In progress...  

This will be long and wordy but first...   @hjwalter Hans, to answer your original question, the only inbuilt mechanism for specifically an image is the computer's graphics engine, which has constantly to resize every texture file in order to create the illusion of distance. BGLs are a different matter and I can imagine that someone has managed to compile one one that does create mips from base textures. Seems redundant though -- the processing power to create mips on the fly and then render them would be exactly the same as simply resizing and rendering the base image.   I won't be at all offended if nobody reads this. I won't know unless some masochist points out a mistake...       @jgf Thank you for adding that. I thought my explanation was reasonably clear but perhaps it wasn't. It could be a language barrier, I suppose.   For anyone who just happens along and has the fortitude, I'll reiterate...   First, image compression.   DXT3 degrades image quality, right from the outset. And it gets worse with every hard save. I'll come back to that.   All compression degrades image quality. Not just game textures and not just the DXT format.   Every time you edit and save one of your photographs as a jpeg the image quality will diminish. Zoom right out from your newly compressed photo and it probably won't look so bad. Zoom in and you will see more of the degradation.   The same thing happens with music (except for a few formats like .flac) though most of our ears can't hear the difference between a wav and an mp3.   Decompressing a compressed image doesn't repair the damage. It is permanent. Converting DXT3 to 888-8 doesn't improve the image quality. I do it to downloads because 1) I'm likely to edit in the future and 2) I'll forget what format it is. I resave downloads as 888-8 to ensure that my future self doesn't mess up.   There is some good news though. Image editing software doesn't actually save the file when you click 'Save'. What it does is make a temporary file of what's essentially metadata comprising the sum of all the editing that you've done. The compression part of the metadata is only applied to the image file itself when you 'Save As' or when you save and close. You can save as often as you like as long as you keep the image open, and only one compression will be done, right at the very end.   DXT images are compressed. 32 bit are not. So, for the same number of pixels, DXT3 uses up much less disk space. They are arguably quicker to load into FS9 just because they are fewer MB in size but I've never noticed a difference, not even on my old XP machine.   On a slight tangent, resizing is also a form of compression: 2048 × 2048 down to 512 × 512 means a file 1/16 of the kB size but the different compression formats we have been discussing don't alter the image dimensions, only the quality.   Second, mip mapping.   It's one of the more interesting aspects of mathematics that just as you can map a piece of a flat image to a point on the surface of an imaginary 3d model (atlas to globe), so you can map a different piece of the same image to the concept of 'further away'.   Referring to the ISS images in my earlier post (which as usual came from Wikipedia), mips don't affect near objects because for close-ups, the highest-res base image is always used.   The explanation for mips being necessary dates back to the 20th century. The size of a building, a tree, an aircraft on your monitor is not 30 metres wide by 40 metres long. Its real size changes as it seems to move closer or further from your virtual viewpoint.   Sometimes the object may be 1000 pixels wide. A few minutes later it could be 30 pixels. Graphics hardware and software have to edit textures to create the illulsion of distance and perspective.   Imagine an FS9 building falling behind you as you taxi past it. As you go by, looking out of your cockpit window, it is a rectangle covering 500 × 500 pixels of your monitor. Taxi onward and look back over your virtual shoulder. The object is now a trapezium 50 pixels tall and 10 pixels wide.   The graphics stuff has to shrink the texture to make it look further away and has to skew it to account for perspective. Shrinking has to be done on a per-pixel basis so that's 262 000 pixels that have to be processed for a 512 × 512 texture. It has to be done for every texture in every frame of your fps. For a 2048 × 2048 it's nearly 4.2 million.   However, if the texture has mips, then much of the work has already been done. While you are near the virtual building, the graphics engine will still select the high-res, unmipped base image in the texture file. As you taxi onward, the graphics engine will select one of the pre-shrunk images from a different piece of the texture file and then only has perhaps 64 × 64 pixels to process. This is the purpose of mip mapping: reducing the load.   Fifteen or more years ago this was absolutely essential: small ram, weak processors, onboard graphics...   Nowadays, small textures like those in FS9 -- a maximum of 2048 × 2048 -- are no trouble for modern equipment and mip mapping is not necessary.   If you have an old PC and you find your framerate dropping then mip mapping textures may help. It's worth being aware that it may not: the framerate could be affected by the number of polygons in the frame, online weather or even by complex systems in the player aircraft. Lots of things affect it.   But... modern PCs don't struggle with unmipped textures in FS9.   D  

MIPs will not affect what you see at close range, they merely reduce graphics resource requirements as the objects get farther away (where you will not notice reduced detail/resolution).  Without MIPs the full size image is loaded regardless of where it is used - imagine the resources required to display all the scenery tiles visible on the screen using 2048x2048 images;  MIPs allow the distant textures to be rendered with 32x32, or smaller, textures.  Same with aircraft, a dozen AI without MIPs are using a lot of resources.   The image degradation referenced above is what happens when repeatedly processing a DXT/DDS image, just like a jpg file it is compressed every time it is saved, and each compression causes loss of quality.  Thus when painting aircraft always edit the original image and save as a new DXT, never edit and save the DXT.

defaid,   I've now done some tests with three different flyable aircraft, each of them fully DXT3 textured and done with and without mips. However, I did not see the crispness differences as in your two pics above. So, the only thing I can now think of is that you and I have different graphics cards and/or display screens.   My graphics card is an AMD Radion HD 7900 series, which outputs to a large Panasonic TV set (resolution 1920 X 1080) connected up via a HDMI cable. However, I must also admit that this very modern TV set has a whole series of it's own built in adjustment possibilities and some of those include picture "sharpness", colors, contrasts, etc. etc. All this is most probably the reason why I was originally not directly referring to flyable aircraft texture mipmaps but far more to those of scenery textures about which I've had my own mipmap theories for many years.   One of these theories is still that the highest possible frame rates should always be sought after and mipping scenery and AI plane textures were one of the surest ways to attain this but a few display problems remained here and there and the questions I had about these were the subject of my original posting in this thread. However, judging by your reactions and those of Alan, I have now understood that my few scenery problems still remaining are not very easy to rectify but because they are so few, it doesn't really remain a problem.   Anyway guys, thanks for your reactions, I learned a lot from them.   Regards   Hans            

Check out JoinFS, which has a recorder function that might work for you. https://joinfs.net/

Check out this post for the answer to your question:    

It's somehow limited to only 2 aircrafts. 1 is me, the user, and the 2 is the cloned aircraft which I pre-recorded. I used the version 1.331 because that's the only version that works for my FSX and laptop. I tried to download versions that are made before and after 1.331, all failed because there is something wrong with the "FSRecorder.dll" file. Does anyone know how to make it have unlimited clone aircrafts? Or better, have an AI Traffic tool that lets you have AI Aircrafts, or a newer version of the FS Recorder that works in FSX:SE. Thanks!

Thanks you all. It's true, by reducing another point in the static_cg_height, the nose gear seems on the ground. I really appreciate your comments and suggestions. Have a nice day and "flight"

Boeing 767 UPS Cargo (N-391UP) taxi (close up) and takeoff (short) at Manises Valencia Airport (VLC) with ATC audio included runway 12, on 23 April 2024  

From the screenshot above , seems just moved above and all the gears are fully extended. I think better read the SDK and understand which number has what meanings.

Except possibly from the subjective perspective of personal preference, that's absolutely not the case.   As I wrote above, mip mapping has no effect within a certain view distance because up to that point, the largest image will be used and not any of the mips. In that circumstance, mipped is exactly the same as unmipped..   Compressing to DXT-3 degrades the crispness by introducing dithering: blurring of edges and blending of colours as an artifact of the compression process. On top of that it seems also to reduce the bit depth of each channel, which alters the colours themselves.   That happens at all draw distances and by the nature of textures, is most obvious at close range.   Here's a snippet of a downloaded Shanghai livery for a Fruit Stand plane. I opened the 32-bit version (the repainter was farsighted enough to include it in the zip) and saved a couple of times as DXT3. Once was enough to introduce the artifacts but I made them more obvious by saving a couple more times.   Whether or not one or the other looks better in game to any specific person is entirely subjective but compressed formats are lossy and degrade the crispness.   D   First the 32-bit original:       Second, the DXT3 format:      

FYI, he's close to a solution in the FS2004 forum. He posted all over the place, lol.

Have you tried different airports? Not sure but could be an addon scenery issue?