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Hi Sniper,Thought I would fiddle with your PO&N 6 beta a bit - I have set it up with separate .env files for each season/weather type, giving it 12 in all (not the 3 default ones which MSTS gives, however the .trk file allows for the full set).This way, I can change the water textures depending on the cloud cover, i.e. blue sky/blue water - grey sky/darker water.
Yeah, I heard somebody was screwing around with that. Same thing had occured to me after I first discovered where the envfiles were referenced from, and I recently noticed the JP2wier.s has a snow texture. Never really occured to me to look at it, I put that waterfall over by Chippewa Falls way back in V4, I think, and the JP2Wier2.s is ESD 0, so I just assumed the JP2Wier.s (the bigger one, by Tinkers Dam) would be the same.Nope, it's ESD 1. So I considered hacking a custom snow.env and making a snow watermid.ace to make the tex match the wier, but then I'd have to include that ace file and hack the JP2wier2.sd for ESD 1 also. And as much as I hate snow, it ain't worth the effort to me! You really wouldn't need to make 36 ace files total for the water tho, I found the watermid.ace has the biggest effect on changing the appearance, watertop.ace is nearly transparent and waterbot.ace don't do much more than add shading. So for 4 seasons/3 weathers you'd need 12 .env files and 12 watermid.ace, plus the default watertop & waterbot ace files. PO&N is a bit different because of the aforementioned wiers, I could clone the shapes, change the SD files to ESD 252 and give them seasonal textures, but that don't cover rain. That's another thing they missed, regular and snow \terrtex, what about rain? Ground looks different when it's wet, and especially pavement & concrete, pools and puddles oh my!If you want to go really crazy, since the .trk file gives you 12 choices of envfiles, you could even make different sky textures for different seasons, and increase the wind for heavy rain/snow driven almost horizontally for the winter. Kinda like sky conductor, only different fixed sky textures, wind velocity, and precipitation volume for each season. Hee-hee, still need dynamic weather tho, kinda monotonous to start out with rain and have everything remain exactly the same all the way thru the activity. For MSTS 5, we demand starting with early morning spring snow, changing to sleet then rain, and clearing with occasional drizzle, solid overcast changing to broken with bright sun peeking thru, melting snow turning to icy slush & puddles on the terrtex. Ah, well, we can dream, can't we?!
Hi Jim,Yep, I have been fiddling with different sky for different seasons, problem is there are so many different variables in the .env files, it takes a long time to set up anything meaningful.However I have managed several different water textures. As you say, you do not need all the possible permutations, e.g. Spring and Autumn can be identical, and water in the rain/snow files can also be identical. Of course some people would have to go and put waterfalls and wiers in their routes just to make things even more difficult! I have however got a nice .sms file which includes thunder, sounds good on wet days. Unfortunately, until we get dynamic weather, lightning is not possible (I think?).Michael Vone has been doing a fair bit of environment work which will be in his new Route Building Guide once it is released. I will have a look in that once I can get my hands on it.Anyway, I am most impressed with PO&N v6, just shows what you can squeeze into 7 megs or so, more detail than some routes with 100 megs . Also like your repainted Locos, the dirty one is very well done, I never like clean Locos, you never ever see them in that condition unless you live next to the loco sheds.
THAT'S who it was, I knew it was somebody named Mike. Yeah, I was screwing around with a sci-fi route until I lost it (worst trouble with multiple backups on different disks is you tend to delete "extra" backups here and there since you know there are other copies somewhere else, until there ain't any more somewhere else!), and playing around with the environments. Basically backing the stuff up and screwing with wind speed and UVscroll, and botching up the hacking on an .env file is how I finally discovered what that cryptic "Train World Initialization Failed" error message meant, missing/corrupt envfiles.But that's what Jak started, there's a whole bunch of stuff that's not enabled in the env files, since MSTS was rushed out the door to meet the deadline. Want some fun, open the \Global\camcfg.dat file in wordpad, take a gander at some of the programmer's notes, remarks and questions that were left in the code!I forget where I saw it, but the watermid has a line; world_anim_shader_frame_uvscroll ( 0 -0.008 )I think the second number was speed, the first number is direction. Mostly you end up poking around and trying different numbers, for the water the easiest way is to hack the editor.env and look at the effects in there, then copy over to sun.env or whatever when it looks right.As far as the engines, I was fiddling with another theory I heard about using non-player driveable engines for AI trains, from what I hear one of the payware routes used some cloned .eng files with no cabview or sound folders, the theory being it's easier on the framerates that way. So I've been working off & on to make an activity that uses only the non-driveable SD40s as AI traffic to see what that does, and the @#%&*#! activity editor keeps getting hiccups and generating 20 clones of the same service & starting time. So after playing with the 1.2 patch SD40-2s for awhile, I took a break from the @#%&*#! editors and dabbled with some skinning. I like greasy/rusty/dirty too, on this one I decided to leave one like it was brand new so it would contrast more. That 3 engines in one folder was my first attempt at doing anything like that, and I could add updates using the same folder, or even reskin to change only the numbers, cloning the 1953.s file, for example, so it would use the same 2 textures without the number and only use a different one for the single ace file that contains the number. You couldn't do different weathering that way, but you could have ab assortment of road numbers sharing other skins.
Hi Jim,Thanks for that info on the water.Just regarding the non-player drivable engines, I have added a button to Route-Riter, whereby if you select an .eng file, say Scotsman.eng, it makes a copy named #Scotsman.eng and makes the changes internally such as removing the cabview, and some of the sounds. Thus giving you the non-drivable locomotives you are after without having to do anything except press a couple of buttons.Another new item is an 'Improve Snow' button, this does the same thing as Ron Paludan's 'Heavy Snow' batch files for the default routes, however with this one, you just select a route and click a button and it does the magic for the whole route, makes everywhere look just like Chicago.Oh well, back to the treadmill....
Nope, it's ESD 1. So I considered hacking a custom snow.env and making a snow watermid.ace to make the tex match the wier, but then I'd have to include that ace file and hack the JP2wier2.sd for ESD 1 also. And as much as I hate snow, it ain't worth the effort to me! You really wouldn't need to make 36 ace files total for the water tho, I found the watermid.ace has the biggest effect on changing the appearance, watertop.ace is nearly transparent and waterbot.ace don't do much more than add shading. So for 4 seasons/3 weathers you'd need 12 .env files and 12 watermid.ace, plus the default watertop & waterbot ace files. PO&N is a bit different because of the aforementioned wiers, I could clone the shapes, change the SD files to ESD 252 and give them seasonal textures, but that don't cover rain. That's another thing they missed, regular and snow \terrtex, what about rain? Ground looks different when it's wet, and especially pavement & concrete, pools and puddles oh my!If you want to go really crazy, since the .trk file gives you 12 choices of envfiles, you could even make different sky textures for different seasons, and increase the wind for heavy rain/snow driven almost horizontally for the winter. Kinda like sky conductor, only different fixed sky textures, wind velocity, and precipitation volume for each season.