Dear Devotees of SC4,
Recently I tried to delete some base textures form several lots. For this I used the method described somewhere on this site: deleting the textures in the Reader. For most of the files it worked fine,.
Then I tried to delete them form the two Oeltanks by SFBT.
When I then tried to plop the lots I could not see anything!
The lots were completely empty:
No base textures (as expected), no overlay, no props.
But as I queried the place where I plopped the lots I could open the query window....
I did it twice with newly copied lots form my backupfolder. Both the same results.
What might have gone wrong?
This brings me also to a related question:
As I am a lazy guy and still a bit afraid of using the reader I thought it might be very easy to make a small file containing just one bright red base texture, preferrably with the number 0x00000001, that can be used as base texture. By deleting this file from the plugins folder afterwards there will be no base texture visible. Simple, even for me. Or are there disadvantages that I don't know of?
Maybe your lots are broken somehow? There's nothing unusual with them, just some regular growable and ploppable lots with Maxis textures and I think one or two overlays from BSC Textures Vol. 1. I suggest to download and install them again, and then start from scratch.
Your idea with the "missing" texture won't work, though, since the game tends to display dark splotches in place of the missing texture - which is not really something that we want to achieve. ;)
The only "proper" way to delete the base texture is editing the lot exemplar file in the Reader and ReIndexing the LotConfig afterwards. Please remember that lots with overlay textures placed on "transparent" base textures will be affected of the dark splotches (aka "water graphics bug") as soon as you switch to underground mode and back.
As far as I remember I only edited the item placement: I have them now in the Harbour menu. I did the editing of menu in LE PRop, and I edited the item order in the reader.
But maybe it is a good idea to try to do the trick with clean freshly downloaded files. I'll let you know.
I know of the water graphics bug. I thought that this would also be the only problem if I used a base texture that was deleted from the plugins folder. But it is another graphic problem?
The water graphics but will appear if you have an overlay without a base texture, or if you have a base texture which is not in the plugins.
When editing the menu placement in LEProp, did you use the "advanced" view? If not, the lot might now behave like a seaport lot, but is missing some vital properties. In this case, the Lot Editor will fail to treat the lot properly. I don't know which version of the oil tanks you have, but the latest version on the LEX is already configured so the ploppable lots will show up in the seaport menu. I suggest you start from those if you want to edit the textures again.
Yes, I did use the advanced option.
It is already maybe a year ago that I edited all the stuff I wanted into the harbour menu. If I remember correctly you helped me then in another thread with this, Andreas. Also the item order was edited then.
Since these days everything works very fine without any trouble.
Last week I just ran into Teirusu's endless beach modd, which gives me, in combination with the meadowshire terrain modd, a very nice underground for my seaport areas. So now I want to get rid of the base textures...
Anyway, I downloaded the Oiltank files again just this afternoon and will try to delete the base textures from these.
I'll let you know.
It worked!
I edited the newly dowmnloaded files and everything is fine now.
Perhaps because now I did reconfig the Lotconfig.
Anyway, it's OK now.