Error Validating Texture, Has Hours of Work Been Lost?

[Drummer]

Hello,

I'm having a very nasty problem here. Since creating an xpack of a foam bale, I've had persistent errors when trying to load up my project. It seems that it can't find the texture file related to the foam bale, even though it is there, plain as day! Is there any way I can kill the xpack completely and stop it from trying to load it when I open the project? I haven't even placed it, it came up with the error when I checked the xpack in the list, so I restarted it and now it won't let me do anything. For some reason, I've been having lots of problems with the materials using the xpacker; I can tell it a dozen times to use a specific .dds file for an object and keep on opening it up in BTB, only to find it's blank, yet again. I thought it would be quite simple really: Here's a box, here's a picture, put the picture on the box! There are no alpha layers or anything like that to worry about with this xpack, just a box and an image, that's it.

If I'm going to continue using this after the trial is up, thus, paying my good money for it, these kind of issues really must be sorted out. It's a great program, but it's not worth anywhere near the amount of money it's priced at with all these bugs, plus the tremendous lack of proper tutorials. I don't often get riled up, but I am right now. I really hope I haven't lost all my work on barriers, walls and tyre walls, because it was fiddly enough to get most of that done.

I'd be very grateful for any help, before I lose any more hair.

Thankyou,

Glen.

 

[ebrich]

Loosing hair is all part of the BTB experience Glen!

As long as you have not placed it on your project track, you can go into your project folder and delete the Xpack.zip.

If you ever get an error message never click on "continue" as the error could again pop up at any time. Always better to loose a couple of hours work than the whole project. And back up the project all the time.

If your having more problems with Xpacks upload it and some one can take a peek. Its often something simple and basic but its difficult to see when your in it.

If you understand the xml files in BTB\Xpacker\xPacks\"Your Xpack"\(Objects, Materials,Textures) open them to check on the eg. Materials\Grass\grass.xml <Path>Ground\Grass\grass_B.dds</Path> in relationship to the other xml files.

 

[Kennett Ylitalo]

I disagree, on some errors it's vital to click continue, you can save the whole project then... Runtime C errors that are related to terrain for ex is one where you can click continue, then "Save As", exit BTB and load the newly saved project.

Captain Hindsight: Always use a backup when importing XPacks. Never import them to your main porject without validating them first. Easiest way of doing this is to close the main project, create the simplest loop of track, terrain to it, then save it. Import the xpack. Try all objects on BTB and ingame. Then you are sure that the XPack is 100% working. Faulty XPacks can and will crash the software. Known bug, we just have learnt convenient ways of circumnavigating our way around them.

You need to identify what material/texture name is causing problems, then you can create a faux XPack with excactly the same path as the error says, and replace the faulty with that one. Sometimes it takes a lot of tries from one error to the next. Every error has to be identified individually.

 

[Drummer]

Thankyou both for your advice. Unfortunately, it seems that deleting the xpack doesn't work, as that,s one of the first things I tried to do. I tried creating a new xpack a few times, with the same name, but it's having none of it. Maybe I could send the file to someone to check out, as you say? I know a little bit about xml files, but I'm just not sure why it's referencing three materials, when it only needs to reference one. I'm all of a muddle.

Thankyou.

 

[ebrich]

If you PM me with the xpack, I'll take a look at it.

 

[Drummer]

As you must have been typing this, I was rooting through my projects folder and found the offending xpack. All I needed to do was delete that xpack from the actual project folder and all was fine! I thought the xpacks only existed in the xpacks folder, but they're duplicated in the projects folder for some reason. :-/ BTB is a weird ass program, it really is.

In case you were interested, the xpacker utility somehow managed to put references to a tyre wall texture into the xml files of the foam bale I was making, but didn't put the texture into that xpack, so it got all confused and caused me a massive headache. The only reason I guess this could have happened is because the last xpack before the bale was a tyre bale. I started a new xpack, but something must have been carried over. Moral of the story: Only ever create one xpack per session with the xpacker utility. After that, close and re-open it to create another! ¬_¬


Thankyou very much for your advice guys, it's greatly appreciated! If you guys would like to test this track when I've done some more work to it, you're more than welcome to PM me, it'd be a great help to have some good opinions before I release it. It's going to be a pretty hungry one, with lots of highly detailed objects and stuff, but hopefully it should run on some higher end PCs. Once I've got some more stuff done, I'll see about creating a WIP topic for it.

Cheers!

Glen.

 

[Kennett Ylitalo]

You can refresh XPacker by reloading the same XPack you are working on. It always has the latest version, all actions are saved so yo can always do that, it haven't failed me yet... When importing or deleting textures, renaming material paths etc. BTB sometimes shows the old data, something should've been removed and it's still on the list and so on. If you want to be sure, reload before zipping xpacks in XPacker. If you want to update an XPack that's already in a project, you need to manually copy that XPack from BTB\XPacks to project folder\XPacks. BTB has it's pecularities, it's not perfect but when you learn the quirks, it's very intuitive interface, fast too.

 

[Drummer]

Thankyou for the insight!

Here's a little curiosity: Will this track I'm making now be usable in Rfactor 2, or will we be seeing a new BTB version for that? If a new version is added, what's the likelihood that it will be able to read my track created with the older version? I haven't looked too hard for this; just wondering if you knew, personally.

Thankyou!

Glen.

 

[R Soul]

I think we have to assume that this is all the BTB we're going to get. Brendon doesn't seem to have the time to finish 0.9 beta (not criticizing), so unless we hear otherwise, he won't have time to work on a version of BTB that outputs to a new and more complicated format.

Back on topic, I'd also be interested in looking at this XPack.

 

[Kennett Ylitalo]

There are ways to make it combatible with rFactor2, for the top of my head, there were only some road material tricks like one material for the left and right side of the road (or was it one material for the width of the track, one or the other..) plus the white painted lines need to be done separately... Then it's just new materials that are assigned to that road so the dynamic track will work correctly, something that can't be done in BTB.

Something that is possibly the main hurdle is that ISI and rF2 is now only supporting 3ds Max. BTB will still be the best track building software, the way you can manipulate roads and terrain is so fast. But everyone should prepare themselves that 3ds max is the next tool they need to learn (i don't like to, but it strongly looks like it.)

3DSimed could get an update for rF2, then at least converting can be done. Track geometry for sure can be converted in some way or another, rF2 uses very similar structure than rF1, there will be GMTs, materials and textures. There are those special building rules you need to follow during track design, plus new sound objects (sound reflections and generators...) etc.

 

[Drummer]

When you say 3DS Max, do you mean the program itself, or just a 3D program that can export to 3DS? I've tried the program and I absolutely detest it! I use AC3D, myself, have done for years. I have no problems creating 3D models for use in games with it and it's by far a lot easier to use. Max is just such a fiddly, cluttered, badly organised and newbie-unfriendly piece of... Software! Anyhow, enough of that; if I have to use that to make models for games in future, I'll just stop making models for games!

Soul, I'm really sorry, but to avoid future confusion and hassle, I killed the offending xpack with lots of fire and bullets, so it's gone. I think the utility just farted a bit and caused a whole load of trouble, as it never happened before and hasn't happened since either. It's good to know that I can delete any offending xpacks though; the whole 'xpacks in xpacks folder, xpacks in project folder' thing really confused me. I thought there was only one copy of an xpack and that it was kept in the xpacks folder. I can understand the need for this if you're going to move things about or delete the original xpacks, but why the need for it when everything's kept on the same computer, the same drive? Surely it's just a waste of space? O.o

Anyhow, back to AC3D to start making a nice bridge!

Thankyou folks!

Glen.

 

[R Soul]

I killed the offending xpack with lots of fire and bullets, so it's gone.

It's the only way to be sure.

BTB and 3dsMax can export directly to rFactor, whereas AC3D or Blender (which I use) can only export in some intermediate format (e.g. 3ds). You'd need to use 3dsimed to send it to rFactor.

One issue with .3ds files is that they only support Diffuse textures, so if your Bump/Spec map needs to be scaled differently, you may have problems. 3dsomed can in theory load texture coordinates from another model into a specific material channel, but the last time I tried it, it didn't work properly.

 

[Kennett Ylitalo]

If you edit any of the materials in that XPack, you can't anymore delete it..

3ds Max has the ISI plugins that sorts that shader level issue.. rF2 uses even more of them, for ex there is a map called marbles (or something) that starts to fade in when there's been a long race and marbles starts to appear. Same goes for the drivingline, it basically a new shader map in rF2. Why ISI favors 3ds Max? No idea other than that they use it. Know what you mean about 3ds Max interface, has tried to get in grips with it many times but can't understand why it's so hard.

But that's all rF2 stuff, no need to worry about it, all gMotor2 titles are covered here. One may like to read the modders package that ISI offers, it's worth the reading just to make any tracks made today more compatible with the next gen simulators. What GTR3 does is all a big questionmark but i bet it will have a similar system. Close enough to "magically" translate all rFactor2 addon content to GTR3. Only a guess but that's what i believe..

 

[Drummer]

Hmmm, ok. Well, we'll just have to see what the future brings I guess. I'm sure that I'd be able to export my track as a 3D file, import it to an editor and then, however you do it, make it work in another sim. Once you have the software, you can do practically anything with 3D, after all!

Cheers folks!