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"Night textures for trains?"

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Smokewraith (51 posts)
Mar-19-02, 11:02 PM (EST) "Night textures for trains?" LAST EDITED ON Mar-19-02 AT 11:14 PM (EST)Ok, I had what I thought was a brainstorm that has somehow turned into a drizzle. What I tried to do was try to make some night textures for a Loco, a la the same way you would for an object. I used the default GP38 as my guinea pig, redid the textures, changed the .sd file, I even went so far as to create Night and Snow folders within the GP38 folder. So I load up the sim, set the time to midnight, no go. Any thoughts as to whether what I'm attempting is feasible?
Bill
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Subject Author Message Date ID RE: Night textures for trains? troub Mar-20-02 1 RE: Night textures for trains? Smokewraith Mar-20-02 2 RE: Night textures for trains? troub Mar-20-02 3

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troub (310 posts)
Mar-20-02, 02:18 PM (EST) 1. "RE: Night textures for trains?" I don't think it works the same for locos and rolling stock, to add alternate textures (which includes night, snow, etc.). There was a lot of discussion about this early on, mainly for adding snow textures, but I don't think anybody really got it to work (otherwise I'm sure we'd see lots of rolling stock with appropriate snow on it).I also noticed that it apparently doesn't work right for the automobiles that use the car spawners. We've all noticed that none of the cars have headlights at night, right? Well, a lot of them do have some nice-looking alternative night textures, which you can see if you just place the car as a scenery object, ie for parked cars. But, the same cars, when travelling along the car spawner paths, don't utilize those alternate textures. The car spawner paths, by the way, are set up in a very similar way to the track and train paths. Coincidence?troub
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Smokewraith (51 posts)
Mar-20-02, 05:16 PM (EST) 2. "RE: Night textures for trains?" Coincidence, I think not. It seems to be just another stumbling block MS and KUJU threw in. It's a shame too, I mean imagine not having to trouble yourself with placing lights in an engine file to make a numberboard appear to light up at night etc. They really used some bizarre thinking when they designed this program, Just looking at all the custom things people have created to make this sim better, it's like they didn't see the potential that this thing had. Just my opinion though...Bill
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troub (310 posts)
Mar-20-02, 07:50 PM (EST) 3. "RE: Night textures for trains?" LAST EDITED ON Mar-20-02 AT 07:53 PM (EST)I agree, it's no coincidence. I don't think lack of foresight was the problem, though. . . I would appear from the existence of these alternate textures for the cars, that it was intended to work, but for some reason didn't--and due to their deadlines they didn't get around to fixing it.Like many things, there is a workaround, but it has to be done to the model. I had this idea several months ago, but never had the time to implement it. I think others have used it, though, but not many. Basically, when you texture your model, you can set material properties for the face(s) you're texturing, describing how they should react to things like light. You can have faces that are lit realistically (which you want most of the time), or you can have faces that are "bright," or lit, ALL the time, even if it's dark. If one would make some vehicle models with these always bright faces for the headlights and taillights, I think it would provide a decent effect. From screenshots I've seen, I think the (3DTrainStuff?) SD70M appears to use this technique for the numberboards, and I think some use it to "light" the computer displays in their models' cabs.troub
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