> I'd say no , its easy enough to do without yet another shader, since each
> new shader 'improvement" has me tweaking my aircraft
> to get back the frame rates I lost.But thanks for offering.

Well, according to GLSL specifications and my experiments, texture lookups 
cannot be made conditional on a varying, but they can be conditional on a 
uniform integer. Which means that this can be implemented optionally without 
any performance overhead if the feature is not needed  (that's not how the 
model ubershaders currently  are written, they read textures regardless of the 
config flags,  so I suspect they run slower on low quality levels than they 
really have to. I have been given to understand that this is because of Mac/ATI 
driver issues, but my medium quality terrain shaders read textures conditional 
on uniform int flags, and for me this gave a performance gain - seems to run 
fine on Mac and ATI as well, so it doesn't seem to be a nVIDIA exploit).

> I would follow the same opinion as Syd. I think Gimp/Inskape/Photoshop... are 
> enough powerful to create correct texture.

Well gimp is nice, but: Using 8192x8192 textures, with a 2x2 m cockpit size to 
texture, you get 0.25 mm resolution and have a 128 MB texture file. Using a 
1024x1024 texture with a 256x256 overlay, you get pretty much the same 
resolution with 2 MB worth of textures. using a 1024x1025 overlay, you still 
have 4 MB textures only and can create 4 times the resolution. So there's that.

The fact of the matter is that very few aircraft are textured in high quality 
(even a really good aircraft like the b1900d has lots of monochromatic surfaces 
on the panel) and if we had a library of a few overlay pattern, it would not 
require a photoshop artist but just a few lines of xml to fix that for good. 
The fact of the matter is also that once I turn my head and look away from the 
panel, the texture resolution in pretty much all aircraft decreases 
dramatically.

But okay, I asked for feedback and I got it - point taken, feature not 
considered interesting from the modeller side. 

* Thorsten
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