Let’s Add New Trucks to Your GG1 (Continued)

By John D'Angelo

All that is needed to change the original bogeys to the detailed bogeys is to change the kuid numbers of the original bogeys to the replacement bogeys. You also need to change the kuid-table numbers 8 and 9 to match. Before we go through that process, there is one thing I would do with the original GG1. I would “clone” the original and work with the cloned copy. This is an easy process in TRS2006. Using CMP you would highlight the object and then ask CMP to clone it. The object will be duplicated and will be assigned to your own identity and kuid number. I’m going to first illustrate all the steps I use when I clone an object. Once I clone any object I change the username to something that will list it differently when you are working in Trainz. It is the username line that makes this identification and is the only line you need to change for this. Let’s do the cloning:




Go to the object to be cloned and highlight it.




Tell CMP to clone the file.




The GG1 is now cloned.




Edit the cloned file to rename it.




Go to the config.txt file.




Change the username line.


Save the new config.txt file which identifies your cloned GG1 under the new username and “commit” the file. From this point on you have your own version of the GG1 that you can work with and not affect the original GG1. Now we’ll go back and edit the config.txt file and change those bogeys to the replacements. Once the bogey numbers are changed we’ll save the config.txt file and “commit” those changes. Here is the revised config.txt file with the changed bogey kuid numbers and username line in bold print:

Here is the completed clone with the detailed trucks.

Finally let’s take a look at why there is an error notation in TRS2006. The “error” is because TRS2006 does not accept some items in the config.txt file that were previously acceptable in earlier versions of Trainz. In this case the bogeys that were created by Whitepass have a few issues. To find out what those issues were, I went to CMP, found the bogeys and then asked CMP to show what the problems were:




Highlight the bogey and ask CMP to list the errors.




The error explanation.


The problem that caused the main error was that there was a texture that could not be loaded. The texture was entitled ”phwheelmap.tga”. Now that I had a clue, I used the “Edit in Explorer” process to bring up the file. There was no “phwheelmap.tga” image file, but there was a “phwheelmap.txt” file. I have seen this error before where a text file “points to” an image file that does not exist in the file. To fix the problem, I clicked on the text file, and made a “REM” (Remark) note at the start of the lines and saved the file. The REM note makes the line inactive. I did this rather than deleting the text file just in case my “fix” didn’t work. I also still have the original file in place just in case the image file appears somewhere. If I found the image file, I would add it to the object and then remove the REM notations. Here is the file with the “REM” notes:




The lines are now “REM”.


I then “commit” the file, and then do the same to the other bogey file. Following this, the files did not have the error problem and no black screen was generated when the bogeys were used. By doing the “fix” to the bogey files, the bogies can be used with other GG1 models without getting an error message.

OK, time to leave the engine house. I hope this article has been of use to you for working with custom items and CMP.

John

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Article and screen shots ©2008 John D'Angelo. All rights reserved.