Oddly behaving squares

This may have been asked and answered before but searching "textures" produces hundreds of threads.

A number of textures I have are showing this odd square effect on them. They've done this for a while, but it is annoying when I change a view or rotate around a point and they appear/disappear as I go around. In the screnshot, the squares completely disappear when I rotate to a certain position.



The squares don't seem to be related to LOD settings as I can zoom up close and far out, yet the squares remain visible. Is this normal, or is there something I can do to tweak the texture config or photo file?

Bill

Do these textures belong to a particular content creator?

What are the KUIDS?

Sorry, John. I nearly always forget to add the KUID for the content. It's from Ish6 and the MARSZ textures. KUID2:58223:24228:1

Some of the textures doing this are not his, but from others. This is just an example of what's happening.

I may be slow in answering as all the FBIs are on TV tonight.

Bill

I reported that back in the early days of TRS19 and was told that is the way that the game displays textures that are not being rendered correctly by the graphics engine. If I remember correctly it was fixed but it appears the bug may have reappeared. I would suggest a bug report is needed again.

The texture image used in that asset does look like that so I don't see it as a bug. The screenshot image looks much the same although a bit blurry. Maybe Ishie was trying to achieve a sci-fi look?

Hi Bill, that looks to be the correct pattern, but this reminds me of why I needed to change the textures on the DHR route.

It uses a .bmp image which needs changing to a .tga with a normal map and the necessary changes made to the config file..
---------------------------

trainz-build 4.5
category-class "GL"
category-region "00"
kind "groundtexture"
texture "xxxxxx.texture"
normal-texture "normal.texture"

texture-variants
{
0
{
diffuse-texture "xxxxxxx.texture"
normal-texture "normal.texture"
}
}
-------------------------------------
Cheers,

Graham

Thanks to everyone. I'll give Graham's solution a go and see what happens. I seem to remember long ago something about BMPs being replaced by TGAs, but couldn't find that thread either. Might have been before "The Great Forum Crash."

I'll report back.

Bill

Thank you, Graham for posting the fix. I've copied your post to a text file in my Trainz Tech Info folder where I keep tips, tricks, and info on stuff like this.

You might be right on that post because I couldn't find it either.

Graham, I've copied your skeleton config to my "stuff I never want to forget" directory as did John. I now have it working. I changed the BMP file to a TGA with NO compression, and added the normal.tga and normal.texture.txt referred to the the config file. Works just fine with no squares in it.

Many thanks.

Bill

I am happy to have helped,

Now back to the Himalayas for me

Cheers,

Graham

Hello Everyone,

My 2 cents on this issue!

A long time ago the textures that I made work fine, but then N3V came along with a patch, and I can't remember, but i think this happened with TR12 ... And, then after that, most of my textures began having these weird boxes to them when the camera was rotated around the sunlight. N3V never gave instructions why this occurred, or how to fix it...

Seriously, it's frustrating, and at times I just give up, Trainz - I know the game needs patches, and stuff, but at least give us guidelines and instructions on how-to fix items immediately if they become broken .... talking to N3V!

On a side note - I've notice saving the texture via BMP, with a depth at 32bit fixes this issue! I could be wrong if some textures do not cooperate, tho!

Take care
Ish

We can continue our conversation about this offline, Ish. It might be a good thing to rework your textures like the one I used in this thread. Won't take hardly any time at all.

Bill

Hello Ish, good to see you active again.

As an enthusiastic updater and reskinner (to keep older content alive), my enthusiasm wanes at every new goalpost move to 'improve' the Trainz experience.
The visuals may improve but the creation of content just gets harder and harder as time progresses.
The latest being the 'improvement' to scripts. The new revisions don't provide backward compatabilty so old scripts have to be updated, I have fixed some simple scripts but I have no chance of fixing encrypted scripts. I believe that the CRG now has a huge in-tray of broken scripts to repair.

While we are on the subject of textures, N3V updated a lot of older textures to 'PBR' type without any warning and obsoleted older sets, so if you had ported an older route in to 4.6 you were faced with faulty textures with no easy fix, same for the new passenger set, updated with no warning and no backward compatibility and older sets obsoleted.

Another creator of unique content is winding up..https://forums.auran.com/trainz/sho...one-want-anything-Irish&p=1948958#post1948958

The Germans have a great compound word for it... Schlimmbesserung, meaning, to make things worse through an effort to improve.

Cheers,
Graham

I have seen this since I started with TRZ17 and often wondered why anyone would possibly use these textures. And now I am up to 22+ and still see a LOT of these textures and still wonder the same thing. I see comments on how to fix them, but I have NO idea what you are talking about.

I don't know if this is causing the same problem, but I'll click on a dark brown dirt and when I put it on the layout it is actually almost white in color. Same deal?

All I can say is it isn't your computer or video card, or even how you have some of your settings set. A while back N3V changed a lot of it's internal code and this made a great deal of textures go "wonky." Some ended up with the ghosted squares, some just went blindingly white (or any other color they happened to be). As for the brightness, you can safely open the content up in Explorer, import the texture file (BMP/TGA/JPG) to editing software, lower the brightness, and submit the content from editing. In some cases I've had to lower it right down to where it is hard to make out details, yet the Trainz machine manages to load it and display at "normal" brightness. Note that the does NOT alter it anywhere outside your game. If you create a route and use the altered texture, others will see the bright version.

Bill

This is just my opinion and is based upon my memory which sadly is not what it used to be. That said, let's take a walk down memory lane.

Trainz is suppose to allow old content to work if it meets the rules in place for its version number. For example, textures at version 2.4 should work as designed in the latest and greatest version of Trainz as long as they are compliant with the rules for Trainz build 2.4. This was in fact the bug that I reported and was fixed in an early version of TRS19. It was not rendering 2.4 textures properly even though they verified as without error in CM. Instead a checkerboard pattern would render. And yes, adding a normal map to the texture caused them to render correctly but required the build number to be raised to at least 2.9 as that was the first version to support the tags for normal maps. I believe it was Trainz build 3.5 introduced in TS12 that began to throw an error if the normal map was missing from a ground texture.

Now a properly made normal map for a ground texture should be a 32 bit image as the alpha channel controls the "shininess" of the texture. I've always used a nearly black alpha channel as most ground textures don't need to be shiny. But when the DLS started requiring uploads to be at least Trainz build 3.5, some users took shortcuts by adding the normal map tag but pointing it to just an all black image. This allows the asset to validate and even works correctly in TS12 and TANE but produces the glowing textures in TRS19 and above.

The normal map I'm using now (with build 4.5 as per Graham's info) is a light-blu(ish) color. Seems to work well for me.

Bill