Flight Simulator crashes when testing new livery

[mikicam]

Hello everyone,

I was an avid flightsimmer many years ago in the time of FS98, then I had quite a break (just until two weeks ago). Now I use FS2004 so I am getting adjusted to all the upgrades that came along. Back in my time I used to do some livery paints, mostly of Tupolev TU204. And I had no problem in testing them and then using.

After searching flightsim sites, I realized that there is still no livery of my national airline - Air Serbia (formerly known as JAT Yugoslav Airlines / Jat Airways). Since I found PA models great, I downloaded repaint kit for A319 and started painting Air Serbia A319-132. Like many years before, I used Adobe Photoshop CS3 for this work. After completing the tail section I saved PSD file as BMP and then replaced Cyprus Airways tail bmp with this new one. However when I tried to choose this plane in FS2004 menu, it gets crashed!

What am I doing wrong? Any tips or tricks?

By the way, I plan to continue doing Airbus liveries - mostly of the companies doing business in my region.

Thanks a lot in advance!

[Kyle Schurb]

You need to save textures in either the 32-bit bitmap, or DXT3 format. The most popular, and my preferred program for doing so, would be DXTBmp, available here - http://www.mwgfx.co.uk/programs/dxtbmp.htm

[mikicam]

Thanks! It works, but oddly, the texture looks very very light coloured when loaded into FS9. As you all know, the same texture includes the engine fan - very, very dark. Well, when I load my texture that fan is almost white (eventough the bmp shows it almost black).

You need to save textures in either the 32-bit bitmap, or DXT3 format. The most popular, and my preferred program for doing so, would be DXTBmp, available here - http://www.mwgfx.co.uk/programs/dxtbmp.htm

[Kyle Schurb]

Sounds like you'll have to edit the alpha channel. In DXTBmp in the top right corner, there is a smaller window that shows the alpha channel. You'll want to change this to white (it sounds like it may be black currently). You can send the alpha channel to your texture-editing software (Photoshop, as one of many examples), change the entire thing to white, save, then Reload Alpha Channel in DXTBmp and save as extended 32-bit.