Network Skins 2

[boformer 3,169]

Network Skins 2 is coming soon! It's a complete redevelopment of version 1 with a lot of new features and a brand new GUI developed by @TPB.

Features (everything listed can be adjusted per none/segment):

• Road Tree replacement
• Streelight replacement
• Pillar replacement
• Pavement color
• Ground texture (concrete, gravel, ruined, none, this is the sidewalk on normal roads)
• Rail catenaries and wires
• Remove road decorations
• Remove zebra crossings

There will also be an advanced mode that allows you to apply any kind of modification to network segments and props (like the addition of trees and lights to networks which don't have them, the removal of segment meshes, the addition or removal of any kind of prop.

Preview of the new GUI (icons not final):

 

[aubergine18 11]

This looks freaking awesome!!

Will it have better compatibility with 81 tiles? When using 81 tiles, skinned roads outside the 25 tile area had a habit of causing all the customisations to get randomly reset to original road settings when loading or sometimes after an auto-save...

[boformer 3,169]

6 hours ago, aubergine18 said:

Will it have better compatibility with 81 tiles?

Not sure, will have to test. I heard there were problems with pillars and 81 tiles. The pillar feature should be much more stable now, so pillars don't disappear after a node is updated.

[boformer 3,169]

[Avanya 2,605]

This is absolutely awesome!  

[boformer 3,169]

TPB has been working hard.

[aubergine18 11]

Regarding 81 tiles, it was usually street lights that I had trouble with, especially when vast numbers of segments had customisations in the outermost tiles of the map. For example, I would replace lights of all my highways and rural roads.

The UI and features of the v2 mod are looking freaking awesome!

[boformer 3,169]

[RedVelocity 0]

Will it improve the drop in fps? I've seen many youtubers complain about it. 

[boformer 3,169]

1 hour ago, RedVelocity said:

Will it improve the drop in fps? I've seen many youtubers complain about it. 

Hey, welcome to the forums!

Yes, performance should be much much much better! It was the main reason for the development.

[Delta2k5 311]

33 minutes ago, boformer said:

Hey, welcome to the forums!

Yes, performance should be much much much better! It was the main reason for the development.

That's the best news on this end tbh as much as I like the features it's even better that performance will increase that much on large cities it was really a thing.

Great to see you develop again btw! You've been missed

[boformer 3,169]

Serialization is now working, that means the applied skin data is saved in the savegame when you save your game, and restored when you load it again! Major milestone!

[Darf 1,439]

Really looking forward to this update! Would it be possible to have no theme road texture overlay? 

[boformer 3,169]

1 hour ago, Darf said:

Really looking forward to this update! Would it be possible to have no theme road texture overlay? 

Not sure if that's what you meant, but you gave me a great idea!

[Darf 1,439]

Yeah I think so, can you control the alpha of the _p and _n?

[boformer 3,169]

55 minutes ago, Darf said:

Yeah I think so, can you control the alpha of the _p and _n?

hmmm no that's controlled by the segment/node texture. But I can use any texture for it, like cobblestone.

Not sure about the LODs though. Could be a problem.

[aubergine18 11]

Some roads have street lights on both sides, but with NS v1 changing the lights meant all traffic lights facing the same way (at least on road pack linked below). If possible could you test these roads on NS v2 to check the lights face inwards on both sides?

UK Road Project Revived: Small Roads Pack:

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1601040013 

  Edited April 4, 2019 by aubergine18  
EDIT: Street lights, not traffic lights

[aubergine18 11]

Would it be possible to use network skins 2 to do seasonal road effects. Specifically, in very cold weather on non-winter maps, could NS2 do something to road surface to make it look icy? Maybe with that other experimental mod (where building textures were being changed, I think it was the abandoned texture or something) it would be possible to start implementing something like a map-wide frost effect?

[boformer 3,169]

6 hours ago, aubergine18 said:

Would it be possible to use network skins 2 to do seasonal road effects. Specifically, in very cold weather on non-winter maps, could NS2 do something to road surface to make it look icy? Maybe with that other experimental mod (where building textures were being changed, I think it was the abandoned texture or something) it would be possible to start implementing something like a map-wide frost effect?

Yes but it's not in the scope of NS. That would be something like a "real seasons" mod.

[aubergine18 11]

Would it be possible to add some sort of pipette (eye dropper) tool?

1. Click pipette tool
2. Click buttons on the NS2 toolbar to choose what to pipette (eg. I might want just trees and street lights) - the current values of those things would be used by default
3. Optional: Right-click an existing network segment to copy its config (eg. the trees and street lights it uses)
4. Click one or more segments to paste the config on to them (eg. paste the trees/lights)

This way I don't need to upgrade segments to apply changes, I can just click the pipette tool and paste the applicable features on to existing segments (and optionally right-click a segment to copy it's features and then left-click any number of segments to paste those features).

[Ryno917 102]

This is brilliant! Looking forward to this one very much

Will this include the ability to specify a different road texture (like cobblestones)? Will it work with Quays?

[boformer 3,169]

9 hours ago, Ryno917 said:

Will this include the ability to specify a different road texture (like cobblestones)?

I did some experiments with texture replacement, both for the road pavement and the sidewalk concrete texture. The problem is that I'm unable to replace the textures of the far LOD, because the game merges everything into a single mesh for performance reasons.

So what I'm aiming for are textures with the same colour, so that you don't notice the difference when you look from far away. I have to generate these textures dynamically on level load, because the colour of the pavement depends on the map theme. So here are the limitations:

• You you can apply different materials to the sidewalk (different types of cobblestone, tiles, pavement), but the material color will always match one of the theme's ground material (that means you get 3 color choices: gray (theme concrete color), brown/beige (theme gravel color) and the "ruined" color)
• You can apply different materials to the road and tint them with the color picker. By default these textures will always have the same tint as the theme's road pavement textures

Example how a material could look like (on the right the default pavement):

From far away:

 

Quote

Will it work with Quays?

What exactly would you like to change on quays? Now that we have custom networks on the workshop, I don't see a lot of potential.

If the quay contains trees or lights, you may be able to replace them, I'm not sure.

[boformer 3,169]

One of the possible sidewalk textures. Uses gravel color.

[boformer 3,169]

[Mr_Maison 2,426]

Looks awesome so far! Will this new version include a search function?

[boformer 3,169]

5 hours ago, Mr_Maison said:

Looks awesome so far! Will this new version include a search function?

TPB said not in v1, but you can pin favorites to the top of the list

[boformer 3,169]

[boformer 3,169]

First proper implementation that tints the textures like the theme textures. Still very much experimental.

[Buddha187 0]

It looks fantastic. Great job guys, thank you very much!

[boformer 3,169]

1 hour ago, Buddha187 said:

It looks fantastic. Great job guys, thank you very much!

Hey, welcome to the forums, and thank you!