[GRAPHICS] Cultural Citystyles for BtS, patch 3.19

[GeoModder]

O yes, The Capo, I'm about halfway done with the ethnic plantation graphics.

[Xyth]

Originally Posted by GeoModder

Mmm, sounds like a texture issue. I'll check it out. Thanks for reporting.

EDIT: Xyth, on my end all those buildings look fine. Did you try a manual install (meaning putting folders from the CC mod on some mod of your own)? If so, did you also copy the art/shared folder? Alot of texture files are inthere because several buildings in CC use them and it saves memory if they are only called once by the game...

Happens when running Cultural Citystyles alone as a mod, no changes. I launch a game starting as Egypt, found a city, enter the World builder, place an academy and a courthouse - both are pink.

[GeoModder]

Could you attach a screenshot please?

What I noticed on both buildings' texture files that they are .tga files, not .dds.
Perhaps your computer has a problem with .tga files?

[Xyth]

Originally Posted by GeoModder

Could you attach a screenshot please?

What I noticed on both buildings' texture files that they are .tga files, not .dds.
Perhaps your computer has a problem with .tga files?

Screenshot attached.

I thought I'd mentioned but it seems that I haven't that this is on a Mac. Many of my fellow Mac users have reported seeing these pink buildings too so it may well be a Mac only issue.

Macs have no issues with .tga files though, in Civ or out. However I notice that these files all seem to have a double extension .tga.dds. Could that be the issue? I don't see any reference to these files in the xml so I assume they are referenced from the .nif files (which unfortunately I have no way of reading/editing atm).

[GeoModder]

I'm going to try renaming (removing the .tga part) and linking the renamed files to the model again in Nifskope. Hopefully this will solve your issue with the next release.
It's the only thing I can think of that could cause a problem.

[Xyth]

Originally Posted by GeoModder

I'm going to try renaming (removing the .tga part) and linking the renamed files to the model again in Nifskope. Hopefully this will solve your issue with the next release.
It's the only thing I can think of that could cause a problem.

Thanks heaps for this. Hopefully it'll work cos I likewise can't think of anything else that could cause it. Accented characters, quotes and dashes can cause compatibility issues between Windows and Mac but there are none in these files.

Absolutely love the mod btw.

EDIT: Looks like there are 19 files total (attached a screenshot) that have this double extension and the names of them really do suggest that this is the likely issue. I'd offer to fix these for you but there's no way to edit .nif on the Mac atm

[GeoModder]

Originally Posted by Xyth

Absolutely love the mod btw.

Thanks.

Originally Posted by Xyth

EDIT: Looks like there are 19 files total (attached a screenshot) that have this double extension and the names of them really do suggest that this is the likely issue. I'd offer to fix these for you but there's no way to edit .nif on the Mac atm

And that's for the academy .nif alone. If you know of other buildings which show pink to you (except the Egyptian Academy and Middle-East Courthouse, please post them.

[Xyth]

Originally Posted by GeoModder

And that's for the academy .nif alone. If you know of other buildings which show pink to you (except the Egyptian Academy and Middle-East Courthouse, please post them.

Actually that's the search results of the entire Art folder for the double extension, to see if there were any other buildings I should test. All the results are from the Egypt Academy and Crescent Courthouse though so hopefully that means it's just these two.

I did get a report that the Viking's academy was pink for us Mac users in CC 0.80 but I tested it and it works fine in 0.90.

[GeoModder]

Originally Posted by Xyth

Actually that's the search results of the entire Art folder for the double extension, to see if there were any other buildings I should test. All the results are from the Egypt Academy and Crescent Courthouse though so hopefully that means it's just these two.

Ah, good to hear.

Originally Posted by Xyth

I did get a report that the Viking's academy was pink for us Mac users in CC 0.80 but I tested it and it works fine in 0.90.

Yes, I changed the graphic there since the last 2 versions. And IIRC the old graphic used this .tga extension too.

Okay, I adjusted the texture filenames, and attached them below. Could you please download them and put them in the CC mod on your computer after placing the current Egypt_Academy and Crescent_Courthouse folders somewhere else first?

I hope this solves it. Please report back the result. If it works, I'll incorporate it in the main download when the next version comes out.

[Xyth]

It didn't work but I've found something that hopefully did.

I managed after much hunting to find a Mac application that can save .dds files. I loaded the textures up, and instantly saved them with default settings and they worked! Well I assume they did, I don't know if these files are supposed to have alpha masks or anything like that. Anyway I have attached a screenshot of how they now look for me (can you let me know if they look right) and the resaved textures for each building for you to test. Hopefully they work fine on Windows too :/

I'm guessing those files were compressed in a strange way or something, maybe because they were originally .tga. *shrug*

[GeoModder]

I've got good news and bad news, Xyth.

The good news is that on your screenshot the textures look as they should, so you're fine on that part.
The bad news is that your files in the __MACOSX folders fail to load in both NifSkope and SceneViewer on my computer. I reckon the other folders were the original files I attached 2 posts ago. Those I can load.

What we can do here is that I ask you to create a folder structure with your converted Mac files in ("Assets/Art/Structures/Buildings/Academy/Egypt_Academy" -and "Courthouse/Crescent_Courthouse"), and sent them to me. I can then make them available for Mac users by putting them on the root folder of the mod warn mac downloaders in a "Macusers_readme" file and in the opening post of this thread.
Or else you could distribute the file throughout the Mac community.

[Xyth]

I figure there's no point making your download bigger than it needs to be so I've packaged up the fixes with detailed installation instructions. It's available at the following url:

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/2003364/Cult...ac%20Fixes.zip

That link goes to the site where I host all my Mac modfixes so it should be up permanently. Could you maybe put a link to it on your first post? I'll post it in the Mac forums too. Most of us use CC via BAT or VD so I'll update the mac versions of those with these fixes.

I'll also update it if any undiscovered or future issues arise. Thanks for your help!

[GeoModder]

I'll do that. Thanks for the cooperation.

[Xyth]

Well no more pink buildings have shown up for us Mac users so far which is great! However a couple users have reported some white buildings showing up in modern Mayan cities/improvements:



If this isn't also happening on the PC side, could you point me to the relevant buildings/textures so I could have a go at fixing them? Thanks again.

[GeoModder]

That's the modern Meso-american cityset.

Location is in Assets/art/structures/cities.
The .nif is named Mod_Meso_America.nif
The .dds is named mod_meso_city3.
I opened the dds in DXTbmp, and it seems to be saved under a 32bit format instead of the usual dxt3 format (under .dds that is). That might be the culprit.

I attached a resave under dxt3 format. Could you drop the file in assets/art/structures/cities and try if that works for you?

[Xyth]

Unfortunately neither the file you provided or the fix I used for the pink buildings worked, the buildings remained white. I'll keep experimenting with that particular file and see if I can discover anything.

[Walter Hawkwood]

Hi! Me again.

When I saw that the Kremlin palace was created, I couldn't hold myself from retexturing it with higher quality textures.

Also, I'm sharing some culture-specific barrack and stable retextures I made recently. I believe a retextured model brings more flavor than a completely different one, since a player can tell at a glance that this is the same building. I've also included modern barracks, though, with a different model. This one comes from Axis & Allies.

[The Capo]

Originally Posted by Walter Hawkwood

Hi! Me again.

When I saw that the Kremlin palace was created, I couldn't hold myself from retexturing it with higher quality textures.

Also, I'm sharing some culture-specific barrack and stable retextures I made recently. I believe a retextured model brings more flavor than a completely different one, since a player can tell at a glance that this is the same building. I've also included modern barracks, though, with a different model. This one comes from Axis & Allies.

These all look good man! I'd suggest you used them Geo.

[GeoModder]

Originally Posted by Xyth

Unfortunately neither the file you provided or the fix I used for the pink buildings worked, the buildings remained white. I'll keep experimenting with that particular file and see if I can discover anything.

That's too bad.

Originally Posted by Walter Hawkwood

When I saw that the Kremlin palace was created, I couldn't hold myself from retexturing it with higher quality textures.

* Geo peers at WH's location...
AHA!

Originally Posted by Xyth

Also, I'm sharing some culture-specific barrack and stable retextures I made recently. I believe a retextured model brings more flavor than a completely different one, since a player can tell at a glance that this is the same building. I've also included modern barracks, though, with a different model. This one comes from Axis & Allies.

Those look good, Walter. Although the A&A camp is too high-poly for a building that will be ingame as often as a barracks.
Any more culture-specific retextures you have laying around? Just asking because CC is in its final stage and I won't be particularly pleased to have to keep working on it next year...

[Walter Hawkwood]

* Geo peers at WH's location...
AHA!

Those look good, Walter. Although the A&A camp is too high-poly for a building that will be ingame as often as a barracks.
Any more culture-specific retextures you have laying around? Just asking because CC is in its final stage and I won't be particularly pleased to have to keep working on it next year...

Yeah, I never hid that I wanted those Russian models to be done too. And after the Kremlin Palace came out, I saw it had both a great model and a not-so-great texture. And then I've realized I had almost half of Moscow (including my own house) sitting on my HDD as 3D models with very high-res, almost photorealistic textures. You can guess the rest.

I also made culture-specific archery ranges for TR, but as vanilla civ has no such building IIRC, I don't think I can be of much further help for you before the release. Still, if you require those, I can post them too.

Ah, yeah, there is one more thing - but it is a bit stylistically different from vanilla model. I put some effort to make vanilla colosseum look and feel less Roman and less out-of-place in most non-latin-hellenic circumstances, including changing its name to a more generic-sounding "arena". Here are several models/textures I came up with, including a remake of original greco-roman one: since I thought the structure was too capital to stand in every city, I lowered it one tier. I know you have many different flavor colosseums in your mod, but once again I went for "one model, many textures" approach. Anyway, here they are. Those seek to be not only culture-, but era-specific too.

P.S. Forgot to mention that, but if you are looking for lower-poly solutions, kicking the horse models out of my stables brings down the polycount considerably.