Embedding Custom Aircraft Skins in Terrain Appears Broken

[CptTrips]

Steps:

1.  Open AHSkView and select the Dr.1 and saved textures.
2.  Edited one of the textures and simply put a streak of color down each side of fuselage.
3.  Open AHSkView and could see my changes.  That's a good sign.
4.  Copy all the content of the Dr1 skin folder over to my terrain's "texsrc" folder.
5.  Open TE and place a static DR.1 in at a field and viewed it with the TE.  Doesn't have my changes.  Not a good sign. 
6.  Delete the static Dr.1 and do a build.
7. Start game and load terrain. 
8.  Go to hangar and select Dr.1.  Not seeing my changes. Skin set to default.  (I have no other skins so only selection.)
9.  Spawn on runway.  Go to external view.  Not seeing my changes.   


*Note: Repeated the same experiment with a P-51D.  It that case, it at least showed up in the TE, but when I tried to build the terrain the TE crashed at the point the status window was displaying "Adding Custom Textures".  Sadly it does not produce a dmp file in this case.

**Note: Even tried it with P-51D textures without altering them.   Using the exact textures spit out by AhSkView.  TE crash. No dmp file.



A couple of side notes:
 
1.  After the build, in the "Texsrc" folder, I see many of my bmp were converted to htx files like "W1GPILOT.htx" "ARMRGLS.htx" but not my "DR1_1.bmp" or "DR1_2.bmp" or "DR1_3.bmp" .  And I only modified "DR1_1.bmp" so I couldn't have screwed up the others.  Besides, the AHSkView read everything ok.

2.  I've been noticing that all my diffuse bitmaps I've been seeing from exporting from AHSkView or AHObEdit are 24bit RGB instead of 8bit Indexed.  Do object not follow the same rule as the terrain textures?  I tried saving my skin as either 24bit or 8bit and neither worked, but in general I had been curious about seeing RGB bitmaps for objects exported.

Thanks in advance.

,
CptTrips


[edit]  Additional data point.  The terrain build is dumping *.dat# and *.hdr files in to the root terrain folder as well as the "stdshape" folder.  Is it supposed to do that?   I don't know if it is related to the skin problem. 

[Easyscor]

Custom skins are working fine in avaetow for tanks, planes, country flags, and the clock. See reply to your post in the TE forum.

[CptTrips]

Custom skins are working fine in avaetow for tanks, planes, country flags, and the clock. See reply to your post in the TE forum.

It works for me for flags.  I am not doing tanks.  Aircraft have not functioned. 

[CptTrips]

Custom skins are working fine in avaetow for tanks, planes, country flags, and the clock. See reply to your post in the TE forum.

Is that a new terrain or something done some time ago?  Maybe it is something that has broken since that terrain was made?

Here is a simple test:

[hitech]

Look in the stdshape folder. Did the TE create them in that folder? Don't try move them there but when the TE opens the terrain it edits those. Also you could try empty the stdshape folder in your terrain and reopen the editor.

HiTech

[CptTrips]

Look in the stdshape folder. Did the TE create them in that folder? Don't try move them there but when the TE opens the terrain it edits those. Also you could try empty the stdshape folder in your terrain and reopen the editor.

HiTech

The files I showed in the video that were dumped in the terrain root folder, were also placed in the stdshapes folder.  I didn't know if that was intended, but it seemed suspect.

You aren't saying I should put the aircraft skin bmp in the stdshapes are you?  I'm currently putting them texsrc folder.

Thurs I will try doing this with a new, small, completely empty terrain with no other custom items to make sure something isn't interacting in a strange way.

Can you verify the basic procedure I was attempting was correct?  Copy ALL the bmp from the exported skin folder (possibly with edits) into the terrain's texsrc folder and rebuild?

,
CptTrips

[hitech]

You aren't saying I should put the aircraft skin bmp in the stdshapes are you?  I'm currently putting them texsrc folder.

Correct, place the bmps in the texsrc folder when you open the terrain ,the TE should process your BMP files and they should end up as hdr and datX files in the stdshape folder.

HiTech

[CptTrips]

Correct, place the bmps in the texsrc folder when you open the terrain ,the TE should process your BMP files and they should end up as hdr and datX files in the stdshape folder.

HiTech

OK thanks.  I just wanted to know I was trying the basically correct steps.

It does appear the datx and hdr files are getting to stdshapes, it just appears they also got copied to the root terrain folder.

I'll back up and try some more isolated targeted debugging steps and report back the results.


One question:  Those diffuse skin bitmaps appear to be 24bit RGB.  Is that correct, or should they be 8bit indexed?

[hitech]

Either should work.
Another thought is that I'm not sure what happens if you do not include  the Normal and spec maps.

HiTech

[CptTrips]

Hmmmm.

Seems to be interacting with my custom objects.  If I take them all out, it builds.  They work fine until i tried to add a plane skin.  Bizarro.


I did get some dmp files this time. (see attached)

[EDIT]  it gets even stranger.  I put back all my custom objects, but this didn't copy ALL the bmp from the skin folder, just "P51D_S.bmp", "P51D_N.bmp" and "P51d.bmp".
with jsut those, it built and I saw the changes in game.

Sooo, it there a max number of custom textures maybe?  when I copied ALL the bmp from the skin folder plus the textures from the custom objects I already had, that exceeded the limit?

However, I still have the original problem where I can't get WWI skins to show up when embedded in the the terrain.  That is a separate issue from exceeding max textures I believe.  I am wonder if that has something to do with the different damage model of WWI planes. I notices the files between Dr1 and P51D seem to follow a different naming scheme and when I try and embed the Dr1 bmps, htx files are not generated.