The latest development release contains two texture related changes.

Size multiple of four

The first is that MCX now also supports resizing textures so that their size is a multiple of four. This is the requirement that MSFS has for the textures. FSX and Prepar3D have the more strict requirement that the size should be a power of two. The material editor has been updated so that it can perform both actions now. If you set the preferred version to MSFS in the options the default behaviour is to resize to a multiple of four. Any other preferred sim will give the previous behaviour of resizing to a power of two.

The fact that MSFS has the requirement that the texture size is a multiple of four, does also imply that MSFS does not use mipmaps when compressing the textures. Because if you want to ensure that mipmaps can be generated the size has to be a power of two.

DDS and DXT BMP generation without ImageTool

The second change in the latest development release is that DDS and DXT BMP textures are no longer generated using the ImageTool tool from the FSX/P3D SDK. For people with only MSFS or X-Plane installed this dependency on the FSX/P3D SDK did not make sense. So I have implemented my own exporter now for DXT compressed textures.

Based on the preferred FS version and the characteristics of the alpha channel of the texture MCX will automatically select if it uses DXT1, DXT3 or DXT5 compression for the textures. In the texture settings there are a few new options that influence this selection as well.

From the testing I have done the new DDS export seems to work just as well as ImageTool, but if you find any texture that has issues when exporting, just let me know in the forum.