Odds And Ends Are Us! Discuss them Here!

[slider38]

I have posted a 5-sided cube containing a set of 4 rungs in the "Odds and Ends" section of the BB forum. I am working on a boxcar that uses rungs rather than ladders. I started out making the individual rungs but found the amount of "weight" on the traincar to be more than I really wanted. I stripped everything out of the traincar in Blender except for one set of rungs and using screenshots of those rungs, put together a 5-sided cube of the rungs. This image contains one set of rungs and one rung cube. I can't tell the difference.

Rungs_vs_cube.jpg

Each of my rungs contained 35 vertices, 140 for a set of 4 rungs and a whole lot of faces. The 4 sets of rungs, one on each corner of the boxcar, equals 560 vertices. The rung cube does it with 32 vertices for all 4 corners of the boxcar.

I thought someone else might find this helpful. Some traincars just don't look quite right with ladders when they actually need rungs. The rung cube can be added through NifSkope, or you can copy them to another diff file for the car you are working on. You would then need to make the appropriate adjustments to your alpha and adjust the uv map.

[slider38]

I have updated the "Short Trucks" BB posting. I realized this morning that it would have been nice to include the dummies files which I already had. If someone wants to use these trucks as positioned, it saves them the time to create the dummies. That said, anyone creating a car that needs these will probably end up re-positioning the trucks which will require adjustments to the dummies files, but perhaps they will be useful in some situations.

[snoopy55]

Back in 2008 Tijer and I discussed putting real looking corn fields in the game. Unfortunately, the game creates the grain fields using a single DDS in \2K Games\Firaxis Games\Sid Meier's Railroads!\Assets\Terrain\Shaders\Grain called Grain_shader_01.dds. It is called by the code of the game and is nowhere in the XML codes. This means that if you want to use it to create something different, all you can do is change the appearance of the Grain Fields. Well, we eventually came up with this:

Cornfields on farm.jpg

We had a few to celebrate, and forgot about it......

It can now be downloaded here: viewtopic.php?p=11337#p11337 and any map that calls for Corn only and not Grain can use it simply by adding it to the map folder.

I did play with a few other crops and will search them out and see what I had.

[snoopy55]

Slider, you brought up the steam smoke in the tunnels, or lack there of........

Have you taken one of your maps with a tunnel, and then did an alpha on the landscape above it to see if the smoke actually DOES stop, or if it is just being hid by the landscape itself? I seem to remember the smoke showing, as the engine entered the tunnel and/or left the tunnel, puffing out the landscape.

In the BB_Old_Wood_Tunnel there is a line <iFade>2</iFade> which I don't find explained in the <!-- section. Do you know what this is, and if not, could it have something to do with it?



Darn you, now you got me bugged............

[slider38]

Hi Snoopy, I will have to look into those two issues and see what I find. Thanks for posting that info. Hope you year gets off to a good start.

[slider38]

I looked at the tunnel xml and found the fade line you were referencing. I'm pretty sure that that relates to the fade of the sound as the train enters the tunnel. I don't think that has anything to do with the smoke from the engine. I looked at the tunnel diff file but I find nothing that would make the smoke disappear when the train enters the tunnel. I just don't think the game designers ever conceived of someone doing anything like this. I don't know. I am going back to testing of the current map. I will work more on this covered bridge down the line.

[StripyDonkey]

I looked at the tunnel xml and found the fade line you were referencing. I'm pretty sure that that relates to the fade of the sound as the train enters the tunnel. I don't think that has anything to do with the smoke from the engine. I looked at the tunnel diff file but I find nothing that would make the smoke disappear when the train enters the tunnel. I just don't think the game designers ever conceived of someone doing anything like this. I don't know. I am going back to testing of the current map. I will work more on this covered bridge down the line.

I can't help with the problem, but I just wanted to say that I'm excited to try the bridge out. Thank you for putting it together!