Creating Custom Base Texture IID

[ncamferdam 1,485]

Hello,

I'm working on creating my own set of custom base textures. I think I understand the overall process, and have been using Inkscape to create new 128x128 PNG files. So now I have this set of PNG files, and I think the next step is to use SC4Tool to pack all of these into an empty dat file and it's ready to go. However, I am hung up on the issue of IIDs. As I understand it, these should not be generated by SC4Tool, but should be picked out and entered in manually. I believe I'm supposed to request available IIDs? However, I'm unclear where to go for this or what information I need to provide.

I found this tutorial that has links to where I can supposedly get my own IIDs, but the links are all dead.

Most other tutorials I can find all seem to be concerned with creating "transit textures". I'm not entirely sure what these are, but I don't think that's what I'm doing. I'm just trying to create some simple base textures for some ploppable eye candy lots. As such, I get confused following the instructions related to IIDs from these tutorials, and in any case it's never clear to me where exactly they come from.

Any help would be much appreciated, thanks.

[Kloudkicker 4,561]

1 hour ago, ncamferdam said:

I believe I'm supposed to request available IIDs? However, I'm unclear where to go for this

Here is the link you need to request your own id range, https://www.sc4devotion.com/forums/index.php?topic=2101.0. But you will need to have an account there, which is easy to set up.

[ncamferdam 1,485]

Perfect, this is exactly what I was looking for. Just made a request post there.

Thanks a lot for the help.

[ncamferdam 1,485]

Ok, I just got the ID range from Tarkus over on SC4Devotion. It's F92C0000-F92FFFFF. Thank you again @Kloudkicker

I'm going off of this post by @rsc204. If I understand correctly, F92C is my texture family, so that should be constant for all of the textures that I make (assuming I don't make more than 768). I want to avoid texture wealth groups, so my fifth digit should start at 4. Since I'm trying to just make the largest size, I should first cycle the eighth digit through 4, 9, and E. Nested within that, I should cycle the seventh digit from 0 to F, and nested within that do the same for the sixth digit and finally the fifth digit.

Does that all check out? Entering this into SC4Tool, it should automatically fill out the remaining zoom levels, correct?

[rsc204 21,806]

Seems you've got the gist of things, one clarification, just from the possible combinations of the last 3 digits, you will have 768 IDs. I've attached a spreadsheet which should open in Excel or any compatible application, listing all IDs within your first "ID Grouping", which is the family F92C4 - Note the 4 is not part of the family F92C, whilst we need to avoid 0 through 3 for the 5th digit, we can still make use of all combinations 4 through F.

TextureIDRange- ncamferdam.xlsx

If you might need more than 768 IDs, you can open the attached spreadsheet, then use the find/replace function:

FIND:
F92C4

REPLACE:
F92C5

With these settings, click on Replace All, it should replace 784 records, because the same ID appears in the column headers, it's sixteen more than listed IDs. Most spreadsheet apps will tell you how many items get replaced, it's a good sanity check that the operation has gone successfully.

Then save the modified sheet, that would give you your next 768 IDs. You can make a total of 12 copies if this sheet, each time altering the 5th digit in an increment of one. In total your first family F92C will give you 9,216 unique textures.

Should you require yet more IDs, it's then possible to use the other three texture families you have. Each of your four texture families can have the full set of 12 sheets for the last four digits, or in other words you have 4 x 9,216 IDs. Using a copy of each of the previous 12 sheets, use the find/replace function again. 

FIND:
F92C

REPLACE:
F92#
^{# = D, E or F for the forth digit of the ID.}

Of course most users I suspect won't need to worry about more IDs than are already listed. For now you can just use the list provided, my advice would be mark the cells as you use the respective ID, in effect keeping a record of used IDs. This will prevent potential problems later on.

[ncamferdam 1,485]

Thank you very much for creating that spreadsheet. That's going to be extremely helpful.

Unfortunately, now I'm struggling at the stage of actually creating usable texture. I started by trying to use the SC4Tool Texture Creator. I named one of my 128x128 px PNG files 0xF92C4004, and tried to open it using the TC. However, I got this error:

I couldn't figure out how to get around this, so I moved on to trying GoFSH as the tool to create the texture DAT file. As I was starting with a PNG file, I first used the BMP x PNG tool to convert it to a .bmp file, checking G=0986135E along the way. I then had these files:

Next, I converted the .bmp file to a FSH, using this setup and clicking GoFSH:

This produced this collection of files as expected:

Next I went to the FSH x DAT tool, and clicked Create .dat from LoadList. I selected that second text file, and created a new DAT file for the FSH files to be added to.

Checking the file in SC4Tool, it looks like everything is there. All five sizes show up:

However, when I try to find the texture in LotEditor or with PIM-X, the textures are nowhere to be found. I attempted the same process again, with two textures instead of just one. This time, of the ten textures (F92C4000 to F92C4009) now placed in the DAT file, only the smallest size of the second texture (F92C4005) was available in the lot editors. The rest remain missing.

I'm sure I'm doing something wrong here. The process is all so new to me. But I'm really having trouble figuring out how to troubleshoot this. As usual, any advice would be greatly appreciated. Thanks again everyone for spending time on this with me.

[rsc204 21,806]

2 hours ago, ncamferdam said:

However, when I try to find the texture in LotEditor or with PIM-X, the textures are nowhere to be found.

2 hours ago, ncamferdam said:

As I was starting with a PNG file, I first used the BMP x PNG tool to convert it to a .bmp file, checking G=0986135E along the way. I then had these files

Look at the actual Group IDs, I suspect converting them from png to bmp probably added the Network Texture GID, so you need to change the filenames from 1ABE787D to 0986135E, then repeat the steps to build your textures/dat. You can just rename the GID in Reader for the existing DAT to save you time, using the TGI Editor. Network textures never appear in the Lot Editor.

2 hours ago, ncamferdam said:

Unfortunately, now I'm struggling at the stage of actually creating usable texture. I started by trying to use the SC4Tool Texture Creator. I named one of my 128x128 px PNG files 0xF92C4004, and tried to open it using the TC. However, I got this error:

So whilst all the IDs in the Spreadsheet end in 4, 9 or E, you could also say they begin with 0, 5 or A. GoFSH and a number of utilities use 4, 9, E or the highest zoom for the "base ID". Whereas SC4 Tools and other programs rely on the first ID, i.e. using 0, 5 or A for the eighth digit. In other words, if you just use 0xF92C4000 instead of 0xF92C4004, it will all work just fine. That said, these days I wouldn't use SC4 Tools for creating textures, GoFSH is much more streamlined.

[ncamferdam 1,485]

Sorry for the slow response on this.

On 8/10/2021 at 3:22 AM, rsc204 said:

Look at the actual Group IDs, I suspect converting them from png to bmp probably added the Network Texture GID, so you need to change the filenames from 1ABE787D to 0986135E, then repeat the steps to build your textures/dat. You can just rename the GID in Reader for the existing DAT to save you time, using the TGI Editor. Network textures never appear in the Lot Editor.

This is exactly what the problem was. Thanks again for the assistance.