Soviet loco skin pack

[sbaros]

The PR committee of the Workshop's Workers'Council has kindly asked me to complete this upload before New Year's Eve, so here it is. I think this is the appropriate topic to make the announcement.

[Gumboots]

You may have upset a few capitalists, comrade. Long live the glorious revolution!
I have grabbed a copy, and will take a look at the contents later.

[Gumboots]

Ok, I pulled it apart and took a look. There seem to be a few issues.

1/ The alpha channels for the skins are blurred, which will give the "glow in the dark" problem at night.
2/ The LV Class PK4 contains beauty shots for the Crampton, skin images for the GP7, and profile files for the Kriegslok.

There is also a bug with underscores in custom file names. They can throw the game for a loop, and it's not predictable. Sometimes it will cause issues, sometimes it won't. It is best to not have any underscores apart from the required one for _A, _B etc, images. See this post and this post for details.

I think this new pack would be better under Rolling Stock. I doesn't belong in Unfinished Maps. Splitting now.

[smith121363]

The PR committee of the Workshop's Workers' Council has reserved a seat for you on the Trans-Siberian Railway for New Years Day. We feel you need a very long vacation.

[Gumboots]

Lol. The bugs are easy to fix. I think he has done the old "use the PopTop skinning tool to generate the skins" thing, which is notorious for screwing alpha channels.

[sbaros]

Is there another reskinning tool than that? The underscores are placed by default by the above tool.

[Gumboots]

Yup. The usual trick with making skins is to either ignore the PopTop skinning tool, or to only use it to generate the basic files you need (ie: the .dsc, etc).

It always screws up the .dds alpha channel, so what you do is make your own .dds by using the defaults for that loco as a starting point. You make your new RGB layer for the A skin, then copy/paste/resize it onto the B, C, etc, images. Flatten the resulting image and save, and you'll have a new skin that looks custom but has the default (not blurred) alpha channel.

Come to think of it: we probably need a new loco building and skinning tutorial.

You can rename the files without underscores yourself. You just have to make sure you get them everywhere they are called, including the file names inside the .imb. To be honest you will probably get away with underscores a lot of the time. The problem is you can't predict when it will cause problems, so I think it's better to get into the habit of not using them. Up to you though. If they seem to be fine when tested, you can take your chances.