Cargo & Industry fixes for 1.06

[sbaros]

A practical use of the above in the case of closed wagons can be the creation of small fittings, which will utilise textures from the general Cargomodels bitmap and enable carried loads to be identified from far away, instead of or in addition to the cargoicon stickers on the car sides.

After much experimentation today, I concluded that Cargomodels & cargoicons are mutually exclusive, no car type can have both. Has anyone managed to combine both on the same car?
On the postitive side, after more that a year of postponing, I came to tackle 2 annoying visual handicaps.

1. The early blue boxcars of Trainmaster didn't seem to bear any markings based on their load, such as other cars. Today I did some digging in "Trainmaster_Boxcars.PK4" with Watto Extractor and realised the absense of any "Box_BlueA_CargoIcon1.3dp" file.
2. The notorious "Produce" sticker that levitates outside the early yellow refrigerator cars. I wonder why it was left that way all these years despite the obviousness of the bug.

I am uploading my corrective proposals here to be unzipped in the ...\Data\UserExtraContent location.

[Gumboots]

After much experimentation today, I concluded that Cargomodels & cargoicons are mutually exclusive, no car type can have both. Has anyone managed to combine both on the same car?

I have not tried, or not that I can remember, but offhand I can't see why it could not be done. I'll experiment a bit.

[sbaros]

Also, cargoicons can be shifted freely around the car-body through the relative X, Y and Z offsets preceding the "INST" statement in their 3DP file, while Cargomodels have a fixed position on the car-body, with X, Y and Z offsets making no difference.
As to "why it could not be done", I don't have a reasonable answer, but I have a long list of things/modifications in RR Tycoon that should be possible, yet the programmers have decided to make impossible.

[Gumboots]

Also, cargoicons can be shifted freely around the car-body through the relative X, Y and Z offsets preceding the "INST" statement in their 3DP file...

Yes, that has been known for years.

...while Cargomodels have a fixed position on the car-body, with X, Y and Z offsets making no difference.
As to "why it could not be done", I don't have a reasonable answer...

Probably because the cargo models were only ever intended to be centred over single cars (cargo models do not work at all on double cars) so on that basis there's no point in allowing a shift via the basic origin point.

However, you can move cargo models around by directly editing the mesh and re-compiling the .3dp from scratch. I've done that on several occasions.

[Gumboots]

After much experimentation today, I concluded that Cargomodels & cargoicons are mutually exclusive, no car type can have both. Has anyone managed to combine both on the same car?

I just recalled something about this. Yes, you are right that you can't have both, because the byte that decides if a cargo model should be called is the same byte that decides if a cargo icon should be called. So, cargo models and cargo icons are mutually exclusive,

See: viewtopic.php?p=46231#p46231

The only way of getting a "cargo model" combined with a cargo icon would be to do the "cargo model" as part of that car's body/truck .3dp, which is what I did for my double open hoppers.

[sbaros]

Actually, I see no practical point in the whole "Cargomodels" concept, once empty car movements are not simulated at all in the program. All visible loads could have been incorporated in the car model itself, while defining separate car types, such as "log flatcar", "steel flatcar", "lumber flatcar" etc. Resource usage would be more or less the same, wouldn't it?

[Gumboots]

Resource usage would have been higher, because you would have more files to deal with. Bear in mind that RT3 was originally coded to run on an early Pentium, and that at the time a 256 meg graphics card was hot stuff. These days it probably doesn't matter.

[sbaros]

During rendering, does it make any difference whether the 3D model is all in a single 3dp file or split among multiple files, once the total number of vertices is the same?

[Gumboots]

I wouldn't think the difference would be significant. In theory it must make some difference, simply because of the need to call another file or two, but I think we'd be talking milliseconds.