-Will the textures be already converted to DXT3
The textures will be in their correct format depending if they need an Alpha channel or not, so their will be either DXT1 or DXT3. There's just a single exception, the texture of the pylons light beams at night is 32 bit, but that's the only one in the whole scenery, and it really needs the 32 bit quality. And it's very small, though.
Are the textures will be already at 512x512? Or do we have the option of the texture resizer?
Textures will be in their correct sizes depending on what objects their are textured to, we never made a scenery with all textures of the same size. About half of them will be 1024x1024, the rest will be smaller.
The resizer for our previous scenery never touched the textures of smaller size anyway, it only reduced the ones in 1024x1024 to 512x512.
I don't think doing a resizer for KLAX would be a good idea: textures for buildings are already resized from their original 4096x4096 resolution in FSX which, as was explained in other threads, wasn't made to get an "ultra" resolution, but to get more efficiency, by using much less 4096x4096 textures in place of many 1024x1024.
This means, at least for all the buildings, we really can't go lower than 1024x1024.
For the photoreal backround, we remade it in the native 1024x1024 resolution using many textures (about 50 instead of just 4 in FSX), which means the ground resolution it's about the same as in FSX, so we might have a resizer here, but only if we'll find there's some demand for it.
This will help out for older configs, with older video cards, for graphics smoothness.
Don't think that, just because the scenery is made for FS9, it will run well on lower end systems. Because of the things FS9 doesn't have, we had to increase its polygonal complexity and lower its texture efficiency, which is why it runs so well under FSX.
- Since FS9 doesn't have shaders, we had to do detail textures both on ground and on buildings by using additional polygons, many thousands more than the FSX version
- Since FS9 doesn't have 4096x4096 textures, we had to remodel things (like the ground) using more textures (less efficient) and more polygons too.
- Since FS9 doesn't support objects larger than a certain amount (the limit is much higher in FSX), we had to get rid of LODs levels, otherwise the objects with LODs wouldn't display under FS9 since a LODed object is larger. The good thing is that, without LODs, there's almost no object pop-up, the bad thing is, the scenery is heavier on the system.
Since the scenery was *designed* from the start without caring how FS9 limitations, it means that, on top of being the most complex port to FS9 we made so far (is taking about a month), it won't have "miracle" frame rates just because "it's for FS9", we would be happy if it would run at least like the FSX version, on the same system.
