Railworks America

I wonder if you Mike Simpson (re: TSTools) or anyone else can make any suggestions on this . . .

The American EMD Norfolk Southern SD60E addon has ridiculously large texture files, including _nm, _nmc (incorrectly), and _normal files. Each is a completely unnecessary 84MB in size, so the basic (single livery) pack is almost 1/2 Gigabyte, and the Marketplace extra livery pack is over 2GB (for three liveries!)

I have experience in reducing overweight texture files, but I can't do it here because when I try to load these TgPcDx files into TSTools, I get an Out of Memory error. It does allow me to view the image, but because the code doesn't load on the screen, I can't save it as a .dds. I am also wanting to patch the 6963 GoRail variant with the correct logos, but again can't get into the file in the first place.

Any thoughts on either getting TSTools to accept the large file(s), or some other way to access them to convert to .dds?

(I have also posted this in the UKTS forum)

Chris

I open 4096x4096 files all the time with RSBinTools export and then open them with DXTBmp to work on them in Paint.Net. I agree these are ridiculously large. No idea why. I just tested and while it took a while it did work. They are 4096x4096 as I suspected.

Are you planning on changing them to DXT5?

Hi Buzz, I haven't used RSBinTools as I've always been happy with TSTools (and its predecessor RW_Tools), but I'll give it a go.

I will use whatever coding (is that the term?) they are already in, but reduce the dimensions to 2048x2048 or even 1024x1024. I have done it with others (in fact AP did it on some of their own textures a couple of years back to reduce the drag on memory on some heavy routes)

More experimenting required!

Just a FYI I think I repeat I think if you find a 4096x4096 in 5DXT to use as a template re-name it whatever the 32bpp ARGB and then save the huge one as a 5DXT DDS and re-import it the file will go from 82mil down to 21 mil and still work OK. You can do the same thing of course using the 2048x2048 template. Is the nmc one already in some other format than 32bpp ARGB?

Yep, that's what I do - I have a "library" of various dimensions and formats, so that I can "save over" them with the revised new dds.

My only problem here (and right at the start!) is that my regular tool, TSTools, won't handle the file size without an Out of Memory error - first time I've had that, but also the first time I have seen texture files of 84MB each!

I'm sure the _nm, _nms, and _normals are all completely uncompressed, because they are all the same enormous size.