I love this a/c i think it is pretty great but when i go to fly it and look out the vc everything is black except out the HUD.
has anyone else had this problem and is there anyway to fix it?  

Hello, and welcome to SimV!

You are suffering from the dreaded alpha channel problem in the VC glass texture. This is a quite common problem with FS9 aircraft that have been ported to FSX.

There is a way to fix it though, you will need the program: DXTBMP. it is free, here is a link: http://www.softpedia.com/get/Multimedia/Graphic/Graphic-Editors/DXTBmp.shtml . Next you will need to find the texture for the VC glass, usually called by that or something similar.

Now load that texture into DXTBMP

Next  if you look in the upper right hand corner of the screen you should see a little window called "alpha channel" it will probably be a white square, in FSX the alpha channel is opposite of FS9.

Now go to the top menu and select the alpha tab, and and choose the option: Invert alpha channel.

Your white square in the alpha channel window should be black now.

Now save and let it overwrite, load up the plane and enjoy the new clear cockpit gass.

Any problems. just ask.

Downloading it now, give me a couple of minutes to take a look at it.

OK, for each of the texture folders in the F-18 aircraft folder itself, you need to do the above process to the following files:

sh_vc02.bmp

sh_vc03_L.bmp

Do that and let me know what you have then. 

thank you so much trying it now

Yep, I just did this myself, and everything looks correct now, except for the VC glass itself, where at first the entire cockpit controls and all were blacked out, this is the same problem you had, correct?

The VC glass is going to require another trick. But one step at a time.

Working that problem now.

so anything new?

oh wow thank you either way works for me

thank you for your help
let me no if anything new turns up

thanks so much

You could maybe download MDLMat and change the material of the glass? I can't seem to work it though...

http://www.mnwright.btinternet.co.uk/download/MDLMat.zip

Wii wrote on Dec 15^th, 2008 at 11:58pm:


I have Accel and it won't work for me. I have played with every texture file that comes with this plane and can't get that glass to become transparent. I've never heard of a texture being part of a mdl file myself, but I'm not quite as knowledgable in that area as some others so I guess at this point it is a good possibility.
The funny thing is, I can get just about every other part of this plane to become transparent except for the cockpit glass.

You know, you might be on to something there! I never even considered that possibility.

I know which file they are refering to, I can make that door frame turn transparent but not what I thought was the glass, which is attached to the same file. The file that I believe to be the correct one for the vc glass is 'sh_vc04.bmp' , but have had no luck still. When I removed the file altogther, I just had more of the VC blacked out than I did before.
I even repainted that glass texture solid white, and solid black and set the appropriate alpha's and still nothing. Just blackness on the glass, but the frame would disappear.

well, that was a dead end, I'm afraid.  Apparently, the chrome.bmp file is related to reflectivity, and has nothing to do with the interior transparency issue.  The 'sh_vc04.bmp' file has been the center of a lot of my attention because it just looks like the right file, but no amount of tweaking on it has done any good for me.  Hope you have better luck!

charlie

I thought it had something to do with the model itself, thanks Hagar!
I've never run into this kind of texture until now, hope I don't see one like it again anytime soon. I'll just stick with the Accel F-18.

Sorry Razgriz, we did our best with this one, but I feel we've reached our end with it.

Yeah dont worry about it guys,
I really apprciated all the help i guess im just stuck with the Accel.
Not that i have a problem with it i just wanted a Super Hornet.
So thanks for the help!!!!!!!!!

Christian

P.S. if anyone wants to try to make this let me know
http://www.simviation.com/cgi-bin/yabb2/YaBB.pl?num=1229291789

Wii wrote on Dec 15^th, 2008 at 11:58pm:


I think we've established that this is not a texture problem - Hence the Idea that it is a model problem.

I also wonder why we can see out of the HUD but not the rest of the canopy.

Hi

Having to much time on my hands, I decided to see if I could assist with the problem, now I don’t know if the file has been updated, or what specs your PC has, but after unzipping the file and copying it into FSX I have no canopy transparency problems at all in the VC view.

The file I used was downloaded using the link provided in the first page of this post, and if I got the correct one the file name is FSXF-18F_Warhawks.zip, and the zip file weighs in at 44,948kb.


For information my specs are

Windows XP Home + SP3 32 bit
FSX+SP2 (not Acceleration)
AMD dual core 4400+ 32 bit
2GB dual channel memory
512MB Nvidia GT8500 (with nvidia 181.22 drivers and Nhancer set up as Nick’s post)

I hope the information is of some use, and that it helps.

Jim Hodkinson

Hi

I really don’t know what to say, the download I used has no transparency problems on my rig, so I can’t offer a solution to what I don’t see.

The only thing that I can suggest is for finding out what texture does what is an old repainting trick for finding individual parts in a repaint kit if the part you want is not obviously visible, which is to get the texture file (in this case use a backup copy) and in your favourite painting program, put lines of one or two pixels width spaced roughly 10 to 20 pixels apart horizontally and vertically to make a grid, and make each line a different colour, but every say 20th line place the same preferably bold colour, to give you a reference, that way you may be able to track down where and on what texture the canopy is, that is if it’s texture at all and not part of the mdl file.

Not much help I’m afraid, but the best I can offer for now.

Jim Hodkinson

My rig is:
8800GT with 512
Q6600
4 GB RAM
Vista Ultimate 32 bit
FSX with Acceleration

Could it be something as silly as a missing dll?  In order to get the POSKY 777 working I had to download the 777 guage from FS9 and have MSVCR70.dll in my root folder.  Could this require something that some of us are missing and others may have from a different download?  Didn't this airplane require guagesound.dll on FS9?

Okay guys, can you pleeeeeeeeeeeeeease explain step by step how you solved the poblem???????