Railworks America

G'day, all.

I have been meaning to add more repaints for the MSTS to RW conversion cars in my collection for several years. I searched through my many MSTS car sets in my collection to identify those that match the conversion cars in RW with an eye to bringing them into the game here. It turned out I had a variety of sets created by others from years ago so I started with them and I then started on some original repaints of my own creation as well. But then I let things lapse...and things have been sitting on my workbench for far longer than I planned. After being sidetracked for a long time, I'm once again seeing what I can get into the game.

As an aside, I struggling with alpha channel issues at present. I have correctly set the alpha channels in the DDS textures but when I use RSBin to convert into the RW TgPcDx format the alpha channel is not showing up. If I can solved that problem then I'll be able to share a variety of new schemes with everyone. SO if anyone can advise on how to deal with this little problem, it would be greatly appreciated.

Meanwhile, here's a teaser of the first sets I've gotten to work in RW so far - Starting with Illinois Central "City of New Orleans"...

Even given their age, I think they look rather pleasing.

KevinB

Nice work!

Some C&O equipment...

Some PRR Equipment...

Some Penn Central equipment...

Group shot...

More to come.

I don't understand what you mean by the alpha channel not showing up. Where is it supposed to show up?

None of the textures I used would show having the alpha included when I reviewed them as RW ready.

In the screenshots, you can see that the drumhead CoNO logo shows grey area around the logo. In my original textures..I alpha'd out all but the logo.

But when I used RSBin to convert into RW format, the alpha channel did not come over.

First pic is my textures in DDS and you can see alpha channel

Second pic in same but converted to TgPcDx but no alpha channel.

I'm stumped.

KevinB

buzz456 wrote:I don't understand what you mean by the alpha channel not showing up. Where is it supposed to show up?

Meanwhile, another set successfully added...GN

Just a few experiments...

Oh! Before anyone notices, yes I saw that the small GN logo is backwards. Will have to fix that and a few small other things before these are finished...but hey...this is WIP pics.. ;)

KB

What you confused me about was you said RSBinTool yet what you are showing in the DXTBmp. So the process is to open your bmp file with the DXTBmp then you need to import the alpha from wherever you stored it when you originally opened the dds file. Then you save it as a .dds in whatever compression your original was and then import into the RSBinTool and save it. Is that the procedure you are following? In other words when you open the bmp you need to import the alpha each time before saving it as dds.

Yep...exactly as you describe. Yet when I look at the texture afterwards (and later in the game), the texture does not include the alpha channel. And this is frustrating and has me stumped.

KB

buzz456 wrote:What you confused me about was you said RSBinTool yet what you are showing in the DXTBmp. So the process is to open your bmp file with the DXTBmp then you need to import the alpha from wherever you stored it when you originally opened the dds file. Then you save it as a .dds in whatever compression your original was and then import into the RSBinTool and save it. Is that the procedure you are following? In other words when you open the bmp you need to import the alpha each time before saving it as dds.

Did you create the alpha channel yourself or edit an existing texture?

Harry

hobo1960 wrote:Yep...exactly as you describe. Yet when I look at the texture afterwards (and later in the game), the texture does not include the alpha channel. And this is frustrating and has me stumped.

KB

buzz456 wrote:What you confused me about was you said RSBinTool yet what you are showing in the DXTBmp. So the process is to open your bmp file with the DXTBmp then you need to import the alpha from wherever you stored it when you originally opened the dds file. Then you save it as a .dds in whatever compression your original was and then import into the RSBinTool and save it. Is that the procedure you are following? In other words when you open the bmp you need to import the alpha each time before saving it as dds.

This happens to me too and that's why I quit repainting. there is no reason I can find that it won't save the DDS texture with the Alpha. Even if I open a file and modify nothing and just resave it the alpha was always gone.