Gone FSHin'

[redfox85 659]

Sometimes that like button underestimates the like ! This is really great news.

[matias93 7,535]

The only reason I'm not playing with this outright is because I'm using each precious minute of my free time on the game...

[CorinaMarie 29,605]

I seem to have gotten myself confuzzled and I cannot figure out what I'm doing wrong.

As you showed in this post, I've extracted the 69EFB6F8 texture from SimCity_2.dat. I expanded it from 1x128 to 128x128 and then stripped out the component color 0x55638E. Next I colored only pixel 1 (the top row) back to the 0x55638E color and made the 2nd pixel all red (0xFF0000) in order to see the effect in the game.

The BMP:

 

I am using GoFSH v3.6.1 as downloaded from the STEX:

 

Once I've made the .dat file and look at it in Reader the top row has changed color from what I painted in my BMP:

 

Is there some do not blend colors option I'm missing? (My work files: Pixel 1 & 2.zip)

Edit: I figured it out.

I needed to select as A8R8G8B8:

 

And now it looks like I expected in Reader:

 

  Edited May 4, 2019 by CorinaMarie  
Found the solution.

[rivit 3,391]

Yes, well found Cori - the color change with default FSH is because the DXT compression works by finding the best 2 colours to approximate every 4x4 pixel block. If there are more colours in such a block you'll only get an approximation - which can get fairly weird if there's a big difference in the 16 pixels..

A8R8G8B8 is exact  - it doesnt lead to loss, but also produces a bigger FSH. In this case its fine because its a one-use texture.

[justforfun 7,802]

Hi rivit, I just installed GoFSH and it displays like this. Is there a way I can avoid the bottom being chopped off? Of any shortcuts I can use to load an FSH file? Thank you.

 

[rivit 3,391]

@justforfun

That's the first time I've seen this happen. This looks to be a very old version of windows (makes the .NET look like VB6) - It should be oK on anything from XP SP3 on. On this OS it looks like gadget sizes are being spaced more when compared to the images above - this is leading to running out of window space.

I can't control this as its entirely down to windows code as called from .NET when the window is laid out. 

[justforfun 7,802]

1 hour ago, rivit said:

 - It should be oK on anything from XP SP3 on.

Well, I'm using Windows 7. Such a pity I can't use your program then, I'll have to find another way to split FSH files. Thank you anyway.

[Tyberius06 12,189]

25 minutes ago, justforfun said:

Well, I'm using Windows 7. Such a pity I can't use your program then, I'll have to find another way to split FSH files. Thank you anyway.

Something is OFF with your settings on WIN7. Because I'm using win7 as well and I have NO problems with using the GoFSH. It shows up perfectly. And it doesn't have that skin what is on your image.

So something is wrong with your settings.

- Tyberius

[justforfun 7,802]

1 hour ago, Tyberius06 said:

Something is OFF with your settings on WIN7. Because I'm using win7 as well and I have NO problems with using the GoFSH. It shows up perfectly. And it doesn't have that skin what is on your image. So something is wrong with your settings.

- Tyberius

Do you have any idea what that could be? The classic skin I'm using to save up resources has nothing to do with sizing, I'm afraid. 

[CorinaMarie 29,605]

9 hours ago, justforfun said:

The classic skin I'm using to save up resources has nothing to do with sizing, I'm afraid.

In and of itself, I agree. I set mine to Classic (using a Sandbox) and then ran GoFSH:

 

And everything still fits within the borders.

[CorinaMarie 29,605]

Me again. The first answer here seems quite promising.

Edit: I've tried doing this in reverse by setting my registry to the ending F version of the font for all three and it doesn't mess up GoFSH or Lot Editor.

[matias93 7,535]

Maybe it's some DPI issue?

[rivit 3,391]

Thanks everyone for all for your inputs - this is a little odd and definitely something we haven't seen before - and its been running on a lot of different machines.

I'm fairly certain this is "window layout" related, DPI may come into it - something on @justforfuns setup is different from default windows 7 and appears to be adding extra pixels to the vertical size calculation. This then exceeds the window space allocated and clips off the bottom.

GoFSH hasn't been made "DPI aware" as such. I rely on whatever smarts are in .NET and the OS because of the particular fixed layout.  On Highres (4k like) screens I would not expect it to autoscale to the larger size i.e. it would look very small because it stayed the same size.

If someone has tried this on a BIG screen and/or with bigger fonts that would be useful to know - I only have a 24" 1920x1080 DELL. If it does scale or part scale this might show a way forward. 

[rsc204 21,808]

Just to add some context here, this started as a conversion in a group PM, a few of us have been trying to help with this issue. Anyhow, I think this might explain things:

Quote

I'm using 1024x600. Have tried 800x600 and it makes no difference. Any attempt to resize GoFSH window will not make the bottom part showing.

x600 is really small by today's standards of monitor, so I'm guessing perhaps this is simply to small to display all of the GoFSH application without making the DPI smaller than 100% in Windows?

Perhaps one solution might be to add scroll bars, when all the information doesn't fit the screen, you'd probably only need a vertical one.

@justforfun: If it's possible to increase your display from x600, that would likely solve the problem. Of course if that's all the hardware supports, there isn't a lot you can do about it.

[justforfun 7,802]

17 hours ago, CorinaMarie said:

Me again. The first answer here seems quite promising.

Edit: I've tried doing this in reverse by setting my registry to the ending F version of the font for all three and it doesn't mess up GoFSH or Lot Editor.

I just checked and I already have E in place. Thank you for suggesting this though.

[justforfun 7,802]

1 hour ago, rsc204 said:

If it's possible to increase your display from x600, that would likely solve the problem. Of course if that's all the hardware supports, there isn't a lot you can do about it.

By clicking on the screen properties I'm only given 1024x600 as top resolution, not sure if 600 can be increased in the regedit or something. I'm using an old Packard Bell KAV60. 

[CorinaMarie 29,605]

4 minutes ago, justforfun said:

By clicking on the screen properties I'm only given 1024x600 as top resolution, not sure if 600 can be increased in the regedit or something. I'm using an old Packard Bell KAV60. 

I would suggest not changing the resolution thru regedit. The choices which appear under the screen properties are the ones that your screen can handle. Forcing it to something it doesn't like would prolly be bad. Maybe even very bad.

[justforfun 7,802]

4 minutes ago, CorinaMarie said:

I would suggest not changing the resolution thru regedit. The choices which appear under the screen properties are the ones that your screen can handle. Forcing it to something it doesn't like would prolly be bad. Maybe even very bad.

Very wise and totally agreed. 

[rsc204 21,808]

If it's an old machine, it's probably that's simply as many pixels as it has. Unless something was very wrong with the drivers, all the hardware supported options would appear in the Control Panel options where you can alter the resolution.

[T Wrecks 10,209]

It sure looks like 1024×600 is the maximum resolution the KAV60 is capable of displaying.

[Cyclone Boom 16,875]

As others have suggested, to me it does sound like this might be resolution and DPI related.

As a possible idea though, I wonder if it's worth trying the Compatibility settings when running GoFSH to see if that could change the display. Checking also on Windows 7, in my Properties of the program's shortcut:

Maybe check the option named: Disable display scaling on high DPI settings

I'd try a combination of the settings just to see. The compatibility mode might be a way also, thinking if this could cause something to be more optimised for running on a system with a smaller screen resolution by modern standards. I'm just guessing on that front though, and would say it's less likely to make a difference.

(If so, just remember to click Apply and then OK to confirm.)

 

In terms of DPI options, I came across this article. Maybe a few things to try there too possibly.

With that named Control Panel setting to "Set custom text size (DPI)" and here's what I have by default:

Perhaps it could help to raise this perhaps, or even unchecking the option there. I'm not certain this will solve your problem, and also if this affects other programs too then it does point conclusively to this being a system-wide inconvenience. In that settings dialog and it doesn't seem possible to reduce the scaling below the 100% there, and logically I think lowering would be the way to go, not increasing the DPI scaling percentage.

A few things to try I just thought to mention in case.

[rivit 3,391]

Well I must say - don't you turn your back or all sorts of things will have happened by the time you look back...  You've hit the spot MGB - knowing the screen size does explain it.

GoFSH was designed with the assumption (not overly weird, I thought) of needing a minimum screen size of 1024x720 so a small laptop could display things.

The exact window size for GoFSH in pixels is 727w x 652h. When a sub window is open it uses about 960x652.

So a 1024x600 screen is just that bit too small. In a future release I'll put a check + message in the program and add something in the manual.  For @justforfun - sorry but the panel can't be smaller and fit what it needs.

[justforfun 7,802]

@Cyclone Boom

Thanks for taking the time to look into this issue, I've tried everything you suggested both for compatibility and resolution, unfortunately the GoFSH windows still opens in the same way. At this point it seems to me that if I can't increase the x600 vertical resolution there's no way I can see the whole window. Oh well, I'll have to give up rivit's superb program.. or change laptop. 

 

@rivit 

Confirmed what I thought, thanks.

[rivit 3,391]

Around the time that players started making more use of custom Sidewalk textures, CP made a mod called the SCILT (Sidewalk Compatible Interchangeable Lot Textures) (to be found on LEX) which allowed lots to use a fixed set of wealth sensitive overlays (96 of them in $,$$,$$$ varieties) that would match (or complement) sidewalk textures for things like driveways, paths and parking areas. Over time a number of more common Sidewalk Mods have been used to make SCILT sets to match. By changing these textures the lots automagically adapt to the sidewalks used.

While fixing Dependencies recently I discovered I needed a SCILT set for CPs Victorian Mansions, and since I use a custom sidewalk mod I needed to make my own SCILT. This is a perfect task for scripting with GoFSH - and the result is produced in about 3 minutes. To make the mod, I unpacked the default SCILT, then used the Alphas and Photoshop scripting to define the D0 files I needed, then made up the script to rebuild the SCILT.

The diagram below shows how, from the definition files, GoFSH produces a new set - in the manual read pages 53,54 to understand this, and pp 57-60 to see how to run scripts.

 

Attached below is a simple mod to reskin a SCILT set for your own setup. Keep in mind that the idea is to match/complement your sidewalks in color, tone, pattern or some combo of them. All you need to do is supply the Paving in $=1, $$=2, $$$=3 varieties. Unpack the zip verbatim to a volume with some free space, and then run the makeall.txt Script with GoFSH.

202004 SCILT Reskin.zip

[Raymond7cn 6,772]

I mean, to say that I was shocked would be an understatement. Rivit's great works keep making me fell in that way, what I can do for this is that make a beautiful Sidewalk Mod to appreciate the great coder, Thank you rivit.

Yours Sincerely,

-- Raymond

[rivit 3,391]

When FSHing you get to contemplate a lot of water. Over the last few days I've made a small breakthrough in understanding how SC4 produces its primary water colours. In particular we are interested in the relationship between the Water Texture 304 (Wt) and the Water Constant color (Wc) at Row 1 of the 69EFB6F8 texture, and the Alpha Texture (Ta) 69EFB7DA which I always (incorrectly) called the Sun Overlay.

Since the sun comes from left over your shoulder when viewing the map, you will never see the sun's rays facing you over water in-game. But you can emulate reflected Sky and Cloud light, and to some extent the Light Extinction and Fresnel effects.

 Wt represents the color of water with light reflected on it from a distance (a summary of the above effects), Wc the dominant color of the water body (arbitrary), and Ta the amount of directional reflection at play across the entire (map) scene. Wt as a texture can also represent a simulated 3D wave profile of a variety of shades.
 
 The relationship turns out to be
 
  Water =  Wt * (Wc + Ta*(1-Wc))  where all RGB components are expressed in 0-1 notation.  (0..1 <=> 0..255)
                                                                             Only the blue component of Ta is used.

I've made a small action script in Photoshop to allow me to experiment with this formula. For a Wt (color1), Wc (color2) combo, it makes a small swatch of colors expected to be seen with the Ta effect built in as a light gradient. Color 3 is calculated for the first row of the C9EFB727 texture which is the top row of the side texture, and color 4 is the color to multiply the gradient in the rest of 69EFB6F8 Texture which represents the bottom of the side texture.

To test this I googled some examples to see what it could do. I looked for elevated water views facing away from the sun. Here is the result after picking colors 1 and 2 directly out of the images.

 Accidentally, image 3 on the top row is almost exactly the Maxis default, so its not as strange as it might appear. Notice nature can make a lot of variety, and we can now replicate a great deal of that quite well. It will never be realistic! - the model is too elementary. Also, not all of these would look good in game unless other things are made to fit. However, better water mods will follow I'm sure. Once I've ironed out quirks I'll also make the PS action available.

[rivit 3,391]

Here attached the promised PhotoShop Action for the color swatches - any program supporting CS6 photoshop actions should be able to use them. There's a Readme inside,

202005 SC4 Water Swatch PS Action.zip

[Raymond7cn 6,772]

Dear rivit, @rivit

I ran into an issue today when i wanted to tweak some fsh files which extracted from simcity_2.dat for a testing, after decoded by GoFSH, Actually, they're 257*1 and Index color in Photoshop, 

I didn't change the mode to RGB color, just filled the entire image with totally white (255,255,255) then saved, and then i loaded it into GoFSH:

Then whatever encoding options i selected, they(A0,C0) became to black color and the size changed as well,

except GREY 256

So may i asked that how to deal with these index color (not sure whether also called greyscale) and special size images with GoFSH, Thank you very much!

Sincerely,

-- Raymond

[rivit 3,391]

Hi Raymond - thanks for asking questions - that way we all learn something.

Indexed color means there is a color table with the colors in it (in this case 256 greys) and each byte in the file refers to the index of that color, rather than the color. In these can be saved as RGB by converting first to RGB then saving as  24bit - the files are three times bigger. Having said that GoFSH can read standard Indexed bitmaps so that should not be a problem as such, and you notice it actually loads the bitmaps properly - the problems occur on Append.

From the outset BMP files were based on a modulo 4 byte width and arbitrary height. DXT files which are the basis of 99.99% of FSH are always a multiple of 4 in height and width - so I enforced that in GoFSH (rightly or wrongly). The other bitmap types which were added much later - don't necessarily use modulo 4, but GoFSH still does expect this. (problem 1) 257x1 hits the jackpot in both dimensions

GoFSH will correctly unpack the FSH regardless of format, but is restricted in what it can save - and you've hit those restrictions. Murphy's Law (if it can go wrong it will) has struck and the modulo 4 check tried to make changes to width and height. In principle GoFSH should have changed the height to 4 and width to 260 by extending with empty space and all should have been well - only it wasn't.

Even a quick look in the debugger hasn't made it obvious what's gone wrong although I did find a cryptic note to self : 'TODO FIX MAKEBMMODULO4 as it doesnt work error free (problem 2). This note is probably 10 years old. What is obvious is that a structural fix will be a little involved - I now need to pay the price of not fixing it earlier.

So Ray, you get the           award for finding a bug. Sorry I'll have to get back to you because GoFSH wont save this file.

Short of having a fix soon you could try to save the -C0 as a PNG and see if PNG2FSH will do the job.

[Raymond7cn 6,772]

40 minutes ago, rivit said:

Short of having a fix soon you could try to save the -C0 as a PNG and see if PNG2FSH will do the job.

Ah, I will try this method soon, Thanks a million Dear rivit, sir, You're a legend here and even in China, people always ask me about you, They described you to be a mysterious person, you may have no idea how many times you saved someone's dream by your great tools, but i do, also thanks for your thorough manual of GoFSH, I have learned a lot from it beyond the software itself, Please take your time if you plan to do that, I will always be here.

Yours Sincerely,

-- Raymond