You are correct, it is a WARNING and not an ERROR - however since WARNINGS become ERRORS, as stated by N3V staff, it stands to reason that they must be addressed, so I view them as equally unacceptable, hence my mistaken terminology.
We clearly don't see them as equivalent, or we wouldn't bother to distinguish. You're right that warnings are something to pay attention to when building content, as they highlight possible cases where you're doing something dumb or outright incorrect.
In some cases we deliberately downgrade real errors to warnings in older versions of content because we know that correctly flagging the problem as an error would break too much content. In such cases, you'll definitely want to fix the warnings if it's your own content. But if you don't understand the warning well enough to tell the difference between these cases, you have no business correcting the warning. Better to leave it alone.
We strongly recommend against "fixing" warnings in assets downloaded from the DLS and other sites. By all means focus on your own content, but the Trainz community relies on content working the same on everybody's machines, so if everyone goes and makes their own changes to the content then the community will lose the ability to share content reliably.
All that said, forcing single colors into the mesh makes it impossible to re-skin later without the original source files, wouldn't make more sense to let small files or at the very LEAST 1x1 size files go without the flagging?
As Terry noted, 1x1 files don't flag as errors. The warning may show up, but if you are confident that you understand what it means and are happy that your asset is correct, then there's nothing really to worry about. Correcting warnings which you already know are fine is just OCD.
Example = a semaphore with Red Yellow Green as lens, I needed Red Red Green for it to be prototypical. The Lens are textured with an 8x8 color file, all the same color. Since it was NOT colored in the mesh, all I had to do was change the texture file to the color I wanted and it was done.
With your system I would have had to have the original mesh file.
True, but not a great example for a number of reasons. Let's see:
* You generally shouldn't make a separate texture for the lens; the whole asset should be comprised of a single texture which contains the entirety of the semaphore and all lenses.
* You're assuming a case where the original content creator made something that was sufficiently flexible to be reskinned for your purpose, licensed the content to allow such, but where he didn't have the foresight to make the lenses reskinnable.
* If the original creator really wanted you to reskin his mesh, he could just as easily hand out the MAX files.
* Even so, there is no error in this example, and so you're being OCD about warnings again.
kind regards,
chris
