My Way Forward...

Apologies for not being as active as I would have liked recently, but real life has got in the way.

Following a long and informative conversation with Eezypeazy, my proposals are to press forward with material which can be used in the BVE5 Simulator. As we are discovering, the objects used by BVE5 are in the form of .x files, so I will be looking to convert much of the material I have into this format. This will of course involve saving all the textures as .bmp files, because as far as I am aware the BVE4 viewer which will be used to convert files recognises only those textures.

The transparent areas of course will have to be pure black, rgb 0,0,0 in order for the .x file to recognise them. Any other colour will be seen as solid. I'm not convinced that the best way to do this is to edit the palette - I have evidence to suggest the transparency looks for the colour's index within that palette, so my preference is to flood the pure blue 0,0,255 areas which I currently use with 0,0,0 instead.

Also I need to gain some experience with conversion / writing of routes in order that we may write a series of comprehensive guides to go with the proposed routes and object library before we go public.

If only there were more hours in the day...

Hi Alan,

I have coverted all the files you gave me to .x and the new ones I have made.

I am yet to put all transparencies back to 0,0,0. I have slowly worked my way along the TWI-WAT route and it is drivable. Some, well most need their rotations fixed, so even if a converter from BVE5 to OpenBVE comes along the routes produced for BVE5 will look terrible. Also .png is the way to go and I have also fixed all of this.

Sorry I did all this weeks ago and need some help so I can put it all somewhere that we can all access. No progress for the next week or so as I'm stuck on holidays in tropical Hawaii (ps I hate the sun / heat).

Bye for now,

Stephen.