Default Ground Texture Swap

[RiscIt]

Howdy Folks,

In searching I don't seem to be able to find the answer to this.. Only more complicated solutions to similar but not the same problems. Still, if anyone can point me to a clear answer I'd appreciate it.

I'm working on a St Lawrence and Atlantic Route (~40 miles long, starts about 25 miles north of where Portland Terminal stops). My brother-in-law works as an engineer at Danville/Lewiston Jct, so that has helped quite a bit.

I'm about 10 miles in, and have a lot of the Auburn area complete (the hard part in terms of scenery). Unfortunately I was silly and chose the standard RailworksUS set when I started, and now I'm finding that I have to paint every inch of terrain to get rid of that horribly unrealistic rock texture and help the trees blend in with the ground in the distance.

How can I change the default ground texture without starting over? All I've been able to find is info on creating brand new textures, and frankly that process seems like overkill. Changing the as-of-yet unpainted areas to the standard "Grass - Lawn" texture would be perfect.

Thanks in advance. Any assistance is appreciated.

Peace,
Phil

EDIT: Relatively simple solution found. Thanks!

[PapaXpress]

I've written a four part (so far) series on this:
http://thegradecrossing.blogspot.com/20 ... to-cc.html

I hope this can help you out.

[Kali]

I think the texture set is in the routeproperties.xml file - but I know nothing about ground texture sets at all, so I don't know if they use indexes for textures which means you can freely swap them, or if they rely on names. You could maybe clone the default set, replace the rocks and then point at that.

If you're brave enough it's surprising what you can replace in a route by editing the xml. I've not cracked actually moving track around yet, that'd be quite useful I reckon.

[RiscIt]

Thanks... Yeah that's one of the articles I found that seemed like overkill as it mentioned adding new textures. I'm not trying to add new textures, simply changing out one for another.

Still, after looking at that for a bit and experimenting I'm finding that, like most things RailWorks related, nothing is as simple as it should be (sometimes I swear they are intentionally obfuscating things).

In any case, I copied:
Assets\Kuju\RailSimulatorUS\Environment\Terrain\Texturing.bin
To:
Assets\InterFixRW\DanvilleJunction\Environment\Terrain\IFRWTexturing.bin

I made no changes to the file itself other than copying it and changing the filename.

I updated RouteProperties.xml as such:

Code: Select all

   <TerrainBlueprint>
      <iBlueprintLibrary-cAbsoluteBlueprintID>
         <BlueprintSetID>
            <iBlueprintLibrary-cBlueprintSetID>
               <Provider d:type="cDeltaString">InterFixRW</Provider>
               <Product d:type="cDeltaString">DanvilleJunction</Product>
            </iBlueprintLibrary-cBlueprintSetID>
         </BlueprintSetID>
         <BlueprintID d:type="cDeltaString">Environment\Terrain\IFRWTexturing.xml</BlueprintID>
      </iBlueprintLibrary-cAbsoluteBlueprintID>
   </TerrainBlueprint>


I made no changes to the rest of the file.

Since I didn't change the contents of IFRWTexturing.bin I would expect this to work. However, all of the textures are missing, replaced with a grey grass gridline texture.

Did I miss a step?

Thanks in advance. Any assistance is appreciated.

Peace,
Phil

[PapaXpress]

Did you copy over the texture folder?

[RiscIt]

What for? Since I didn't modify the contents of the ..Environment\Terrain\IFRWTexturing.bin file, it should still be referencing the textures in their original location.

Right? No?

[PapaXpress]

Yea, you should be OK, but from what you are describing is sounds like a path is off somewhere.

Also you can tell from my series that I brought all of the texturing over to my route folders. Its unlikely that RSC would ever change their base textures, but if they do add some then having my own set for my route allows me to add or change what I need without the outside world interfering.

[sleepyto]

To change the default texture you have to replace the very first texture in the Texture.bin file with the one you want to be the default.
BE SURE TO BACK UP TEXTURE FILR. If Using RW_Tools it will make a back up file for you.

In my texture file I replaced this which was in the first position. This is second.

11-22-2011 11-15-00 AM.jpg

With this later in the texture folder. This is now first.

11-22-2011 11-13-34 AM.jpg

Hope this helps.

[RiscIt]

you have to replace the very first texture in the Texture.bin file with the one you want to be the default.

Wouldn't it make more sense to change the Low/Mid/HighGroundTextureIndex values instead of moving he entries around?

Regardless, it's a moot point until the textures are working "as is" with the copied texture file.

but from what you are describing is sounds like a path is off somewhere.

That was my assesment as well.. Looks like a textbook "missing texture" situation. After double checking the paths, however, it should be fine.

I'll mess with it some more another day.

[PapaXpress]

Wouldn't it make more sense to change the Low/Mid/HighGroundTextureIndex values instead of moving he entries around?

This depends on what you need to do. If you have not painted on any ground textures then changing the the low/med/high will be enough.

If you have painted a texture to the route and you want to change that texture, then replacing it with the desired texture is the only way you can achieve this (unless there is a way to erase ground textures), but this seems overkill, since it would be much simpler to just paint over the same spot with the texture you want and not hack the index order in the BIN file.

[Kali]

Perhaps doublecheck the route hasn't forgotten your dev folder ( that happens to me occasionally ) and run RW with these flags: -LogMate -SetLogFilters="All" -DontUseBlueprintCache . I can't see a path issue though...

[RiscIt]

Thanks Kali... The log entries weren't very helpful, but it looked fine with those options, which suggested to me that I should clear the blueprint cache, and that took care of it.

Now that it's working again, I'll work more on getting the default ground texture swapped out another day. No time right now.

[RiscIt]

Found a few minutes... Changing the (Low|Mid|High)GroundTextureIndex-es from from 1 (scrub- mixed) to 3 (Grass - Lawn) did exactly what I wanted.

I just saved the change, cleared the blueprint cache, and everything was perfect. Everything I hadn't painted yet was changed to the grass texture. I did not need to change the texture order (...which is good, because as a programmer, I couldn't come up with a good reason for why you would need to change both and I was beginning to feel dumb).

Thanks for all the help! :)