Two railway textures

[Thin White Duke 4,072]

I'm probably a big fat goobus who missed something essential during NAM installation, but I've been living with this for a while and it drives me nuts. My draggable rail has a completely different texture from the puzzle pieces.

[matias93 7,535]

I've noted that the NAM 35 installer defaults to not install the Real Railway, so maybe that's the problem...

[Tarkus 6,931]

It's also possible there's some sort of load order issue involved.  The RRW does change the IIDs of the base Rail network, but not intersections or puzzle pieces.  If the RRW wasn't in your Plugins folder, you'd probably be seeing blank stretches on either side of the puzzle piece.  My suspicion is that one of the alternate versions of the Maxis Rail textures (either the SFBT set or the dedgren set) is lodged in there some how, and is loading after the RRW textures.  Take a look for either SFBT_Rail Textures Mod_Darker Textures.dat or zzz_Dual_Rail_Texture_NAM_Upgrade.dat in your Plugins folder (probably in z___NAM somewhere).

There have been some installer and file architecture-related issues with efforts to prevent folks from ending up with both RRW and non-RRW components not working as intended, so it's certainly possible something like that could have happened.

We've had to keep the RRW as a non-default for the past few releases due to complaints.  Initially, they were somewhat justified, as the version that shipped with NAM 32 was rough, but now, it's mostly subjective complaints about its color scheme. Given that it's actually the only rail standard we're developing now, and the RRW texture customization efforts are mostly in place (thereby satisfying those previously concerned with its aesthetics), it may be that we make it default for NAM 36.

By the way, in case anyone is wondering what's happening with NAM 36, it's been in internal testing since mid-May.  That testing has actually been going very smoothly, but heavy batches of RL for a few of us since then have been torpedoing our ability to finish the last few things.  Additionally, I'm in the process of completely re-writing almost all of the documentation.  We're ditching the PDFs, as they proved to be functionally impossible to maintain (as evidenced by the severe lack of documentation updates  since 2013), and we're going back to a more modern version of the old HTML approach we used up through NAM 30. 

-Tarkus

[Thin White Duke 4,072]

Thanks for your replies! I reinstalled NAM again and this time didn't check the box for any custom rail texture, and now it's all uniform. Probably a silly oversight on my behalf. I'm sorry if I wasted you guys' time, but I hope this can be helpful in the future if anyone else has a similar inquiry. I think making the RRW a default component of NAM 36 would be a good idea.  

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TL;DR:

- RRW is incompatible with any other custom rail textures.

[Tarkus 6,931]

'Twas not a waste of time at all, and in fact, it was a great opportunity to get feedback about the NAM Installer and Rail specifications.

11 hours ago, Thin White Duke said:

TL;DR:

 

- RRW is incompatible with any other custom rail textures.

Well, any currently available ones, as they are all Maxis-spec.  Custom RRW-spec textures are on their way, however, as a result of a project produced by eggman121, rsc204, and rivit, though those, at least to my knowledge, will be their own package, outside the main NAM download.

-Tarkus