.ban file

[buzz456]

A member has asked me to look into why it's raining on the inside of the windows on the GP30. In cabview there is nothing but a series of .ban files. I tried to open one to see if there was something going on there and couldn't get the file to open with anything coherent. Looking back it was suggested using notepad or wordpad but neither of them worked for me. Anyone know of how to get these opened or a solution to the inside rain either one?

[mrennie]

A member has asked me to look into why it's raining on the inside of the windows on the GP30. In cabview there is nothing but a series of .ban files. I tried to open one to see if there was something going on there and couldn't get the file to open with anything coherent. Looking back it was suggested using notepad or wordpad but neither of them worked for me. Anyone know of how to get these opened or a solution to the inside rain either one?

The .ban files contain animation sequences for the parts of the model and have nothing to do with the way raindrops on glass is simulated. That's done by applying a special shader called TrainGlassWeatherEffects.fx to a surface that's placed slightly in front of the glass on the inside of the cab. The material also requires a special texture where the RGB values are used to indicate the direction of travel of the raindrops (in 3DCrafter, the texture goes into the bump map slot). You can also apply it to the outside surface but that requires some extra scripting for it to work properly (I did it for the FEF-3 ... if you look carefully, you'll see that there's rain on the windows when you look at it with an outside camera as well as from cab view).

When a surface is textured with TrainGlassWeatherEffects.fx, the game engine automatically renders the raindrops when it's raining or snowing.

[buzz456]

When you say slightly in front of I think maybe in this particular case maybe it's a bit more than slightly since I never noticed this on anything before.

[mrennie]

When you say slightly in front of I think maybe in this particular case maybe it's a bit more than slightly since I never noticed this on anything before.

Can you show me a screenshot of it? If it looks like there's rain inside the cab instead of running down the window glass, then yes, it's probably the extra surface that's too separated from the actual window pane.

[buzz456]

rain1.jpg

rain2.jpg

[mrennie]

That doesn't look too bad to me - I thought you meant the rain was well inside the cab, a long way from the windows. Perhaps what it needs is a darker line in the middle of the inside faces of the window frames to give the impression that there is actually a pane of glass there, along with a texture for the glass itself that adds dirt to the edges and corners of the glass (you can see how that looks if you take a look at the windows in my locos).