Update:

Dynamic textures are a big flop with F/A-18. I am still don't know why it did not work as expected. It solve the mixed MFD problem but there was a unexplainable perfomance drop. But after I start with this game I am always expect that unexpectedly. It simply do to many strange things. With a modern 3D Engine it should run like hell. Anyway we have to life with the engine we have and a failure is only a challenge.

After I "lost" (maybe I can use it later for something else) two days with the dynamic texture attempt I have try something else. The game don't redraw the MFDs pixel by pixel in the memory. Rather it copy it character
by character from a texture that contains the whole font to the textures for the MFDs. It use the old direct draw Bltengine for this job. Unfortunately this hardware accelerated 2D part of the GPU is not longer full usable since Direct3D 8. The reason for this is that in modern GPUs you use an other technic called render to texture to get the same result but it use the much faster 3D part of the GPU. To make a long story short I have build in some new methods that detected this usage of the blt function and redirect anything to the render 2 texture functions of the GPU.

It fix the mixed MFDs and speed is the same a before on my system. As the implementation is not tuned for performace at the moment there is some room left but don't expect any miracle as there are more places than just the MFDs that kill the performances in this game.

I have click a little bit around in the MFD menus and it looks like that there are many pages with many values. I they are all part of the simulation I can understand why you guys like this game. Too bad that EA don't have give you the sourcecode of this game. I am sure that somebody would be able to upgrade the graphics engine to something that is more appropriated for a modern GPU.

I am write to much stuff and forget the most important part for you guys. I am prepare a new beta release at the moment. It is a MFD fix only. All other bugs are still there. Maybe even the MFDs are not 100% correct but the should not appear on the wrong place anymore.

i dont know if i could help you ralf, but i am working on assembly code and i have already done some modification and too, i have written a modification which could call an external dll...
may be i could integrate some fix in the dll or hook some events..
i have isolated all routines which draws MDI and so on

_Frenchy, thank you for the offer. But I don't think there is anything you could do at the moment.

The changes that need to be done to improve the overall performance are to extensive to do this as patch on the assembly level. Sure it can be done but it would be easier to write a new flightsim.

But maybe you can answer me an other question. It looks like that F/A-18 always run with 60Hz. Is this right?

EDIT:
@All: new Version is up.
There is a new Plugin in this release but you don't need it for F/A-18. It only writes a log that show all textures etc. that are created.

Thatnks for your attempts Ralf, I will look at this in a few moments.

I do have a few questions. Can you explain what the resolution and count is used for for the "present changer" plug-in. As well as the quality of the Multisampling? What values are expected to be entered here?

I just want to fool around with it. I noticed when I entered the resolution that my sim runs in, the area of where you click on menu items were waaaaaaay off.

Getting back to your last post....You are right though, there are textures with all kinds of symboligies that are used in the displays. But not all them appear in the texture file.

However, there are FNT files as well, which contain bitmap characters. EA used a program called Fonter to create these files. Frenchy did a small test and was able to open it, convert it to BMP, edit it, and then save it back to FNT.

Do you suppose, it grabs the characters from it? I have a feeling it does...who knows....

Here is the URL for that program:
http://home.online.no/~kr-lund/emul-fnt.htm


Have a gander at the texture versions of the PCX files:






I thought I would show you the HUD icons as well.




And then here is the *.FNT files.

MESS.FNT


NHUDLG.FNT


NHUDSM.FNT


NLCD

Rudel, in the case of F/A-18 better don't play around with the other values in the Present Changer plugin. Maybe the refreshrate can be usefull.

In the case of some other games it allows to select special screen resolutions. Force tripple buffering etc.

Yes, the game have some textures that contains stuff for the MFDs. I don't know were there are come from as I am on the other end of the food chain as you and your team. This means that for me there is no difference if the game loads a texture from a standard image file, a custom file format or build it on the fly. I can change all of them if I want the same way. I can even change the resolution and bit deep.

Hi ralf..for 60 hz i dont know...but what i could say..F18 use timediff to synchronyze all timer event..each cycle of program is around 20 ms (early 60 hz!!) and could increase to 30/40 ms following the number of events..its an infinty loop...

i think that maintains always the same framerate..its the reason we stay always in the same level of FPS...if i dont say mistake!!

My fault. I forget to change the default refreshrate for the resolution I run my tests. Now it is back at 75 Hz with backdrops to 50 and 25 HZ. The reason for the stable framerate is the VSync. If you force it off you can go beyond 100 FPS and the drops will be in much smaller steps. Because of this I think it simply renders as fast as possible. The simulation in the background may have other timeing rules.

To confirm , JF-18 does not always run at 60Hz. I run it at 1280x960 and 1024x768 @ 85 HZ, and if I edited my refresh overrides I assume I could also do it at 100 HZ (my monitor's limit).

I will test the new version of the beta later today. I can report back everything wrong with the cockpit text if necessary.

With the new beta version of DXTweaker, all the cockpit display text seems to be 100% ok.

Can you please check the HUD, too?

Is the performace on your system still OK?

This will reduce the list with open points

1. Screenshots
2. Loadingscreen
3. end-mission MDI