Gone FSHin'

[rivit 3,391]

 
   Since GoFSH has been around since 2011 its probably fitting that it has a dedicated support topic. It will probably contain Tips and Tricks and Examples of things that can be done with GoFSH and Bender. However, I'd also like to use this topic to talk about making textures in general. I envisage this topic to be both informative and contemplative (hence the title). Please feel free to contribute your questions, insights and knowledge. I know there are many great texture wranglers in this community.

Its almost exactly 12 years since I first dared to submit a modd for SC4. The HerringboneBrick Streets were made the hard way - all manual and using a program called FSHMan which didn't always work as expected. There was a lot to learn. It took me about three months to make just one set of $$$ wealth street textures but it was worth it. Eventually this has led to GoFSH and a number of new mods as my skills and productivity improved.

   For anyone interested below is the original High Quality Herringbone Brick texture - feel free to use it in BATs or other textures - maybe a Euro sidewalk mod or replacing some hackneyed Lot Texture/Overlay. These are appropriately scaled for SC4, but you may want to adjust colors or rough them up a bit to fit your purposes. There are three sizes in the zip 128x128, 256x256, 512x512. They will tile without seams.

HerringbonePavingRed128.bmp

RedHerringboneBrickPaving.zip

[rivit 3,391]

 Textures are the single largest resource a SimCity like game uses to achieve its aims of presenting a city landscape. It represents the largest proportion of storage and memory in use. Textures are the prime vehicle by which we change the appearance of the Game through modding.
 
  There are three main groups of textures that dominate the look and feel of SimCity
  1. The Terrain and Water
    making these needs to solve the problem of how to map (without tiling artefacts) differing textures onto the game's idea of   geography, elevation, weather and moisture while presenting a particular ecology or climate.
  
  2. The Networks - Road, Rail etc. etc.
    making these needs to solve the problem of how to deal with thousands of textures - making sure all intersections of networks are addressed, and otherwise making things fit with 128x128 limitations with no join/tiling problems, while not looking too new or pristine.
  
  3. The Lots and their Buildings, Props - MMPs, Trees, Automata etc.
    making these needs to solve problems of realism within rendering constraints, to find/make textures, scale them, color match, and render them outside the game and test them in the game and then make sure it all fits.
   
   The common requirement for all of these uses is making sure the whole fits together - the game was produced with particular lighting in mind. My take is that the overriding look and feel is Oakland and Environs, California. The sun is always on the left at elevation 45deg, shadows fall horizontally to the right. The palette is consistent with this dryish environment - relatively unsaturated.
   
   We all try to take this into account when making mods - not necessarily consciously. We make something and when we put it in the game and we check if it fits. If so we are happy, if not back around the loop. How it fits though, is affected by what we have modded already, where we live and what we see everyday, what our equipment is - monitors vary, and even our state of mind. Is there a more objective way of solving these problems?
   
   
   
   In the new GoFSH package (v3.10 12 Jan 2017) is a little program called Gamut (automatically installed with GoFSH, Bender) that I made to investigate the game palette in a slightly different way. You can load images into it and look at three aspects of the image  - Hue, Saturation, and Luma. All of the following assumes normal lighting conditions - sunlight or daylight or standard man-made illuminants. Things like Sodium lamps do weird things to our perception of colour. This description is a simplification of a complicated area of study.
   
   Luma is readily recognised as the Intensity of the image - its a greyscale image of the color and made by use of the formula
   
     Luma (Rec709) =  Y = 0.2126 R + 0.7152 G + 0.0722 B.  at a gamma of 2.2 which is the sRGB standard in modern monitors.
    
   You can see its made of a weighted sum of Red, Green and Blue components.
   
   Saturation (as used in the HSV, and HSL) color systems is a measure of depth of colour. It is defines as
   
     Sat = 1 -  Min(R,G,B)/Max(R,G,B)  - so if Max=0 also Min=0, we have Black and have Sat=0 by definition.
    
   So saturation gives a measure of difference between the largest and smallest component - or spread of intensities.
   In the real world saturation falls off with distance to viewed objects or if the atmosphere isn't clear. Further our perception of saturation is adversely affected at low light intensities.
   
   We can manipulate Saturation in most image editors, but I'm not aware of any that allow you to view the whole image this way so that you can see what you've done to it.
   
   The final View is that of Hue - i.e. the underlying color of a given item. Hue is what you get when Saturation=1 and Luma=1
   It is defined as a color hexagon (circle) where Red=0deg, Yellow at 60deg, Green=120deg, Cyan at 180deg, Blue 240deg, Magenta at 300. In the real world we are 3 times more sensitive to the Yellow/Orange/Red than the Blue. For 1 in 12 males colorblindness may affect discrimination between colours. Sunlit objects are on the orange-yellow side, shadowed blue.
   
   It's derivation is not that straightforward but suffice to say that if the three components are the same then Hue is undefined implying the 'colour' is a shade of grey between white and black. Gamut displays its Hue as white.
    
   It should be noted that changes in any one of Hue, Sat and Luma imply changes in the other two. This follows because all are tied through R,G,B.
   
   So enough of the theory already - what does it look like!
    
  Attached an image of the color picker in Excel, from which I have made one image of the Color, Hue, Saturation and Luma. This demonstrates how it works.
   
 

 

  Now before you start to look at how this looks and affects us in Simcity4 I recommend you go to Google images (or your own photo collection) and select Images with the keywords  "Aerial". You can Copy the image and CTRL-Click in Gamut to paste the image into Gamut, or load it from a requester (Click on Gamut Image). This program is guaranteed to not be bulletproof so don't overdo the size of image as it will use about 8x the memory of one image. It will not scroll or zoom.

   Try to assemble a set of rules (<10) that describe how this HSL thing (often surprisingly) works in the real world, then try it out on Simcity4 or Cities (journal) images and see if they hold. Are they different and if so how? What does this mean? What questions are thrown up? (urp) How can this help us make better mods?
   
    
    
    

[rivit 3,391]

Well as my last post here seems to have turned out to be a bit of a Harold (didn't so much fly as plummet) I've had to break the rules and post back to back. Sorry about that.

Firstly there's a new version of the GoFSH package up (v3.2) which fixes things I broke in v3.1 and contains a major advance in special editing functions to be able to vary textures based on the source fed to them. This was invented in the first place for the RRW reskinning but is now applicable to all sorts of textures and gives us a way to keep the subtle variations inherent in multiFSH often used with lot textures when making the match our terrain grasses.

Secondly I guess I should answer the questions I posed in the last post about Hue, Saturation and Luma.

Here Goes:

1. In bright clear skies - sunlit objects will tend to yellow/orange unless they were already quite blue. Shadows are blue. Saturation decreases if the sunlight is very intense or there is haze. Brightness is high.

2. If the sky is overcast then the overall effect is to increase the amount of blue in the image, lower the saturation, and brightness. Contrast is also reduced. 

3. If its raining the image becomes bluer, saturation falls and brightness falls.

4.  In terms of decreasing saturation Trees/Plants -> Terrain -> Buildings -> Roadways. Water depends on the viewing angle - more vertical usually more saturated unless its murky. There will always be some highlights - anything in high visibility colors - some vehicles, truly white objects.

5. In a global way natural things have deeper saturation than man-made things unless they were deliberately made to be highly visible - think sea rescue orange.

So if we look at what we have made in SimCity - all of the above have been fairly faithfully reproduced into the game. Occasionally you will find a BAT where the saturation or brightness is too high to fit with its surroundings, but BATters seem to be really sensitive to getting this right. The Black roadways are the most out of place - mainly because in real world images they are usually more grey than black (brighter) unless they are wet or brand new. 

We can make major changes to our terrain/trees and grasses/paving in our game with mods - but if we do this we need to consider how they match.

For instance I live in a place (Sydney) that is brightly lit and has low saturation. Any of the northern terrain mods just won't give me the look I need. As it happens I took the Meadowshire terrain mod, and for myself made it redder and less saturated to reflect my environment. The maxis trees now look right.

I also had to make sure my Rock Mod (Sandstone) fitted. This now makes all of the MAXIS grasses look a little too green - saturated so I have also modified those to be less saturated. I can't go too far with this or the buildings will look out of place but you get the idea - its like matching collar and cuffs. 

[matias93 7,535]

4 hours ago, rivit said:

For instance I live in a place (Sydney) that is brightly lit and has low saturation. Any of the northern terrain mods just won't give me the look I need. As it happens I took the Meadowshire terrain mod, and for myself made it redder and less saturated to reflect my environment. The maxis trees now look right.

My terrain grievances have been so clearly interpetated by that little paragraph...

Your considerations on colour give me a crazy idea that I guess would be absurdly hard to realize, but that would add a new layer of realism to the game: to add rayleigh scattering (less saturation, more bright, blue tint) progressively on the lower zoom levels of everything, simulating the presence of an atmosphere over the city. Evidently, this would require to pass every single FSH in the game by a retouch process and to establish a new standard for all custom content, but as a simple mind experiment, it would be really interesting.

Even so, maybe Jenx's weather mods would be a much simpler (relatively speaking) way to simulate rayleigh scattering...

[rivit 3,391]

At the risk of another soliloquy I'd like to announce the latest version of GoFSH v3.3.1 has just been put on STEX. This version (or later) will be the one you will need if you want to make a custom version of RRW reskin, or other mods like RUM for RRW, RVT or MGB streets, and MGBs Grass and Paving mods in the future. We are currently upgrading our mods to take advantage of features built into this version.

=======

Brings me neatly to the RRW Reskin Mod, which from the perspective of its curators Eggman121, MGB204, Simmer2 and rivit has reached a stable phase of QA testing. We have had it here for about a month and I'd now like to invite you to take part in a public QA. We need your many eyes, and your many ways of using the RRW textures in Networks and Lots to pin down any glaring misses and errors before we prepare to publish this epic.

For this purpose I have prepared a full RRW Reskin Modd (like the version MGB published a few weeks ago) using my preferred sleeper and ballast colours. It looks like this  - concrete sleepers on a brown/grey ballast (a dustier version of RRW)

and is ideally suited to sunny, dry and dusty climes. You will note my grass on crossings is a less saturated version of MAXIS grass to match the rail.

Here is the link to the Archive:  RRW Reskin RVT Public QA  - this archive is 41MB and contains everything except crossings for RVT and MGB streets, RVT Tunnels and some other things in RUM for RRW. Do not expect the latter to change yet - MGB and I are nearly ready with RUM for RRW v5.

The archive will be available on my OneDrive until 28 Feb 2017 after which it will self-destruct.  It is designed to reside in Plugins:\Z___NAM Overrides  - unzip into Plugins and this is what you'll get. Please be sure to put it where intended - we are testing compatibility with other mods as well as correct textures.

To take part in this QA you need to run the RRW with NAM. Nothing will work without this.   What we'd like you to do, in addition to just playing about on a new city, is to try this out on as many existing cities as you can because this way we are most likely to find out things that are wrong and for you to see what a magic effect it can have on something you know well. There is full support for BSC, NCD, WMP, Simmer2 (transitions into his lots) and MGB Lot rail textures here, and you are more likely to have used some of these than we are. In the unzipped folder you will find a small txt document to help you know what to look for Quality Assurance (QA) - we want the best quality.

Remember its a texture mod so nothing changes except the look, and reversion is easy - just remove the mod as a whole. 

Please feedback here with pictures and finds - both good and bad - I particularly would like to see what this looks like in different terrains and cities, quite apart from pinning down errors.  We'll be monitoring and be ready to help if needed. Thanks in advance. 

[CT14 2,486]

OK, I tested a bunch of things and labeled screenshots in this album. I haven't installed the new NAM on this plugin set yet. I also run the BSC/NCD RRW patch, not sure if that matters.

Some BSC/SM2/NBVC and road crossings don't work. I will test with NAM 35.

 

[rivit 3,391]

@CT14 - many thanks for this first feedback and great shots. Your city is quite varied and I think this color scheme fits quite well in your setup.

It looks like you have RVT NZ Gravel streets - that's why those crossings are wrong, and you may need to check  that the BSC/NCD pack is loading before this, because it looks like we have only some of them when I thought we had better coverage. Having said that there are some tiles on NVBC and BLAM Lot textures we have never seen, and one or two in the industrial lots. Its going to be difficult to herd those in. The Jamieson Mill has really weird effects, some tiles missing, some done, and some look like they have the wrong ids altogether. Its possible that the original lot may have overlays on top of rail textures that weren't obvious before. That will need some investigation.

All of the SM2 lots are correct - Simmer2 has made transition tiles into his lots - but for integrity of the lots no tiles inside the lot - his lot textures are unique, very specific and the amount of work to redraw them is too high.   

The SAM3 crossings should be OK so I'll look into that, and the one road crossing tile has me stumped. The STR Ballast change is probably the starter tile - you should be able to drag through that and its fixed.  The Viaduct is correct - in that its one of mine and the texture change is bound to the viaduct - RUM for RRW v5 will fix that. I now know we must release RUM for RRW together with this. The default bluestone one In NAM should be fine.

Overall a very useful first test - apart from the strange lots the main rail looked OK. Thanks.

[CT14 2,486]

You're welcome and thanks for all the work you are doing.

Good call on the NZ Gravel textures, I was able to search plugins for "NZ" and found some rogue files I hadn't set up yet: RVT zRUM for RRW/E2 RVT Streets contained E2_RVT_SAM4 NZGR RRWX.dat as well as two others. Herringbone mod 2a is the only one I intended to use.

I will check out the STR ballast/starter tile thing and look at NAM 35 for this set.

[rsc204 21,808]

The colour shift of RRW textures is a problem I get too. It's not unique to the ReSkin but somehow related to RRW's model-based implementation. It's random and annoying, but I'd hazard a guess there isn't a lot you can do about it. That's because the problem shifts and is never consistent.

See here for an example, identical textures / location, but when I replace this switch, the colour shift changes to another texture:

I get the impression it's a shadow based problem, but couldn't be certain. I'd also imagine this is rendering related, one that may only affect certain videocard/driver combinations. My attempts to pin it down never got me anywhere, but this is the first time I've come across another user mentioning the issue. I had thought it was just me!

[rivit 3,391]

@CT14  - a little more digging has proved and found out some things

The SAM3 crossings (E3 SAM Crossings), and I suspect the One road crossing (BCD NAM) are in zRUM For RRW - they will be removed in the new RUM as everything will be in NAM, and Reskin.

Last night I went through the BSC textures Megapacks (again), and the PEG super packs and found another 14 tiles - one of which was in the Newman Coal Mine Lot. This also proved to me that the BSC/NCD files were being interfered with.  The BSC/NCD fixes files will be redundant after this mod - so either must load before or be removed and the same goes for the file L Lot Support.dat in RUM/L Lot Support. This is because there is a partial BSC fix in there reversing some of the Reskin.

Let me know if you're up for a RUM upgrade to V5 and I can make a WIP version available, alternatively before your next test remove RUM from your plugins temporarily.  

What this means is that only the Jamisons Lot is completely unexplained. I downloaded a Jamisons Steel Works and Cokery (these at very old, and really wild lots) but cant seem to get the one in your picture.

==

@RSC204/MGB   I'm inclined to agree with you that its shadow related. It implies the ground under the tile is just not completely flat (as far as SC4 is concerned) because if the model wasn't it would happen all the time. It does make checking for colour errors a bit tricky though - I know I've been down this rabbit hole too but never really woke up to the insanity of your two pictures - same tiles different effect, random color change!   

I hope someone else can verify they get it too, because I've really only consciously come across it with one corner curve tile and viaducts in DTR , and the starter tiles for STR. The others I found were color correction differences.

 

[rsc204 21,808]

1 hour ago, rivit said:

I hope someone else can verify they get it too, because I've really only consciously come across it with one corner curve tile and viaducts in DTR , and the starter tiles for STR. The others I found were color correction differences.

This is just one example. I can show you various textures from Ortho DTR/STR, Curve pieces where one tile of the curve has it but no others, to puzzle pieces too.

What's odd is that I checked (re-made after flattening with stubs) the land was flat. I've even seen the tile with the shift alter when clicking about. I too believed it was a texture error for a long time, but have since come to the conclusion it can't be that. At least unless the shift is consistent for a given tile. But yeah, no it's out in the open, maybe some others will join our new support group .

[CT14 2,486]

The Jamison mill is the xxDita re-lot https://www.sc4devotion.com/csxlex/lex_filedesc.php?lotGET=1561.

I'd be happy to test a RUM V5.

Just installed NAM 35, removed old RUM and RRW Texture Overrides for NCD/BSC, I'll post another album.

Notes so far:

• All the crossing related glitches seem to be gone.
• The old plop viaducts are working now.
• Jamison textures are more unified...but still crazy. I suspect it's time for another re-lot on this one...
• Sandstone sidewalks are steamrolling the rails a bit.
• That shaded texture next to a road crossing? Went away when I clicked nearby tracks with the rail tool. Didn't seem to be a starter.

[rivit 3,391]

Well I'd have to say that's a fair advance.  Thanks for the link - I'm becoming quite intrigued by that Lot.

Here is a link to RUM for RRW v5 - RUM For RRW v5 QA  = I'll leave it up till the end of the month - its the same color scheme as the Reskin. You need to read the how to install as once again there are things you need to remove.  

I take it when you say the sandstone is steamrolling the rails its a color clash - too much of the same colour? You might want to have a think about what color sleeper/rails you'd really like.

[CT14 2,486]

Thanks, I'll check out the RUM v5 link.

Hmm... well it's more like the sidewalks go over the rails entirely, there's a picture in this album showing what I mean. I bet it's something to do with an out of date mod.

Not much new to show here because most things are working now. I included a few shots here that show baked-in textures which aren't expected to be affected, I guess.

Also one image seems to show pollution responsible for darker textured rail (which went away with click of rail tool).

 

[rivit 3,391]

As you say Jamisons is just plain weird. Looking through this, it strikes me how good some of those old lots look with the new rails. I'll check put the Doc's rail repair yard (first time I've seen that in along time) - he's got one weird texture there. And I think I've got the logging railyard - those base textures are just missing? And in the modular railyard are those switches on the side always there?

I notice all of the NCD textures are a bit dark - so I think I can fix that, unless of course that's desirable. They were always a little different.

The (diagonal) street crossings need slightly stronger rail steel and then they'll be ok - I have checked and can fix that.

The extra textures at those street crossings are something MGB might know about - its possible the much older SWN mod has overridden something we now do differently. 

[rsc204 21,808]

6 hours ago, CT14 said:

Hmm... well it's more like the sidewalks go over the rails entirely, there's a picture in this album showing what I mean. I bet it's something to do with an out of date mod.

Quite the opposite, that's the new SAM textures at work. For wealthed textures they all do this, showing just rails overlaid on the crossing and sidewalks surrounding them. This is how Swordmaster designed them to work, only I think he was using Maxis sidewalks, where the rails and sidewalks don't clash. With my darker sidewalk they are fine too, but Sandstone is a real problem. Notice how for the road/ave etc textures a concrete section is placed around the rails? That's because the rails clash even worse against black textures, you can hardly make out the rails at all. Adding those for every SAM crossing is too much work right now, but we could adjust the Definition Alphas easily to bring back the Sleepers and Ballast instead of the sidewalks as so:

As you can see, with the default RRW textures (shown), Sandstone sidewalks still clash because the colour is too close to the original ballast. But, using a contrasting ballast would help to reduce the problem.

I wouldn't want to make this change by default though. At proper level crossings, you always have an adapted section for pedestrians to cross, rather than the usual ballast/sleepers. This is what the sidewalk part of the original textures are supposed to represent.

[Simmer2 23,786]

Thank you @CT14 for testing the new overrides.

As @rivit pointed out, my lots rail textures are extremely detailed and it would take me months to redo them all, therefore I opted to make transition tiles on entry and exit points for my lots.

Regarding the older rail related lots, we need some sort of definitive list of them all and someone to test them all as well. I then, would be willing to create alpha masks so that they would be inline with the new overrides.

Now....who would have that list?

Simmer2

[Eggman121 1,035]

12 hours ago, rivit said:

I notice all of the NCD textures are a bit dark - so I think I can fix that, unless of course that's desirable. They were always a little different.

I could have a go at fixing the NCD files. I am the one that made the alphas and updated RRW set as well.

It should be a batch command though most image manipulation programs (GIMP, Photoshop etc)

Regarding other sets, They can be made but that would mean I have to make or copy over a new set of alphas. It may take some time.

I can't wait to see the possibilities of the RRW re texturing project!

-eggman121 (NAM Team member and co contributor to the RRW re texturing project)

[rivit 3,391]

Thanks everyone for becoming engaged in this testing process - its always the exciting bit seeing creations confront the user world.

@CT14 - I have checked that Jamisons lot and ... its clean - on plopping in my test city it looks OK, and there's nothing weird about it in Lot Editor. Also the Docs Railyard is good. The PEG Logging Railstop actually does miss two textures, Paengs version just one they are:

0x1da44bda-e and 0x1da44bfa-e. If others could check with datanode if they have them that would be useful - I suspect they are either PEG or BSC textures based on their ids, but they are not in the biggest megapacks.

@MGB - I will widen the rail alpha on the diagonals and that should fix them - currently its down to less than 1/2 pixel of rail so that's why you cant see them well. I don't have a problem with the paving at all - we are talking about making 32 pixels a tile more obvious, and should stick with the vision. 

@Eggman - the NCD textures are fine (that is they are made to spec, but there is often very little ballast so they come up a little dark (optical effect)after ballast colour changing) and I can fix them by adjusting the reference texture color slightly - you don't need to do anything.

 @Simmer2 - that's a brave offer - but to be frank so far it looks like only those lots that have baked in or wholly dedicated textures will be a problem. The coverage is really good so far. Our biggest problem is finding textures we haven't got and finding oddities in lots that only show up now we have changed the textures. However I wonder if a list of Rail Lots exists. 

[CT14 2,486]

New RUM questions and config

Okay, I've installed "201702 RUM for RRW v5 QA.zip". I have the Z__MGB Mods/M - MHO Patch but not the ones mentioned in the Readme.

I also have had the zzz_sandstone_NAM and zzz_PaengTextureMod installed this whole time - going to remove them for next album.

Question #1: can you elaborate on the B2_GLR RRWX AltDraggable.dat file? I read the explanation "Select one of the GLR styles - AltDraggable works like an overlay of rail" but still don't get it. I chose that option, though.

Question #2: Which app has Datanode?

I chose the following other options in RUM:

• C2 Transparent
• E2 Red Herringbone only
• F_Viaduct Sandstone to fit the theme going (love the Dirty Brick though)
• no H Catenaries
• J RVT Tunnels

Speaking of viaducts, I note the zzzzz_RVT Alternative NAM Viaducts/F_NAM_Rail_Viaduct_Style_Brown_Brick.dat didn't override anything in the tests I've done so far - seems like this is rolled into RUM at (F) above, yarr?

Earlier albums

The rail/sandstone sidewalk thing: I'll have to double check graphics settings and plugins, but the rails themselves were disappearing with my sandstoned setup. I understand the rail sleepers need to be hidden on sidewalk crossings.

About Jamison's, if we're both talking about xxDita's version I must have some other plugins mucking things up. But then, that's the point of this, I suppose...figuring out what's in the way.

And I just found the Big John's Mine pictured was my own RRW re-lot... hmmm... disregard.

[rivit 3,391]

Sounds like you've done the right things in the install of RUM. I'm not sure what the alt draggable is myself - I think it removes the complete sidewalk in favour of more open GLR lines. You should just keep the Dirty Brick Viaducts - it looks good in your city. The Tunnels are not yet done.

SC4Datanode is an app - its on my list of things here on Simtrop - but we know you don't have those textures because they were missing in your pic too.

The rail at crossings thing is a feature of how they are made - I've concluded that we can fix them reasonably easily to show a bit more rail, but it potentially affects a large number of crossings (Street, SAM and anywhere the concrete retainer runs out before the paving, but some are fine) so I need to discuss with the team how we will tackle that - is not a game breaker but that's what a QA test is for.

As for Jamisons - suggest you try it out in a test region and see what happens for you - I had to use the LotPlop cheat to put it down though.

[rsc204 21,808]

19 minutes ago, CT14 said:

I have the Z__MGB Mods/M - MHO Patch

Redundant if you have NAM35, all the files and more besides are now in the NAM. You should remove it if you've upgraded.

19 minutes ago, CT14 said:

I also have had the zzz_sandstone_NAM and zzz_PaengTextureMod installed this whole time - going to remove them for next album.

They don't affect the rail overly. In any case, given the folders used, RUM/RRW ReSkin would both override them. So they can't be the problem.

19 minutes ago, CT14 said:

B2_GLR RRWX AltDraggable.dat

NAM actually contains 5 unique GLR networks. 1 Puzzle, 2 Draggable and 2 additional GLR networks, the "Alternative Draggable GLR" styles. Find them (where installed) lower down the Misc Transit menu, the icon is brown.

It contains two starters, one for the old-style Sandstone under the rails and another for GLR with grass underneath. The idea of these networks is that you only need to change one texture, the base and the whole network will match a given sidewalk/grass texture. So it was much easier for users to change than having to re-make every single GLR texture manually. That file contains RRW crossings for them, which until now, didn't exist at all.

[CT14 2,486]

Thanks all for the clarifications. I'm going to additionally remove the MHO patch before the next album. And I wonder what the missing dependencies on the old MTP lot are. That might have to wait.

31 minutes ago, rsc204 said:

That files contains RRW crossings for them

Does that mean it is not redundant to the other GLR file in the 201702 RUM?

On a related note I had to un-DATpack my main plugins folder to upgrade to NAM 35 with a Cleanitol run, and man oh man does it take forever to load and redraw now. Going to have to take a break from testing to DATpack that sucker again. I use a free/open source program WinDirStat (https://windirstat.net/) to find out which directories are taking the most space (and contain the greatest number of files)...

[rivit 3,391]

Yeah, its a big mod and NAM is not insignificant in itself - we are trying to find a way to make it drop over RRW so this at least doesn't double the rail tiles to load...

[rsc204 21,808]

37 minutes ago, CT14 said:

Does that mean it is not redundant to the other GLR file in the 201702 RUM?

No, because the other one covers the standard 3 networks, but not the Alt-Drag networks. Of course if you aren't using those networks, you won't need the extra file.

[CT14 2,486]

OK, that makes sense. New RUM Readme should probably not have user remove one of the files for GLR, then.

Modular Railyard: I believe those stubs on the side are part of the original design, for extension pieces.

I plopped Jamison in a fresh tile after making the above changes and it looks near perfect. Might have been ok before the changes with a re-plop? Anyway, it works now. Here it is:

But, like there is this one weird part, and I have to test with a clean plugins folder to be sure of this now.

Locomotive and empty ore cars suspended in thin air near the pool, here's the other view:

This has to be some kind of a bug with the lot itself [edit: yes, confirmed by clean plugins folder test] but sure is fun seeing the rail textures themselves 100% on this one!

Here's a weird question, do we even need the original NCD texture pack now? Guess I'll try and break things by removing it.

[Eggman121 1,035]

2 hours ago, CT14 said:

Here's a weird question, do we even need the original NCD texture pack now? Guess I'll try and break things by removing it.

The NCD texture pack is completely covered so I believe that removing the standard RRW version will have no impact apart from making some more room in your plugins folder.

The team behind the project should probably look at ways to host the content. The package is NAM 36 ready for the ERRW and will be updated to give more coverage to the various Lot and NAM components in future updates. Since the package is so large we may have to be creative on how we host the repository.

-eggman121 (NAM Team member and co contributor to the RRW re texturing project)

[rivit 3,391]

I'll fix the RUM readme - thank you. Jamisons looks great - it is a full on Lot.

on NCD - technically I think we will have overridden it completely thus ultimately making it redundant in the new set up.  Eggman121 made the textures for all of NCD_100 and NCD_201 packs so that's a lot of textures (480 pairs). After testing here I decided the colors were right after all, its just that there is often a dark gap between the rails so on snapshots it looks darker. 

[CT14 2,486]

I tested a bunch more and rather than posting dozens of pictures of everything that's working, I'll just mention what doesn't work.

Not working

The Depot Rural Train Station and its friends from the Rural Rail Station Pack (https://www.sc4devotion.com/csxlex/lex_filedesc.php?lotGET=1838) don't seem to use anything commonplace...

Fukitol Flour Mill looks similar.

Estacao da Luz may be baked in textures.

 

Working

Absobloodylutely everything else in my plugins folder

All tested Mattb325 stations,

All tested SFBT lots

Japanese stations whose names I can't type

Grain Silo - With Track

Amsterdam Hauptbahnhof

BSC SER Recycling looks fantastic with a PEG dirt road style texture crossing the new rails.

Workingman Productions Rail Ferries especially the bends around platform on Rural version look great

Jenx Paris stations

Rayden Transfer

Paeng MTP Old Mine

Duisburg Steel Mill (great transitions to lot-specific rail textures)

Llama Terminal Company & North American Freight Sidings

 

[rivit 3,391]

You're a champion mate - thanks very much for keeping on with it. You do realise you've now got the nearest setup to what will be in NAM36...

Given all those lots work - and its a fairly wide spread - that has to mean we've got most obvious things covered. I'll check the SPAM ones - I've probably got them - I may have found those textures the other day - you don't have them yet.

The other definitely has baked-in textures under the roof - that could be edited at a pinch - b of a job though

cheers Ron