Identifying Extended Bitmaps

Extended Bitmaps and FS2000

Not as straightforward as you might think!

For various "Backwards Compatibility" reasons FS2000 contains a number of textures that would seem to be R8 format from the filenames. Many of these are in fact Extended Bitmaps masquerading as R8 files to fool any addon FS98 scenery that requires them.

Similarly there are addon Aircraft that come with the usual xxxx.0af, .1af, .2af etc textures which are actually Extended Bitmaps rather than the expected R8. Sometimes they may be normal BMP format bitmaps instead. All will work but "normal" bmps are restricted to 8 bit to work successfully.

FS2000 will attempt to load any texture, whatever the filename, but will treat normal or extended bmps correctly if that is what it finds when it opens the texture file.

The quickest way to tell if a texture is an Extended Bitmap or not is to look at the filesize in Windows Explorer. Not all the sizes are listed below but the main possibilities are covered.

After that the only sure way to check is to load the file into Bmp2000 as an extended bitmap and see if the sub-images are displayed.