Cargo weight revamping

[Gumboots]

Ok, I'm starting with autoracks just because they're sitting at the top of the folder in alphabetical order. Have got the E era (post-1990) one done. All meshed and skinned like it should be. This is going to be a bit of an experiment because of its size. It's done to the same scale I usually work at (10" = 1 RT3 unit) and they're 90 feet over the strikers (equal to 108 RT3 units). Wheelbase is only 71'6" to the outer bogies though, which translates to 85.8 RT3 units. That's well under the practical wheelbase limit of around 100 units. So overall length is kinda huge, but wheelbase is quite reasonable. They'll look awesome on level track but may be a bit wild over very lumpy track. Only one way to find out.

And yes, they are coming with graffiti for the test pack. If you don't like graffiti you're welcome to play with the PSD yourself.

[Gumboots]

Just tried them in the game. They're surprisingly well-behaved. They'll jump a bit over really lumpy track, but generally just trundle along nicely like they ought to, and look a heck of a lot better than the default autoracks.

I've attached a basic test pack which uses this model as the only car for Automobiles. So yup, modern tri-level racks start in 1910. Just for the moment while I get the older ones together. Give them a whirl and see what you think.

Zip removed. See this thread for the finished product: Autoracks, and similar vehicular beasties

[Gumboots]

Ok, got the other four types figured out. These are more or less historically correct for the US and Canada.

The A and B era boxcars are the right dimensions for their time. The A is a 40 foot AAR box (early wood version) and the B is a late 1920's Pacific Car & Foundry 50 foot auto boxcar. The current skins are just a quick mashup of the default BoxC, and the mesh a still basically default BoxC too, so both can be improved later. For example, the 50 footer should really have an arc roof rather than a straight pitch, but it's ok for a temporary test pack.

The C era car is a Canadian 75 footer from the mid-1950's, and can be improved later too. The current skin was reworked from a grainy old .jpg, with bits of default boxcar skin thrown at it. Making a complete skin from scratch will be pretty easy (mostly just solid colour, lines of rivets, lettering, and a bit of grunge) but it's not happening this month.

The D is a mashup of the old default AutoA. The skin is still as cruddy as ever, but I've upped the number of jalopies to 12 and boosted their size to around what a real smallish car would be. So flatcar size is up around the 89 foot mark now, which is what the old open racks ran on. Really this should have 1970's cars on it if anyone can be bothered making them.

And the E is the one in the previous post, of course.

So these just need some final checking, then can be exported and packed. Should have them ready in a day or two. Then I can get onto the next thing down the list: boxcars.

Edit: See this thread for the finished product: Autoracks, and similar vehicular beasties

[Gumboots]

Have had a think about the boxcar series. I can do all sorts of things, and might do eventually, but at this stage I think it's best to keep things simple and only have one type of boxcar per era. That effectively rules out the famous 86 footers, since while a few running around would be fun it wouldn't look right to have all boxcar cargo in them. What's needed are models that were more or less normal for their time, and that make a good-looking progression in the game, so what I've settled on is this:

A era - 1800 to 1839: The default PopTop boxA shopping trolley, but done as doubles. Their length is right for the period (about 10' to scale) but singles just aren't enough fun and the doubles are a no-brainer to make. That'll bring them up to a visual size which feeds smoothly into the next era.

B era - 1840 to 1864: A generic 25' boxcar of the period, running on solid (no springs) timber beam trucks.

C era - 1865 to 1889: A 28' PRR Class XA, on archbar trucks.

D era - 1890 to 1914: A 36' NYC boxcar of the period (don't know the class offhand).

E era - 1915 to 1939: The ubiquitous AAR 40' woodie.

F era - 1940 to 1964: The AAR 50' steel car. It came in not long after the 1937 40' steel car, so might as well go straight to 50.

G era - 1965 to 1989: 60' hi-cube. Steel, obviously. Edit: Just built that one, since I didn't have it before. Here it is. And yes, it really is to Plate E clearances.

H era - 1990 onwards: What everyone really wants. Double-stacked 53' well cars.

I had an idea for the well car containers too. The civilian cargoes can be normal 53's of course, but I think I'll skin the military cargoes (weapons and ammo) as a double stack of 4 Bicons end to end with 1 Quadcon stuck on each end. That makes up a total of 50', is just about as easy to skin, and will add some extra visual interest. I've never seen a well car stacked like that but it's possible in principle (Bicons and Quadcons were designed for this sort of thing) and the military use a lot of Bicons and Quadcons to ship stuff all over the place, largely because they're easier to handle in-theatre than standard ISO containers.

So that's the plan. I have it about half done at the moment. Now that it's decided, I'll get onto the other half.

[Gumboots]

Boxcar packing is underway. The A era is all I have time for this morning, but will knock off the B era (and possibly the C as well) tonight.

A era - 1800 to 1839: The default PopTop boxA shopping trolley, done as doubles, and with decent axle hangers nicked from the PopTop A era pax skin.

So that consist is 7 boxcars and a caboose. Car weight is 5 tons, the same as the default freight cars of that time.

Edit: Got the B's done. Not doubles. Back to single cars. So these are 1840 to 1864, at 6.5 tons each.

And the A era* Ammunition and Weapons boxcars.

*(because weapons and ammo don't exist before 1840 anyway, so their A era is everyone else's B era)

[Gumboots]

Oh I had a very strange thing happen yesterday when doing the Ammunition cars. It reminded me of something Bomber said over in the "Locomotive Fixes for 1.06" thread.

I did some experiment with X Y Z coordinates, and in this forum should be a hilarious picture of a main wheel doing large circles around the loco, but I never was able to set it right.

What happened yesterday was I had exported the basic B era boxcar and tested that with all boxcar cargoes. No problem. Then I did the Weapons and Ammunition cars, which are identical except for the skins and use exactly the same mesh for all components. The Weapons car was fine. The Ammunition car was another matter.

There are eight bogies and eight files for them. There is no file for a ninth bogie, anywhere. It simply doesn't exist. All eight bogies were correct, just like the other cars that shared the same mesh. However RT3's game engine, in its infinite wisdom, had decided that my Ammunition cars really wanted an extra bogie, and promptly invented one. On the right hand side of the car, perfectly positioned for track width, with an axle height of somewhere around 6 feet, and mapped to a section of the skin that no bogies have ever been mapped to.

So ok, I check all the bogie files. They're fine. So then I think: since the bogies on boxcar and weapons are ok I'll copy them into the ammunition folder, delete the old ammunition bogies, rename the good ones I pasted in, and repack that sucker and see what happens. What happened is that it was exactly the same. Still had a magically invented ninth bogie just like before.

Why? No idea. My guess is that it is some obscure game bug that is probably related to the naming of the files, and for some reason #Ammunition makes it go bonkers even though #Boxcar and #Weapons don't. What I've resorted to for the moment is simply using alpha to get rid of that chunk of skin (it wasn't important on the ammo cars anyway) so the magical ninth bogie is still there, but you never see it.

This is obviously not an ideal solution. It works for now, but if the same bug occurs with another car or locomotive in a more critical section of the skin that could be a real problem. What I'm going to do next is pack and test the cars for the next era (C for boxcars, B for weapons and ammo) and see how they behave. If they are all fine, that's means the bogie bug is random AFAICT. If the ammo car is still being funny for the next era, that will tell me it's somehow (don't ask me how) related to the car designation #Ammunition. If that's the case I'll just rename them to #Ammo or something that works.

Edit: C era boxcars are live. No bugs. Will test Ammunition and Weapons cars tonight. Just for the moment the B, C and D era boxcars are sharing the same skin, and are distinguished their different sizes and different trucks. Can get more inventive with skins later.

[Gumboots]

Ran them through. The mystery ninth bogie on the A era Ammunition cars is still a mystery. The next era is fine. B era ammo cars have eight normal bogies just like they're supposed to. Got me beat.

Also tested the GoodsC and WeaponsB cars. No problems with those either. Which is nice. Famous last words and all that.

Will get onto the D era civilian and C era military a bit later.

[Gumboots]

PopTop is being annoying again. This time about archbar trucks. They're not complicated things. In their most basic form, as used in the latter half of the 19th century, they're just a couple of big chunks of wood, a few springs, some bent steel strap, and some bolts. So you might reckon that's what they would have put on the skins. No such luck.

This was ok back when I knew nothing about archbar trucks. I always thought the skin looked kinda weird and wrong, but it didn't bug me much. Now I'm always wondering why the top chord is broken in the middle, and what the stupid round thing on the side is, and why the middle has this thing that looks sorta like a giant threaded rod and a huge iron casting. And no axles, of course, because why would wheels need axles?

And they look equally stupid on all the late 19th century freight cars, of which there are 7 different types and 2 different eras of each. It would only take 1 decent set of trucks to fix the lot. You can see where this is heading. At some point I'm going to have to make my own.

[CeeBee]

So basically we're getting a whole new game.... eventually?

[Gumboots]

It's looking that way. More or less.

Anyway I had a quick play with those trucks. Better already. I think I'm getting the hang of this Blender and Photoshop stuff. I'm almost at the stage where grumbling about things takes longer than fixing them.

[Gumboots]

Meh. Got stuck into revamping the skins for B, C and D boxcars. It was only going to be trucks but while I was at it...

So the old skin was a bit wishy-washy. Also, for the C and D eras it really needed a brake wheel and some lettering and truss rods and a few other things. Not so much for the B era because back then they didn't usually have all that stuff, but it starts to look wrong without it after the 1860's. So C and D will have the extras, with D just being basically a stretched C and much the same skin (will change some lettering just for the heck of it).

The other thing I'm doing with the C and D, and really should do with the B, is splitting out the car sides faces so they aren't actually joined to each other. This means extra verts, but since the UV coordinates are different for the different faces anyway, if I don't do the extra verts myself the graphics card will have to do them anyway (gfx cards invent extra verts when they need to, but it's more work for them). So might as well do them in Blender.

The other advantage is it should get rid of the weird shading that was happening. With the car side faces joined to each other the gfx card tries to shade the whole thing round, which looks wrong now that I run decent shaders that show the effect. You can see it happening back in this earlier shot. That was bugging me, so a fix is the way to go. Only have to fix it once, but will have to look at it a thousand times.

So C/D skin just needs a few more bits of trickery but it just about done. Mesh is done for C, and D will only need slight tweaks to that. E era will be using the default PopTop boxC skin since it's near enough to a USRA single-sheathed car for now. Had that mostly meshed too so that should go quickly. Should have the first five eras of boxcars ready by the weekend, which will allow testing up to 1939. Might leave the last three eras of boxcars alone for now (they need more work) and get onto pushing out hoppers. Or might just go for the complete set of boxcars just because I can and it would be out of the way then. Will see.

And one more thing I'm going to test is renaming the #AmmunitionA cars to see if I can get rid of that mystery ninth bogie. I have a suspicion that it may be tied to the use of the # in the name, even though it doesn't seem to cause problems with other cars. Worth testing anyway. If a simple rename fixes the problem I will probably change the naming system to get rid of the # everywhere, just as insurance.

[Gumboots]

woot! Just gave the renaming of #Ammunition a quick test. I changed it to zAmmunition. It works. Mystery ninth bogie has suddenly vanished and things are back to normal.

Which is useful information. It looks like even though a lot of cars will run just fine with a # prefix, every so often you might hit one that won't. And you won't be able to tell in advance either. Then there's the possibility (unconfirmed, but plausible) that using special characters in the name might cause other random bugs without warning. That's something anyone would definitely prefer to avoid.

So the upshot of it is that all cargo cars are going to get renamed to get rid of # and use a different prefix. That includes the existing caboose, express and autoracks packs. The caboose and express really needed repacking anyway to get rid of the problem of excess mipmaps, so that's an ideal time to rename them. Doing the autoracks is a piece of cake too.

I think I'll stick with a lower case z for the prefix. It will mean that the Zephyr will be in between zElectronics and zFertilizer, but apart from that very minor glitch it'll keep all the custom cargo files together nicely, and it's easy to remember and easy to type.

[Gumboots]

Ok, I think these are just about good enough to keep most of us happy for quite a while. They certainly look a lot more like the real thing than PopTop's version, and are still low on tris. I could throw more mesh at them, but I don't think it's necessary. So all the new freight cars in the 1865-1915 period will be getting these.

[Gumboots]

Threw some bolts n stuff on them. Same mesh. Calling them done now.

Found something out while doing all this skinning too. Using the binary alpha export option with the nVidia/Photshop plugin causes artifacts to be thrown into your alpha channel. It's all nice and binary. That is fine. It's just that small numbers of pixels you wanted transparent may be randomly opaque, which is a real nuisance. It looks like the only way to get a really reliable result is to still check the alpha channel manually like back in the bad old days.

The binary export is still good as a basic export, and won't throw artifacts in areas that you have set as opaque, but it's just not completely reliable.

[Gumboots]

Ha! It's not just the binary export option that throws glitches into the alpha channel. Non-binary export does it too.

What happens is that even if you go over the alpha channel manually and check it everywhere while the file is in PSD form, as soon as you save to DDS there will be small and random patches of grey pixels in the alpha where they should be black. These can be very close to black, and hard to spot, but they will show up as random bits of floating snot lost in space once you apply the skin to the mesh and check it out.

So this was driving me nuts until I figured out what was happening. Fortunately there seems to be a viable workaround. It appears (so far!) that it's the initial process of saving to DDS that causes the problem. Once the file is already saved as DDS it looks like it's ok to open it in Photoshop again and fix the alpha channel, then save it again still as DDS. This doesn't seem to cause problems. The alpha channel stays fixed and the RGB channels don't lose any more image quality.

However if you do more work on your original PSD, and then save that to DDS, you're back to a borked alpha channel again. Looks like the cunning plan is to have a backup of the DDS hanging around just to use the alpha channel, and copy/paste that into the working version after any changes. So work on PSD > save to DDS > alpha borked > open DDS in PS > paste in good alpha from backup DDS > save again > should be ok.

If this gets any worse I'm going to switch to TGA skins.

Anyway the @%!^@& thing is done. No more skinning. Totally over it. Had enough. Even if it looks like crap in the game, I'm still going to use it.

[Gumboots]

Thinking about this some more: I have a suspicion it may be due to old information somehow being "burned in" to the PSD. I've noticed that when saving the PSD to DDS the corruption in the alpha channel always happens in the same places. So possible explanations are:

1/ the PSD is effectively corrupted, with some bytes somewhere storing old information from long-dead layers, which then somehow overrides the current alpha channel when saving to DDS, or...

2/ something about the DDS compression algorithm is somehow cross-referencing information from the RGB pixels to the alpha channel when doing the compression from pixels to texels. IOW, certain colour combinations in your layers may have a feedback effect to the alpha channel.

Based on what I've seen, 1/ seems the most likely. A bit more testing showed that some images seem to save to DDS without problems, and others don't, but at the moment I'm not sure what makes the difference.

The other thing is that nVidia's binary alpha export option definitely seems to be borked. It's supposed to allow you to set a threshold value for grey, with anything one side of the threshold being set to white (fully opaque) and anything the other side of the threshold being set to black (fully transparent). The possible range is 0 to 255, but the catch is that using any value other than 0 will result in the whole alpha channel being set to black.

Which is not exactly what it says on the tin. So yeah, their Photoshop plug-in has at least one serious and consistently repeatable bug. Which makes it not surprising that there would be other bugs, and not necessarily easily repeatable ones either.*

Short version: modding RT3 is still a PITA.


*(Consistently repeatable ones are the best bugs, because they are easier to find workarounds for. Random-appearing bugs are always a nightmare to track down).

[Gumboots]

Ok, this is still on the go. More or less. Time and energy permitting and all that.

Anyway, while playing with the model for the kkStB 108 (that's the express 4-4-2) I wanted to see how it looked with a consist of pax cars. Just because I was playing around and y'know...

...so anyway the default blue pax cars don't look that good, so I tried a few tricks in Photoshop for quick and easy changes, and somehow just nailed it with hardly any effort. I love it when that happens.

Since I have to re-pack the express cars for this new weight scale anyway, due to the DDS's having borked mips in the old pack, I'll do them up with this new livery. It's an easy change and it'll make using them more fun IMO.

[Gumboots]

Ok peeps, I have a bugfix pack for the Caboose revamp. I recommend that you use it.

Release notes:

This pack fixes three known bugs with the previous pack:

1/ Use of the # special character. Testing showed that use of special characters causes problems in RT3, so this pack removes the # in file names everywhere and replaces it with a lowercase x. The lowercase x was chosen because no locomotive or cargo files start with this letter, so it is a handy way of keeping custom cargo car files grouped.

2/ The DDS image files for the previous pack were mistakenly exported with mipmaps. The RT3 game engine does not recognise mipmaps, so they can cause graphics glitches at times. The DDS images for this new pack were exported without mipmaps, so should be free of problems.

3/ The models for B, C and D eras had been exported flat-shaded. The roofs on these models have been fixed to be smooth-shaded.

The weights for the A to G eras have also been changed slightly, after further testing indicated this was a good idea.

New weights are:

A era - 1800 to 1839 - 5.0 tons.
B era - 1840 to 1864 - 6.1 tons.
C era - 1865 to 1889 - 8.4 tons.
D era - 1890 to 1914 - 11.6 tons.
E era - 1915 to 1939 - 17.2 tons.
F era - 1940 to 1964 - 23.9 tons.
G era - 1965 to 1989 - 31.8 tons.
H era - 1990 to 9999 - 0.01 tons (what an EOT weighs).

The cabooses still look the same as the previous pack, and have the same era change years. Only the weights have changed.


I should have an RC3 bugfix for the express revamp pack available soon too.

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Old zip removed. See first post of this topic for the new zip.

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[Gumboots]

I'm using the Pennsy H3 as an incentive to get these @&&#%! freight cars finished. It's a freight hauler, so it needs something tasty to haul. Yes, you will be getting both, and soon. I'm on a roll.

I've nailed down a progession I'm happy (enough*) with for the open and covered hoppers. They flow pretty well for size and style. These are all being done as doubles, from A era right through to H era. Last night I went through those and did all the LOD's, so all 8 eras for both covered and open hoppers are now ready for export.

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The pic shows C, G and H eras. To get around the game limitation of not having cargo icons on trucks the later eras (D, E, F, G and H) will be using the same trick I used on the double well cars, with a fall plate that has handrails that also carry the cargo icons. For the earlier cars, where this style doesn't really fit, I'm using the trick shown on the C era in the attached shot. This places the icons on the inner ends of the trucks (ie: visible hoppers), but still part of the body (ie: drawbar and inner bogies). This means that around tight bends part of the icons will disappear inside the trucks, but most of the time it will look fine.

Since several eras will be built around the same default model and skin, just with different lengths and heights, I'll be using colour coding to make it obvious when there is an era change. So the B era may stay default blue, changing to brown at C era. Then again I don't think the default blue really suits hoppers, especially 19th century ones, so I may drop that colour scheme entirely and use custom ones throughout.

Oh and the open hoppers obviously have the fix mentioned back here, so there won't be any problems with a coal load graphic poking through the other loads, and in 1.06 rock and ore loads will show the base graphic of crushed rock.

*For a basic pack. Detailing can be taken to insane levels later, whenever anyone gets enthused enough.

[Gumboots]

Have decided on the final colour schemes for the covered hoppers. They're gonna look like this.

Was a bit fiddly trying to get something halfway decent out of the default chopA and chopB skins. Those things are pretty gruesome, so I ended up cutting all the framing and planking out to two separate layers so I could fiddle with them individually. Metal parts were on a third layer of course. Turned out ok in the end. By comparison, the default chopC and chopD skins were a piece of cake to work with.

Anyway they all make satisfyingly long consists behind any locomotives of their period, and the H era ones only have a 93.6 unit wheelbase so are still quite manageable. For reference, the G era (silver) ones are made of two default chopD's, and the D era (green) are made of two default chopC. B era is two default B's of course, and no prizes for guessing what the A era is.