hopper on 24/3/2014 at 21:42
A little backstory to my question first: The mission I'm working on, going a long way back, got started on old Dromed, with few, if any, custom resources. Somewhere along the line I installed NewDark and continued building my mission on Dromed 1.21, and I've also downloaded many higher-res textures and started using them. Among the chief improvements over the old Dromed is the new texture management tool, I find.
More or less by chance I discovered that the textures I find when I look at a specific family using this new tool - in this case, "catacomb" - weren't the same as I saw when I looked in my fam/catacomb folder through Windows Explorer or Irfan View, which only contains 2 custom textures. The catacomb family in Dromed contains 4 original and no custom textures. So I figured there must be another folder where Dromed got its catacomb textures from. A search across my entire machine revealed a catacomb folder in Ominous Bequest, but with completely different textures. I then tried searching a specific texture, celt1, and got a hit in the fam folder of one of the Rocksbourg missions, but this was a heavily edited version and not my texture. Nothing else was found.
So now I'm wondering: Where are my catacomb textures? Are they somehow integrated in my .mis file? I wanted to edit their size using a .mtl file and couldn't find them, although they show up in-game. Of course I could just adjust the texture size property in Dromed, but it bugs me that my textures have somehow turned into ghosts!
R Soul on 24/3/2014 at 22:20
When you installed NewDark, you might have done it using TafferPatcher, which also includes the Enhancement Pack. That includes updates for many of the original textures (and objects). The new files are in ep2.crf, which is probably in your main T2 folder.
hopper on 24/3/2014 at 23:35
Indeed I did, and that's where the 2 textures in my fam/catacomb folder come from. What I'm wondering is, where are the original textures from that family that show up ingame, but Windows can't find anywhere on my machine? Are they embedded into the .mis file or something? And why don't the textures from the ep2 pack show up in Dromed at all?
Edit: I found a compressed fam.crf folder in my RES folder that contains the original texture folders, including catacomb. But there are about 30 textures in that folder. If this is where Dromed takes my ingame catacomb textures from, why do I only see 4 textures in the catacomb family? Reloading the family does nothing. Texture management in Dromed 1.21 seems to be an arcane art :p.
Xorak on 25/3/2014 at 01:40
Do you have another mission installed by chance?
It could've archived your catacomb folder and replaced it with the one that has only 4 textures.
I don't know about textures being embedded in the .mis file. It's successfully reading them from somewhere, and if it didn't, it would show them as jorge. NewDark will also automatically scan for higher quality versions of existing images (it looks for .png files first, then .jpg, .gif, etc) regardless of where they are saved. I had NewDark automatically load images stored in my temperary Gimp directory on D:, while Dromed is installed on E:
I think you might be able to turn the feature off in one of the .cfg files. You could try that and see if you get jorge in your mission.
Ricebug on 25/3/2014 at 19:13
You don't have anything in the filter field in the texture management window do you? (Top left corner of the window.)
Open Dromed with a blank world. Go to the Textures menu, select Add Thief 2 Family A -N, and pick Catacombs. Now press F7. You should have 32 textures, beginning with Jorge. If not, something's screwy in the path definitions. (Install.cfg or Darkinst.cfg?)
hopper on 25/3/2014 at 20:49
I did what you suggested, and all 32 textures showed up. So I figured maybe once the textures have been loaded, they'd all show up again if I opened my mission again. No dice, I still had only the same 4 textures there.
But then I thought, maybe the problem was the sheer amount of textures in all the families I had loaded? There were a little over 1000 (!) of them. So I compressed all, reloaded catacomb, and bingo! Now I get all the textures in that family. So in other words, there is a limit to how many textures the tool can handle (probably 1024), and used textures are prioritized over unused (forgot to mention that all 4 textures were being used), which of course makes sense.
Thanks everybody for your help!
slavatrumpevitch on 24/4/2017 at 18:47
I'm having, perhaps, a related issue. The catacomb family loads just fine, but there are no sounds associated with any of the textures. I can run, jump even shoot an arrow at them and hear nothing. Moreover, when I open up the textures tab of the object hierarchy, there are no textures from family 'catacomb.' And if I go the the archetypes tab, all the catacomb textures are listed under 'missing.' What gives?
Yandros on 24/4/2017 at 18:49
Purge missing objects, then Portalize and see if it adds them back under Textures so you can drag them under the right material folder. You may have to drop the whole family and add it again, repaply them to brushes and portalize to get them to show up (sometimes it takes several tries too).
slavatrumpevitch on 24/4/2017 at 21:28
Oh, drag. Thanks for the info!
john9818a on 24/4/2017 at 22:25
I know this is a silly question but did you look at the catacombs textures in the fam.crf file in your RES folder?