Yandros on 21/10/2017 at 17:42
In the old days, people sometimes used fam/... textures on the texture replace props and it seemed to work fine, although you sometimes got the Locked Resource assert if the texture wasn't also applied to a terrain face somewhere in your mission. However, in recent years with NewDark this has become a bit of a no-no although when asked, most of us (myself included) couldn't really formulate a specific reason why not to do it anymore aside from the assert message mentioned before. I just found one, though, with help from R Soul.
There was an old object in DCE (2005 or so) which I didn't realize was using a replaced fam texture in this way until R Soul pointed it out to me. The same texture had been seen as Jorge in other missions, and I only now confirmed that the two are connected. The one mission applied a fam texture to an object without having it loaded on the palette, and that prevented it from being used as a terrain texture on any other mission loaded in the same session. Note that NewDark didn't say anything in an assert or the monolog about this, which is why I never realized what was going on until I fixed it in the first mission and then some testing with the old and new versions of that mission and loading the next mission in the campaign in the same Dromed session. R Soul I believe understood the connection but I was too busy or too dense to understand at the time, and then stumbled upon it myself today.
Personally, I think it is much easier to simply copy the fam texture to obj/txt16 and refer to it and not have to worry about any of that. I've done that for numerous other textures in DCE, some of which are windows, and in those cases I often modify the texture for objects anyway so the glass panes are partially transparent.
