Seasonal PBR Surprise

pware

Trainz Veteran
June 1st, the official start of Winter "Down-under". Outside the sun is shining brightly on a clear blue sky but there is a chilly wind that seems to be coming straight off the South Pole to confirm the arrival of winter. Not a snow flake in sight (it has has never snowed where I live).

I fired up my Trainz Plus (recently upgraded to build 117669) and loaded my current project into Surveyor.

I was greeted by a shock.

Seasonal-PBR.png


My PBR embankment texture was now as white as my hair. My first thought was that something had happened in the recent update but after checking it was only that texture that was affected. Further investigation revealed that the cause of the problem was that the texture had a seasonal (snow) component (but it did not have the word "Seasonal" in its name). I was under the impression that seasonal affects depended on the Environmental Tools Snowline altitude as well as your season of the year. The maximum terrain height of my route never comes anywhere near that altitude. But, apparently?, this does not seem to apply to PBR textures.

The original texture was <kuid:328583:100117> JVC-PBR Sand/Rock 04

It has now been replaced by <kuid:661281:85150> PBR Donner P12 cliff river5 as shown below

Non-seasonal-PBR.png


This does not show a seasonal snow effect. Interestingly it does have a seasonal (snow) texture but is also missing the word "Seasonal" in its name. This prompted further investigation.

The new texture has a config.txt file tag in its season-selector container.

above-snow-line 1

The original texture has the same container but does not have the "above-snow-line" tag.

Winter can bring many surprises. I will need to check over my route in case other winter shocks are waiting.
 
"Seasonal" snow is only supposed to depend on snowline altitude, not on the time of year.

If you are seeing snow appear below the snowline and in response to time of year, then the asset has been configured incorrectly by its creator.
 
"Seasonal" snow is only supposed to depend on snowline altitude, not on the time of year.

Actually it does depend on the time of the year, that why it suddenly appeared on the first day of winter.

If you are seeing snow appear below the snowline and in response to time of year, then the asset has been configured incorrectly by its creator.

That is my conclusion as well. The creator, Jankvis, has a number of similar PBR textures that all have the same problem. I will send a PM but he/she has not posted in these forums for almost a year now and his last recorded DLS upload was September of last year.

In any case I have switched to an alternative texture that is very similar but foes not have the same problem.
 
As a test, I modified the asset by adding the line

above-snow-line 1

to the season-selector container and the problem was resolved.

If Jankvis does not respond I may report the problem assets to the content repair group, or investigate the possibility of creating a new version using the original as an alias.
 
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