Clone A Texture and it Becomes Faulty?

[boleyd]

The texture works and looks ok in TS10 and TS12, No errors shown in Content Manager 3.6. I now clone it and I get the following errors. Messing with the original seemed suicidal. I am doing this because some textures have disappeared from two routes. The grid pattern is there but I can find no way to determine which textures are now missing. The Trains 2012 program absolutely refuses to tell me what is missing despite the program knowing that info. I have seen this before and had to manually place new textures. Today I have spent several hours fiddling with files, and reverting, and getting config.txt, and fiddling the parameters in there. It seems that some are aware of the constructs of various files and can easily fix these things. However, I can't. I have done normal and deluxe repairs


Since I purchased the program to use as a train simulator I find the errors and failures that need the customer to change arcane values , well I can't really say how I feel. Perhaps unprofessional is the best description for confusing events that occur and could easily be fixed by the vendor. I can't get my money back and there is no way to meaningfully interact with the vendor. So I am stuck to either live with this or post an obscene rant and let the vendor banish me. Either way it is a waste of time.

Error: The *.texture.txt file is missing for texture resource 'grass_b.texture'.
Error: The *.texture.txt file is missing for texture resource 'grass_b_nom.texture'.

 

[shaneturner12]

If it was a built-in texture, you must use PEV's Images2TGA program to fix this error.

Shane

 

[dnevans8]

As I said in your previous thread, you will get this if you clone a built-in asset. Run it through Pevs images2tga utility and it should be OK. Get it from:

http://members.optusnet.com.au/~villaump/pevsoft.htm

 

[sniper297]

Main problem with built in stuff is the whatever.texture.txt and whatever.tga files are compiled into one, whatever.texture. Images2TGA from http://members.optusnet.com.au/~villaump/pevsoft.htm will fix that in a clone, but then you're opening Pandora's box - if it's a later build number it might work okay, if it's a 1.3 or 1.5 you often get other errors after committing that need to be fixed by updating it to 2.9 in content creator.

Easiest fix for your problem, instead of messing around making your own textures, is to;
1. Open route in surveyor, click Main Menu, delete missing assets.
2. Select a generic grass texture in the paintbrush tool.
3. Click the fill grid tool.
4. In the new menu that pops up, uncheck the option "current section only".

What that will do is fill all the blank areas with whatever texture you choose over the entire route.

 

[boleyd]

Wow!!! That is brilliant. I very faintly recall that stuff now that I have seen it again. I had a good idea what the missing texture was but the thought of manually fixing every instance just made me madder. Please do not go away. I may need to be reminded in the future THANKS...

Main problem with built in stuff is the whatever.texture.txt and whatever.tga files are compiled into one, whatever.texture. Images2TGA from http://members.optusnet.com.au/~villaump/pevsoft.htm will fix that in a clone, but then you're opening Pandora's box - if it's a later build number it might work okay, if it's a 1.3 or 1.5 you often get other errors after committing that need to be fixed by updating it to 2.9 in content creator.

Easiest fix for your problem, instead of messing around making your own textures, is to;
1. Open route in surveyor, click Main Menu, delete missing assets.
2. Select a generic grass texture in the paintbrush tool.
3. Click the fill grid tool.
4. In the new menu that pops up, uncheck the option "current section only".

What that will do is fill all the blank areas with whatever texture you choose over the entire route.

 

[RoysTrainz]

Brillantine for sure go the barber shop for new hair

@Sniper297 probably i miss something essential but if it is what i read you just put what you call a generic grass texture under the entire route per basemap and think you solve the problem right?
Ok i think its like hair loss and you go to the barber shop and ask for hair implants generic and put them all over your scalp....
Well Dino pointed me this morning at your solution but i think i refrain from implants like that.
Yes I had inexplicable hair loss on my route and most of the times very faint you hardly could see it but a trained eye would catch it for sure one day...... This happens when you like N3V says ok hit the delete missing assets because no clue what assets/textures are missing over time and there you go down the drain faster than light speed and no recovery once done and saved.
I did painstakingly chase them like rodents "close to the track" and replace them with what in that specific area would fit it could be rock,grass, dirt, water well I could go one for a little while and suppose i would put generic grass as a quick fix I ask for trouble see what i mean?
Lucky i think i catch most of them on the more than 250 km long track or better also on the mountains snow, etc so enlighten me where i am totally wrong in my assumption.
Would be nice to have a indication if a texture is missing even faint to now what type and where............... on roughly 7k up base maps
Nice and most appreciated to help out here other people and hopefully me too.
On a still monsoon heavy rainy monday morning from NE Thailand with a kind of hangover without alcohol, must be the texture cleanup finished yesterday. :hehe:

have a great day

Roy

 

[sniper297]

Reason I suggest a generic grass texture is because when one is missing sometimes you have no idea what it was, and the whole point is to eliminate all the bare grids on the route at once so you don't have to hunt for little patches behind the tool sheds. Common sense would apply here;

Whatever that missing texture is,

It's probably ballast rather than grass. So I select a gravel texture, click the fill grid button, then I have the option of doing it in one grid at a time, or over the entire route with a single click.

Do the whole smash at once, then;

Go back and overspray any obvious areas that don't look quite right with a different texture over the new texture.

 

[RoysTrainz]

Sniper297 WELL done in the future I could choose some light gray or whatever and than just follow the river to see if viewable those to redo.
Still there is a probably a nasty little devil under the carpet that randomly kicks out stuff in the dbase when doing a qdbr or edbr after a crash or as many times forgot to wait 1 minute to reboot or put asleep as trainz is still running and I am almost sure textures are also vulnerable to asskicking out of the dbase and classified as missing assets RIP.
splines still are most ugly where road splines yarn or yarnish or any might end up missing and even worse classified as track (way back to 2009 bug never solved never answered by N3V) I could go on but people would think I am a rivet counter and looking to blame people for bad things well in the contrary I can proudly say I weathered ALL trainz storms and have a route surviving all odds after Olympic records repairs and replacements and now no much touc any object only drive and keep it out of QDBR and DBR for good reasons.
Rant over:hehe:

thanks sniper nice job

Roy:wave:

 

[sniper297]

Other thing I do to avoid all those problems - at least once per day I go into content manager, select the route I'm working on, and save to CDP in a backup folder. Each time I do that I add numbers to the end using today's date, so for example my WIP route in the C:\Trainstuff\Backup folder is Austin&Western0830, Austin&Western0831, Austin&Western0901, and today being Sept 2nd I'm saving the latest as Austin&Western0902. If there's a "stealth bug" that somehow got added August 31st that I can't get rid of, I can start over from the August 30th backup. But in normal circumstances any disaster will at worst lose only that day's work since I can just restore yesterday's backup if something trashes it completely.

 

[Dinorius_Redundicus]

Sniper

I saw your post and thought it was brilliant, and I knew that Joosten's route had suffered from spontaneous texture droputs, so I referred him to this thread. It sounds incredible that TS12 could be left with such a serious bug in it after all these years of development. Maybe it's too late for Joosten because he's fixed the dropouts the hard way, but it's still a great trick to know about.

Just as a 'by the way', don't you have trouble finding the right backup CDP if they use that month-first date system?

~ Deane

 

[RoysTrainz]

ALARM DIVE DIVE DIVE

OMG how could I forget this sorry guys DO NOT I REPEAT DO NOT use replace assets on textures for at least one reason deadly!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

if you have a DEM you can be pretty sure in any trainz version 2009 up you will get a meteor shower randomly and setting mesh gridpoint set to zero. eg. you have a beautiful mountain ridge and suddnly you see when selecting F9 wireframe view you see your mountain crushed by these OLD bugs N3V!
Yes sometimes you can very time consuming repair and carefully smooth the point into the the correct height back but many times it is to tricky and yes you have scars on steep ridges....
the other one many trainzers should know is black dots or spots on the textured map that is already an indication that you have the disease and if you NOt repair immediately this will create problems in ANY 2009 up trainz version.
What you have to do is go to all black spots and select same texture and rotate the new texture first and place it on the black spot that is the only way to get rite of it.
Other things at this moment I know there are but i have other things more important on my mind so have to do it with this one to start with.
Does it mean all the versions of trainz are lousy and bad? It depends how you look at it my experience 2009 was a joke, 2010 less but indicated something was gonna happen if lucky as call it a happy accident from the BC guilt! dino know what i mean.
If you careful enough 2010 up is good to very good even with all these nasty stupid bugs N3V just very professional ignores and just look the other way, well done.
I COULD NOT HAVE FINISHED SUCCESSFULLY MY SOON TO BE RELEASED CPR MOUNTAIN SUB TS12 if not maneuver like a submarine in 3D lol and try to avoid old very old booby traps like mentioned before. Yes I had quite some repair work that could have been avoided if N3V just paid some attention to its old customers and be less arrogant and amateurish....

ok enough back to my work

Roy

 

[RoysTrainz]

use cut n paste i.o. replace asstes

i use cut and past F5 i.o. replace assets on textures to avoid the N3V bug.
in TS12 even if you still like to do the replace assets missing assets are likely not classified as grid and as such you cannot select grid at least in my version of TS12 but even if it would keep you fingers from that hot potatoe.

Roy

 

[sniper297]

Main trouble with that is if the texture is truly really sincerely missing, you can't use the replace assets because the game has no clue what it's supposed to replace, it's an unknown KUID. Best way to avoid the mess in the first place is to pick one of the textures that's built into 2009, 2010, and 12, use the fill grid for the entire route before you start painting terrain. That way if a texture painted over the built in texture goes missing, you'll just have the original texture that was oversprayed instead of the blank baseboard.

Deane, no, being a Yankee Doodle Ive used the month/day/year format my whole life, I've been using the same backup routine since I started creating scenery for MS flight simulator 4, and I have explorer set up for Windows classic view so I see actual filenames instead of cute little pictures.

 

[boleyd]

One little added note- you would be dismayed at how badly the User files are defragmented during editing. That is to be expected, but if you are concentrated on fiddling the scenery, or a scenario, keep your favorite defrag handy. After I did the fix all the missing textures trick my User folder was a disaster. Now, that is an extreme case, but using your defragger often is a good practice. Trainz TS2012 does not seem to handle delays getting scenery from your disk/disc well and fragments make this ancient area of the program stutter and stop at times.

 

[stouthm]

I've been following this thread and have a question. I think I read some where here on the forum that some textures hurt frame rates. If, by adding a base texture, I think that is what sniper297 is saying, how will that effect frame rates if at all? And as you add more textures, say one mixed with another, now you have 3 layers of textures. Is that adding more stress to the OS to keep up? Not criticizing here, just trying to learn. Roy, hang in there with your route and say hello to Ning. Sniper297, love your bridges. Keep them coming.

 

[sniper297]

I don't make bridges, you're probably thinking of bendorsey. Anyway, dunno, I read somewhere somewhence about textures affecting framerates, edited the Chicago Metro route in Explorer to replace the mapfile.gnd file with one from the earliest backup (removes all textures and all elevations so you're back to flat bare baseboards) and didn't see any difference at all in framerates or stuttering.

 

[stouthm]

Sorry about the mixup, when you get old the mind goes among other things.

 

[sniper297]

I've been trying to figure out if I was senile for 10 years, but if I was senile would I be aware that I was? What were we talking about again?

 

[JCitron]

The black-spot bug also presents another problem - divots. I have seen these places, which seem to occur on the baseboard seems, become rows of really deep holes in the grid as though the program lost the settings for the grid displacement. The opposite also happens too where there are strips of grid leaving ridges and spikes. These come as a surprise when you're testing a driving session. Ride along only to find a giant land spike in the middle of the track, across a river, or even in the middle of a town.

What's frustrating is having to fix these things because we end up losing the sculpting that went into making the hill or valley. This becomes worse when there is a DEM involved because then the terrain becomes completely distorted in these places since there's no way of bringing the surface back to where they were before.

I pointed these issues out to N3V back when TRS2009 was in the public beta stage. No one acknowledged the issue, and apparently no one bothered to fix it either.

John

 

[clam1952]

The black-spot bug also presents another problem - divots. I have seen these places, which seem to occur on the baseboard seems, become rows of really deep holes in the grid as though the program lost the settings for the grid displacement. The opposite also happens too where there are strips of grid leaving ridges and spikes. These come as a surprise when you're testing a driving session. Ride along only to find a giant land spike in the middle of the track, across a river, or even in the middle of a town.

What's frustrating is having to fix these things because we end up losing the sculpting that went into making the hill or valley. This becomes worse when there is a DEM involved because then the terrain becomes completely distorted in these places since there's no way of bringing the surface back to where they were before.

I pointed these issues out to N3V back when TRS2009 was in the public beta stage. No one acknowledged the issue, and apparently no one bothered to fix it either.

John

I think you'll find they are well aware of the problem now, whether it's going to get fixed is another question though.
The Spikes in Dems in 2010 can be more or less solved by merging the dem on its first load in Surveyor with a blank board first before doing anything with it. Don't actually have it touching the board, leave a gap, merge, save, reopen and delete the extra board, doesn't always work first time so it's a case of start again with a fresh copy and repeat until for some unknown reason it works.
This doesn't seem to get rid of all holes and spikes on board edges though or stop the black spots that turn into holes appearing. Actually if you very slightly tap the raise or lower terrain on the affected black spot it usually clears and no holes! That says to me it's a problem with the grid.

As for ruined DEMs I've gone to the extent of chopping out the bad bits and then removing the unaffected boards on a copy of my original mapfile.gnd and merging it, not an exercise I'd recommend with a few hundred boards and it won't work in TS12 anyway.