Duke skin + a little help requested

[fairline4]

I've made a new skin for the Duke 4-4-0 in the livery of late 19th century outside-framed locos of the British Great Western Railway, and it seems to work OK in-game.




However, the Duke now suffers from the infamous night-time 'glow in the dark' problem associated with poor size-reduction of the alpha-channel by the TrainSkin tool. I think I've got round this by making a series of 5 progressively 50% size-reduced TGA's with max-contrast alpha-channels, as suggested elsewhere by Bombardiere and others. I now need to pack these into my new Duke skin pk4 file, in place of the DDS's made by trainskin.exe; problem is I have no idea how to make pack4.exe do this. Can someone explain how to work pack4 please, or suggest an alternative pk4 packer?

[JoshM]

I have the .dds plugin for Photoshop which is the easiest way to edit the dds mipmaps separately.
It helps to unpack the original pk4 file with "RT3 PK4.exe" or Pjay's unpacker, I still don't remember where I got RT3PK4.exe from though.


Trainskin.exe takes the *.tga files and converts them to *.dds mipmaps, then makes a *.dsc file and *.imb files and packs it all into a pk4 file.

The *.dsc file will link the skin pk4 to the locomotive pk4 as an alternate skin.
The *.imb files will link the profile and beauty shot files in the alternate skin.

Make a new folder with:
pack4.exe
the files to be packed
a .txt list of the filenames you want to pack.



For skin pk4s include a .dsc file which is a text file with this information:

"trainskin"
name of the pk4 file you are creating
name of the *.lco file
name of the profile *.imb file
name of the loco skin *.dds files
name of the beauty shot *.imb file
name of the tender skin *.dds files




Then Start>Run and type "cmd" and click OK
>cd C:\New Folder
C:\New Folder>pack4 "filelist.txt"

This will create a pk4 file of the files listed in the filelist text file.





Example list.txt


GP_35_CON.dsc
GP35_BeautyShot.imb
GP35_Profile_conrail.imb
GP35_Loco_conrail_A.dds
GP35_Loco_conrail_B.dds
GP35_Loco_conrail_C.dds
GP35_Loco_conrail_D.dds
GP35_Loco_conrail_E.dds
GP35_BeautyShot_A.dds
GP35_BeautyShot_B.dds
GP35_BeautyShot_C.dds
GP35_Profile_conrail_A.dds




Example GP_35_CON.dsc


trainskin
GP_35_CON
GP35l
GP35_Profile_conrail
GP35_Loco_conrail
GP35_BeautyShot
GP35_Loco_conrail

[fairline4]

Thanks very much Josh - that was an excellent guide and I've used it to create new pk4 files for reskinned Duke and Stirling in Great Westrn Railway colours - the latter is a passable double for a GWR Rover Class or Dean Single.




I use PSP7 and 8 and find the NVidia DDS plugin doesn't work as well as it does with Photoshop. I therefore work in TGA format and use DDS Converter 2 to create DDS files. Now that I've cleaned up the alpha transparency channels I've sorted the 'glow-in-the-dark problem and removed residual pixels I was getting around transparency I'd added to cab and roof; the skin works well in-game now. Also figured out that including all the individual loco and tender DDS's as well as the pk4 in userextracontent allowed me to use recoloured wheels on my locos.

Next step is to upload the Duke and stirling to the downloads folder! I may make a set of GWR coaches and a GWR Great Bear pacific to accompany these.

Thanks again for your help :)

[bombardiere]

Look great! Even though I am firmly Southern man.

[fairline4]

Look great! Even though I am firmly Southern man.

Thanks - I'd thought you were an LMS or LNER man from all those fine pacifics you made. How come there's no SR Bulleid Pacific amongst your meisterwerks?

[bombardiere]

You caught me there. I am reborn Southern man. In fact I am a NetworkSouthEast man. uuuuufffff. I guess I have spent too much time at signal failure outside of London Bridge in a Networker… I have played recently with toy trains, and Southern is my region. Especially new Dapol’s Q1 is fun. If only I could model this 0-6-0 goods engine to RRT3.

Pacifics!!! You really must refer those 4-6-2 skins I made a thousand years ago. I have learned so much since then…

Bulleid Pacific!!! Well, you know the problem. So hard to find proper models. Closest could be French mountain, with new set of wheel. No point to make rebuild Merchant Navy. It is streamlined or nothing.

It is easier to make American engines, because there are so much better 3D models available. Especially there are no good bodies for big European 4-6-0. Saint or Stanier’s Black 5.

[fairline4]

You caught me there. I am reborn Southern man. In fact I am a NetworkSouthEast man. uuuuufffff. I guess I have spent too much time at signal failure outside of London Bridge in a Networker… I have played recently with toy trains, and Southern is my region. Especially new Dapol’s Q1 is fun. If only I could model this 0-6-0 goods engine to RRT3.

Being a London commuter is surely enough to put anyone off trains for life :)

Bulleid Pacific!!! Well, you know the problem. So hard to find proper models. Closest could be French mountain, with new set of wheel. No point to make rebuild Merchant Navy. It is streamlined or nothing.

It is easier to make American engines, because there are so much better 3D models available. Especially there are no good bodies for big European 4-6-0. Saint or Stanier’s Black 5.

I agree, it would have to be a streamlined Bulleid, although I guess it would be easy enough to represent a 'naked' one with the models available. PopTop let us down with Brit models post-1870....

[Gumboots]

Hey the pix of these skins are offline now. Did anyone save them to desktop when they were available? They were very cool, and it'd be nice to make new ones now that we have the tools available to make skinning fairly painless.

[Gumboots]

Thanks very much Josh - that was an excellent guide and I've used it to create new pk4 files for reskinned Duke and Stirling in Great Westrn Railway colours - the latter is a passable double for a GWR Rover Class or Dean Single.




I use PSP7 and 8 and find the NVidia DDS plugin doesn't work as well as it does with Photoshop. I therefore work in TGA format and use DDS Converter 2 to create DDS files. Now that I've cleaned up the alpha transparency channels I've sorted the 'glow-in-the-dark problem and removed residual pixels I was getting around transparency I'd added to cab and roof; the skin works well in-game now. Also figured out that including all the individual loco and tender DDS's as well as the pk4 in userextracontent allowed me to use recoloured wheels on my locos.

Next step is to upload the Duke and stirling to the downloads folder! I may make a set of GWR coaches and a GWR Great Bear pacific to accompany these.

Thanks again for your help :)

Bit of an old topic, but I've figured out what was going on here.

The way the game engine is set up, any files packed into a later PK4 (like a skin for an existing loco) will not override any files packed into an earlier PK4 (the existing loco stuff). To get files later in the chain to override earlier files, the later files have to be loose. This applies to all game assets, not just locomotives. Loco skins are a special case because they set up code to allow an override by a PK4, but they forgot to write the code so it would apply to trucks and wheels and other stuff as well as applying to the body. This is why you can't get recoloured wheels with a PK4, and why fairline4 got them with loose files.

Unfortunately I have no idea how to get around the bug with recoloured wheels not showing until after a game is saved and reloaded. I suspect we are stuck with that one.

Anyway, I ran my own tests and got the coloured wheels working. For some obscure RT3 reason it is necessary to have all the skin stuff packed into a PK4, plus the loose DDS skin images, to get it working. I tested other options:

1/ all files loose - didn't work.

2/ .dsc, profile.imb, profile icon in PK4, all DDS skin images loose - didn't work either.

3/ all skin stuff in PK4, plus all loco and tender DDS images loose - yup, that works.

The profile icon can just be in the PK4. That one doesn't need to be loose as well. It's only loco and tender images that map to the .3dp's that must have loose duplicates.

I haven't tested it yet, but I suspect this dodge will allow recolouring trucks too. That would be necessary if wanting to do multiple skins for Garratts, since the front and rear units for Garratts have to be done as trucks. It should also work for connecting rods, etc, although I haven't tested that yet either.

Anyway proof of concept shot, with green wheels on a green Berkshire.