I'm a 20 year Trainz vet. I've posted many now defunct reskins on old versions and kept most of my modern skins private.
Over those two decades the CP 2816 Empress has been hinted but never released as an easily downloadable version.
One fellow had a very nicely detailed model near completion, but health issues naturally set other priorities.
We've seen a few tries and failures. It's hard a project to learn an already hard skill.
Some have tried to convert MSTS and ended in frustration. I was successful converting the graphics, decompressing the shape file and converting it to a .m3d, then to an .im which works quite nicely in Trainz 2019. The problem was any attempt to edit the .m3d file breaks the textures. That made it impossible to get rid of the wheels, which were to be replaced by trainz bogeys. However, instead if you do nothing to the file and simply export it to a trainz .im it works!! Well, sorta. It's inverted and you still need swap out defaulted colour maps to the correct texture files and it's got wheels that don't turn.
No worries. Alpha ordering to the rescue. The wheels are now transparent. Okay cool, but it's just a mesh. No attachments... and it's still upside down.
I made an invisible clone of Ben Neal's (bdneal) fabulous freeware CP 2860 Royal Hudson and swapped a few things out and tweaked some numbers. Cleaned up some graphics. New fonts, logs etc.
Then I attached the body mesh and rotated it's orientation 180 degrees and BOOM, I have a fully functional 2816 Empress! steam scripts, steam sounds, smoke... even an Oh Canada horn. It's low poly. Needs LODs? I dunno, it's tiny. Perhaps a LOD2 with less scripting, so it at least runs as such.
I'm not sure I can release this because I am not the author of the shape file, but it's GREAT FINALLY having it in my collection. Runs great!
Over those two decades the CP 2816 Empress has been hinted but never released as an easily downloadable version.
One fellow had a very nicely detailed model near completion, but health issues naturally set other priorities.
We've seen a few tries and failures. It's hard a project to learn an already hard skill.
Some have tried to convert MSTS and ended in frustration. I was successful converting the graphics, decompressing the shape file and converting it to a .m3d, then to an .im which works quite nicely in Trainz 2019. The problem was any attempt to edit the .m3d file breaks the textures. That made it impossible to get rid of the wheels, which were to be replaced by trainz bogeys. However, instead if you do nothing to the file and simply export it to a trainz .im it works!! Well, sorta. It's inverted and you still need swap out defaulted colour maps to the correct texture files and it's got wheels that don't turn.
No worries. Alpha ordering to the rescue. The wheels are now transparent. Okay cool, but it's just a mesh. No attachments... and it's still upside down.
I made an invisible clone of Ben Neal's (bdneal) fabulous freeware CP 2860 Royal Hudson and swapped a few things out and tweaked some numbers. Cleaned up some graphics. New fonts, logs etc.
Then I attached the body mesh and rotated it's orientation 180 degrees and BOOM, I have a fully functional 2816 Empress! steam scripts, steam sounds, smoke... even an Oh Canada horn. It's low poly. Needs LODs? I dunno, it's tiny. Perhaps a LOD2 with less scripting, so it at least runs as such.
I'm not sure I can release this because I am not the author of the shape file, but it's GREAT FINALLY having it in my collection. Runs great!
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