Terrain.ace and microtex.ace

I've been struggling to get a shape skinned so it looks identical to the terrain. This is just sharing what I've found so far.After many failures I decided to experiment and created a terrain.ace from a 1 pixel/color rainbow using 16 colors (adjusting the RGB by 128 in each step). I should have used fewer colors and a white cross strip but the result I got so far was still informative:It's a little hard to see some of the subtile color shifts... the easiest is red orange yellow which is indeed 3 pixels, then 3 shades of green, lights, medium, and dark blue, followed by 3 shades of purple.I think each color stripe in the foreground is 1 wide x 4 long terrain.ace pixels.On each stripe (particularly noticible on the green) you can see the pixels from the microtex.ace file. So clearly what the sim engine is doing is expanding each terrain.ace pixel into a larger square and then blending in n number of microtex.ace pixels. What this means is you cannot skin an object from terrain.ace directly and expect it to look the same as the ground. My hunch is you have to take some subset and enlarge it n fold and then superimpose the microtex.ace pixels.I think what I'll do later today is create another terrain.ace file with a 1 pixel checkerboard pattern which should give a slightly better view of the effects of the microtex pixels.But the bottom line is don't bother skinning anything directly from terrain.ace because it can't come out the same on the object as on the ground.Dave NelsonWP mainline, Oakland-Stockton: 95% complete;
SP mainline, Oakland-Stockton: 20% complete;
Aug 1950

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Let's try this again....

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Okay, next update (if anyone is actually reading....)I created a red and white checkerboard terrain.ace, each square just 1 pixel in size. Then I took microtex.ace, marked the corners and center.Unfortunatly the screenshot I have will not upload -- it's too large as a VGA image and making it any smaller negates the value of seeing it. What it shows is the full microtex.ace image covers a 16 x 16 pixel square of terrain.ace. This works out to 16 microtex.ace pixels for every terrain.ace pixel. From the other perspective you could also say the microtex.ace file is replicated 1024 times across one terrain.ace image (as <512/16>squared = 1024).Therefore, to skin an object such that the end appearance is identical to the terrain will require taking a small portion of Terrain.ace (16 x 16 square) and expanding each individual pixel into 32 x 32 pixel square. Line up all these new squares and in the end you get a new 512 x 512 .ace file. Upon this you need to add another image layer that contains the microtex.ace pixels. Since the microtex.ace file is smaller, the overlay needs to be done 4 times and probably needs to be fairly transparent.Well, at least that's what I think so far. I'll find out tomorrow.Dave NelsonWP mainline, Oakland-Stockton: 95% complete;
SP mainline, Oakland-Stockton: 20% complete;
Aug 1950

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