenery. Good thinking on that one.

Bjoern, have you tried loading the plane in the selection center, into the little view window, and then going back into a flight to see if that does the trick? Maybe the load preview window is the route to take. The button for it, I believe, is located on the bottom right in the aircraft selection center.
 
lionheart said:
Now, there is a way around 'part' of this. Dont have a default texture folder, have all the textures in each texture folder, like in FS9 and it has been known to reload entire textures (on my rig).
Click to expand...

No Bill, the "proper solution" is to have all the common textures in the ..\texture folder, with all of the unique livery textures in their own ..\texture.xxx folders. You also need a correctly written texture.cfg file in each of the unique ..\texture.xxx folders, so the sim will know where to find the common textures.

It really is that simple! ;)

We at Eaglesoft have adopted my proposed scheme, whereby all of the unique folders sport the registration number as their dot name.

Code: 
..\texture
..\texture.N400ES
..\texture.N382GA
etc.

texture.cfg:
Code: 
[fltsim]

fallback.1=..\texture
fallback.2=..\..\..\..\Texture
fallback.3=..\..\..\..\Scenery\Global\texture
 
LCSims said:
Unless I missed something relative over the past four+ years, only an exit to Windows and restarting FSX will accomplish what you want.
Click to expand...

I *did* manage to make FSX recognize changes in textures upon reloading the plane, but I guess this was more because of luck than anything else.
 
Hello:

I have had success adding aircraft to be used mid-flight, getting that aircraft recognized, and switching to it, as apparently FSX does re-index the aircraft list each time I access that pick list via the FS menu system. :idea:


In FS9 IIRC, this would not always work (if at all). :confused:


Additionally, since during longer flights, I do experience occasional texture anomalies on certain FTX PNW ground tiles followed by loss of textures on aircraft when flying with the FSX global texture slider maxed out, I found that if I:

1.) Set FSX global texture slider full left
2.) Return to my flight
3.) Set FSX global texture slider full right (or 1 position left of full right)
4.) Return to my flight

...I get a proper refresh of all previously 'glitched' scenery and aircraft textures, either instantly or within a few seconds. ;)


Hope this helps ! :)

GaryGB
 
Last edited:
n4gix said:
No Bill, the "proper solution" is to have all the common textures in the ..\texture folder, with all of the unique livery textures in their own ..\texture.xxx folders. You also need a correctly written texture.cfg file in each of the unique ..\texture.xxx folders, so the sim will know where to find the common textures.

It really is that simple! ;)

We at Eaglesoft have adopted my proposed scheme, whereby all of the unique folders sport the registration number as their dot name.


Code: 
..\texture
..\texture.N400ES
..\texture.N382GA
etc.

texture.cfg:
Code: 
[fltsim]

fallback.1=..\texture
fallback.2=..\..\..\..\Texture
fallback.3=..\..\..\..\Scenery\Global\texture
Click to expand...

Interesting Bill ! :scratchch

I stumbled across this reference to FS looking for a Texture.Cfg file via a search engine once.


http://www.flytampa.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=2083


It made me wonder if FS9 had any perceptible internal search performance issues comparable to those described for FSX which were detected via SysInternals FileMon due to this apparently generally less well-known FS option < dare I say "preference" ? > not being used by most aircraft developers. :confused:

GaryGB
 
Texture.cfgs are the single coolest thing FSX has. They can shrink aircraft add-ons in size quite dramatically...if you know how to use them to best effect.



GaryGB said:
...
Click to expand...

Sorry Gary, but that's not what I'm looking for.
 
I'm not sure if this is what you need but if you activate the 'object placement tool' for fsx, you can click on the 'flush textures' button.
This seems like an in-game refreshing of the textures, but maybe I'm wrong...........:confused:
 
Last edited:
*Bump*

Developing for FS9 now, I've run into the same problem - turned up to eleven.
FS9 steadfastly refused to reload changed textures even after exiting and reentering the simulator! The only solution was a complete reboot!

Now, noting suspiciously high page file acitivity and counting one and one together, I came to the conclusion that FS9 really, really loves Windows' page file. Not surprising, considering that, in 2003, it had to dump all of its textures somewhere. RAM was rather small (1 GB at the very best) and slow back in the day and Windows XP's memory management wasn't the best either.

So, to achieve forced texture refreshes, I've had to disable Windows' page file.

Now, when using at least two repaints of the same aircraft, I can stick a changed texture into one unused repaint's folder and switch to it via the UI et voilà, the texture gets loaded.


Apparently, FS9's memory management routines (naturally) pick stuff readily available in the page file rather than reading it from its actual location on the HDD. By eliminating the page file, FS9 *has* to look in the original location.

This *might* just work for FSX as well...

Drawback:
Running without a page file could get you into trouble if you don't happen to have 8 GB or more RAM.
With my laptop's 2 GB, I can run FS9, GIMP, GMax and Opera at once, but it's a very close call, according to the Task Manager.

Hence, I recommend disabling the page file *only* when you absolutely need to do some in-sim texture work, like checking transparencies or lighting.
For everything else, use ModelConverterX to preview your work!
 
Have you guys considered changing the filtering and then resetting it back to what it was before? Takes some time but this is the method that I use,
 
Probably a good idea to check last post date before deciding whether to revive an 8 year old thread that was bumped from 2011.
 
BTW, the way I found that works in FSX and in FS9 is to move the Global Texture slider one notch either way in Options/Display and click OK. Don't forget too set it back to maximum when you finish.
 
Well for the record, there is a configurable hotkey that is unassigned by default in the key commands. I have mine set to shft/~ or alr/~ or some similar combination.
 
=rk= said:
Probably a good idea to check last post date before deciding whether to revive an 8 year old thread that was bumped from 2011.
Click to expand...

Ah, come on. It is a valid tip that fits the subject.
 
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