Skins – problems with overuse

[finiteless]

Skins – problems with overuse

 

I love the many new skins people are making, and I have several dozen downloaded, but I’ve ‘discovered’ a problem in using them; SkyPat warned about this 6 months ago.

 

I like to make/fly guns-only furball missions containing lots of different aircraft types on each side, which means, lots of pretty, hi-res skins, but I found my FPS has gone to hell and I started getting terrible graphics juddering during flybys, and when you have some ‘guy’ lined up to fire ... (grrrr)

 

It never used to be like this, and thought about what could have caused it, so I decided to experiment by uninstalling all of the non-CDDS type skins, and then went back into Lock On and found that my gunzo missions were fluid and smooth again—no more graphical juddering at just the wrong moment (and TrackIR’s panning was smoother as well because of it).

 

So that settled it, SkyPat was right, skins should be in CDDS format, or you else get problems you don’t want.

 

If you are (or have) making hi-res skins, think seriously about making CDDS only release versions. I won’t be using anything else in future. The “Temp textures” folder is just that, overuse it at your peril.

[SlickWili]

This is good to know, finiteless. I'll keep it in mind when grabbing skins. Thanks. :)

[Ruggbutt]

How do I convert the few skins that I use to CDDS format? The good news is that most of them now are CDDs.

[finiteless]

As I understand it, you can use the 'Extract' and 'Insert' functions within LOMANs CDDS Browser to place your new skins into the appropriate original Lock On CDDS skin file.

 

According to SkyPat it will:

"Insert BMP or TGA or DDS in CDDS files or to temptextures automatically when installing addon"

Edited September 1, 2004 by finiteless