Custom terrain textures - Incredibly frustrating

[SAR704]

I know I've posted about this a fair bit lately, but it just annoys me big time when TS crashes for virtually no reason. I cannot find anything really wrong with either the terrain blueprint or the ace file, but it still does it's beloved crash when i move to certain points in the route, or jump to markers more than about a kilometre away (often related to terrain being at a different level, and having to regenerate).

Following the tutorial posted by Derek doesn't resolve the issue. I cannot think of a way to prevent these crashes. I've checked the blueprint, the ace files, everything.

Here's an image of the terrain blueprint if it helps. (Provider and name of route have been hidden in the image).



BTW, the terrain textures are converted from .tif files into 512 x 512 24 bit, compressed. is this the correct setup for TS?

Another issue I'm having related to this is that I can't move any further north in a route I'm laying track in because the game crashes, even with generated terrain. When I change the blueprint to the Kuju one, it worked fine. I am baffled.....

[Bananarama]

BTW, the terrain textures are converted from .tif files into 512 x 512 24 bit, compressed. is this the correct setup for TS?

Since you never responded to my reply at TS.com, I suggest you carefully read the tech docs on terrain texturing., specifically 4.09 Terrain Texturing.pdf. You can download the original RS files in the RWA library.

[SAR704]

Sorry Marc, I forgot that i posted the topic initially. One thing I overlooked recently was that they need to be 256 x 256.

Unfortunately, there are no suitable terrain textures available for my route (it's an arid desert route set somewhere in Australia), so I pretty much have to do the complicated task of trying to create my own. Kuju didn't make this task easy for us though.

Edit: found an ace plugin for Photoshop Elements which saves the files as ace without needing to use any of the ace programs. Saved the image as a 32 bit file, 256 x 256 and tried it, but unfortunately it still crashes. The blueprint is basic, with only one texture, and just the one base name listed at the top. There is no wang or flora enabled.

Also, is it vital to add 00/000 to the name of the texture? The pdf you suggested says to add this, but this is for wang. My Terrain textures are not actually WANG tiles. But for now, I've added it anyway.

BTW, do stand alone textures need alphas?

[wacampbell]

BTW, do stand alone textures need alphas?

Bingo. Terrain texture .ace's must have an alpha channel ( even though it is not used by Railworks ).

The 000 etc suffix on the filename is NOT required. The only naming requirement is wang textures need _A , _B etc suffixes.

And, I have found it is best to allow the BPE to export the .tgpcdx file using 'Export With References' on the terrain blueprint. When BPE exports a .tgpcdx for terrain texturing, it uses a different set of compile options than it does for normal .tgpcdx's.

[SAR704]

I always use export with references so that i can check for any faults or other issues, such as accidental export of the wrong file. I never suspected that this would be harder than getting a section of custom track into TS/RW, but it seems to be lol.

[Derek]

Hiya, I think I covered most of these issues on my art of railworks blog.
However shout if you need any assistance. (pretty loud as I am often looking in a different direction, but ping me on my WVR blog)

cheers
d

[SAR704]

I seem to be having trouble with the 32 bit element at the moment. In the blueprint editor, it comes up with an error message when it's halfway through exporting. When I save in Photoshop Elements as a TGA, it says it is 32 bit, but it never seems to successfully convert in the BE. When I save the file as ace, the same thing happens.

Does including the alpha actually make it 40 bit, or is it still 32 bit? After converting it using RW ace, it says its 24 bit but including the alpha. This is confusing.

I had a look at your blog Derek, but I wasn't able to find that much related to single non-wang textures for RW. BTW, which blog is thw WVR one?

This is the arid texture I've been trying to get working in RW without these annoying error messages/bugs

[savv_nz]

Hi there,
What is the error the editor is giving? I have recently made an entire texture set for a route project so finally got my head around them.

One thing I note is that in your blueprint you have the .ace in your file name, in my experience it will not export with the .ace on the end and you need to remove it - in the reference (MixTexDescriptor).
The file itself should remain as Texture.ace

The textures I have done were in Photoshop, but the same settings should I apply. My colour settings were as follows:
RGB
8 Bits/Channel

Once the main texture was made I copied and pasted it into the alpha slot, then exported to ace.

Hopefully something here helps :)

[SAR704]

Howdy

The error is just a typical crash alert message, saying saved dmp file file to C:\temp dump or something.

Are you able to give a brief explanation of how you created one of these textures? I may have forgotten something obvious.

[savv_nz]

In brief I just followed Dereks tutorial - all my textures are wang files - once I got into a rhythm I was able to do a couple of sets per hour which wasn't too bad going.
Unfortunate its not giving you a proper error message in the export window or it'd be much easier to track down. Have you exported anything before? Do the ace files usually export?

[SAR704]

In the last month or so, I've exported custom track, and a few scenery items. I don't think this game was set up to make it easy to get brand new terrain textures into the game.

I might have to give the wang format a go, as I don't seem to be having much success with the individual ones.

Edit: made a try at the Wang format. All I did was duplicate the texture into the A-F range, and the other required amendments. However, it's still doing that crash. I feel as though this is going to take a while to sort out. It seems to be far more difficult than a track loft to get everything more or less on target.

[Bananarama]

Edit: made a try at the Wang format. All I did was duplicate the texture into the A-F range

You forgot two. The actual range is A through H. Textures need to be 256 x 256 and 32-bit with alpha. If you have the original RailSimulator program, you'll find several dozen example terrain TGA files in the main Assets\Kuju\RailSimulator\Environment\Terrain folders.

[SAR704]

I meant to say A-H, but made a typo.

Strangely, I tried exporting the RS TGA file (converted to ace, renamed) into the sim, and getting it to act as the default texture as a test. Weirdly though, I still get the dreaded crash message. It may not be just the textures after all

[Bananarama]

You can try testing your textures by creating a blueprint in RS with the texture entries, export, and see if it poses a problem. If not, just copy the RS blueprint source back to the TS dev source folder and test in TS.

[SAR704]

I don't have RS installed. i just fiddled with an old RS source texture file. So how do I do this?