How to Replace Street Texture with SAM's Asphalt without Starter

[Propfam 2,305]

Hello,

I want to create some streets in my town. However, the default street texture is bad on my eyes and I like the texture of asphalt street. So, I want to ask: How I replace the default street texture with SAM's Asphalt without any starter piece?

Thanks.

[matias93 7,535]

Conceptually is relatively easy, as it only consists of replacing the default street textures with the ones on the SAM 7 dat file using GoFSH.

Now, I haven't used GoFSH on about a year, so I don't remember how it's done. You should check the (very complete) user guide to see if something is explained along the lines of that; I remember that one of the examples was about changing the textures of one SAM variety.

[APSMS 1,893]

As of NAM 36 the SAM networks include all the WRC/advanced functionality pieces of the base street network, so the need to do this is a lot less than it might have been in past years.

[rsc204 21,866]

16 hours ago, APSMS said:

As of NAM 36 the SAM networks include all the WRC/advanced functionality pieces of the base street network

Not quite actually, in reality we simply added 4 new WRCs for them, so yes those will no longer need making from scratch. There are at least 322 unique street textures, reduced to 242 if you don't bother making both EU/US variants. Whereas for a SAM network that number is nearer 100-120. So depending on how far you want the coverage of such a mod to go, there are potentially many textures you would need to create for such a project. However, the SAM network does cover most "Core" pieces, so you can get started with relative ease.

If you are serious about the work involved to realise this, I can provide you with some help and a repository of street textures you can use to build such a mod. In short, that would provide you with a template you can build with a script in GoFSH (using automation). You'd then need to extract the SAM 7 textures, alter the ID's (filenames) to match the street textures and one by one replace the repository textures with the SAM 7 ones. Once you run out of such textures, anything left needs to be created manually.

[licoricebomb 93]

So each SAM street has about 100 textures that it selects from when displaying a street? Is this out of necessity for the game to have something to display, or is the number so high in order to have enough variation to make it look good? Because if it's the latter, I would have guessed that far fewer textures would be required.

But I'm really curious- why would you want to avoid placing a starter piece in the first place?

[matias93 7,535]

Think on puzzle pieces: to form an image you need different pieces, some of them will be copies (as straight sections) but other are fairly specific (as an inner corner of a wide radius curve, which only has a bit of the street on it but nonetheless is needed). 100 different 16x16 images are not so much considering this.

 

[rsc204 21,866]

1 hour ago, licoricebomb said:

Is this out of necessity for the game to have something to display, or is the number so high in order to have enough variation to make it look good?

It's a bit of both really, the game works in such a way that each piece, intersection or network combination needs a unique texture. But having this also does make the game look a lot better than it would if a single texture were manipulated by the game to work for all circumstances. One advantage of separated textures over auto-generated ones, such as used in SimCity (2013) and Cities Skylines, is full control over what you see when two textures or networks interact. If you look at the modern games they often look terrible when two networks come together or at intersections which don't always come out as intended. But the downside is that each piece needs to be made individually. That said, when making my recent Industrial Streets and previously working on the SAM 7 Bikepaths, this for me has been a positive. Because it enabled me as a modder to create something that looked exactly how I wanted, in more setups.

If you look at the original game, it only covered maybe 30-50 street pieces. In no small part the high number is because of the sheer number of NAM additions and cross-compatibility added over the years. You want to get scary, the RHW textures number in the 10's of thousands.

1 hour ago, licoricebomb said:

But I'm really curious- why would you want to avoid placing a starter piece in the first place?

I think that's the wrong way of looking at it. Some people would likely prefer to have the black streets as the default ones. The default street network can do things for example that the override SAM networks currently cannot. It's not a technical limitation per-se, but the amount of code and work needed to make all SAM networks override every street texture is quite large. So things improve over time, but the regular streets are still way ahead, with SAM covering the most used pieces only. Not to mention the Maxis original textures were not all that great, for example they aren't even correctly spaced, causing alignment issues when one is flipped next to one that isn't. There are plenty of valid reasons to want to replace them with something else. Starting with an existing SAM set sure would save a lot of work making textures.