Editing Track? Having Problems...

[motorbreath]

I'll have to go through it again an re-do it since I deleted my clone of the track. I just used the edit in explorer option and colored in the tops of the rails on the file that has the picture of the track bed next to the track. Is that a modification you could do quickly or would it be alot of effort and time? I guess my question is how does one change the appearance of existing track?

[Pencil42]

Yep, that's how you do it. When you save the image, make sure you save it as an uncompressed TGA file.

[motorbreath]

I'm using TRS06 and Irfanview and trying to edit the appearance of track. For example, I wanted to take the DB Track Unused and lighten the tops of the rails to create an overgrown but regularly used track. It was looking great until I went into surveyor and tried it. The little screenshot rotating in the menu showed up and looked good too. When I tried to lay some track, it was barely visible and transparent. The only thing I edited was painting the top of the rails from rusty to clean. What am I doing wrong?

[motorbreath]

I also cloned the track before editing. I don't know if that matters.

[Pencil42]

It sounds like potentially a problem with the alpha channel of the texture you are using. Can you email the modified texture to me and I'll take a look? My email is in the config.txt file.

Thanks!
Curtis

[Pencil42]

I could do the changes myself, but if you'd like to learn to do it yourself, I'd be just as happy to help you do so.

(shameless bump to bring the thread back from forum date error yesterday)

[motorbreath]

Any help would be great. I won't have too much time for the next few days but I did make a little progress yesterday. Possibly reverse progress though. I saved the tga file as a jpeg and editeded it in paint, which almost worked. The track showed up in surveyor and looked good except for the outer edges, which were still transparent. The visible part only went to the edges of the ties. But yes, I am trying to learn and want to get this stuff figured out. Thanks for trying to help and thanks for your creations, I've used quite a few of them.

[Pencil42]

No rush :)
Paint may have converted the image's alpha channel to pure black and white, which would give you the all or nothing transparency you are seeing.
Alpha channels can be tricky to work with depending on the tools you have available. One thing you can do is break it into two images - use the tga file for your color, and a separate .bmp for your transparency.
To do this, you'll change the mstand_tex.texture.txt file to point to the new bmp with the mask - something like:

Primary=track4a.tga
Alpha=mask.bmp
Tile=st

I've separated the alpha channel for you and posted it below:
http://www.carsoncarshops.com/files/mask.bmp

Hope that helps!
Curtis

[motorbreath]

Thanks alot. I'll check it out and see if I'm not too stupid to make it work.