Can't load custom terrain textures

#1 Hmm, not sure what your doing there Kevin. Could you give more information such as the steps you used to import your terrain?

I have had no issues importing a terrain straight out of the third part program L3DT by pressing the export to Torque button. I've created a 5km, 10km and 25km square terrains with water automatically created when I imported to the engine.
I did no tweeking, just create and import and then run Torque.

I used to get issues with the older versions of Torque but not now, they've made everything much easier.

"And just to rant for half a second:"?? - No offence intended but, the youth of today just want everything on a plate :) half the fun is in working these things out.

Torque rocks dude.

#2 Hi Kevin, whats your materials.cs entry for the one youre having trouble trying to use? The white image usually means that where the materials.cs is linked to, the image isnt there.

Did you manually write the entry or have you added it through the terrain material editor

#3 Been using Torque since 2004 and I've never encountered this issue. Where did you place your texture files? Are you working from an original level or did you copy the level and edit the copy? If you look in your .mis file you should be able to find the name of your .ter file - check the art/terrains folder to ensure that matching files are there.

Also, what editor are you using? You might have corrupt or non-standard format image files.

#4 Thanks for the tips so far...

@Malcolm: I'm not importing terrain topography. (And I'm hardly "the youth of today", nor do I expect things to be handed to me -- I DO expect things to work consistently and smoothly, especially basic stuff like loading textures. I also don't want to "have fun working things out"; I want to build a game not waste time with some engine quirk!)

@Andy/Richard: I'm attempting to set up a new terrain texture layer, or modify an existing one (yes, with the terrain material editor); I'm just browsing out to a folder with some PNG textures in it and attempting to load them. (The folder is not the default terrain path...)

These were created with Paint Shop Pro; they load correctly into TGE (and other apps), so I seriously doubt they are corrupted.

It's sounding like the trick is that PNGs must be in the "art/terrains" path or they fail to load...? I can't load terrain textures from any other folders???

Edit: This is with a brand-new level from scratch.

#5 It's sounding like the trick is that PNGs must be in the "art/terrains" path or they fail to load...? I can't load terrain textures from any other folders???

whats the route to the file, as long as its under your game folder,you should be allright, or are you pulling it from another tree on your hdd ?

#6 I remember hearing something about paths being hardcoded concerning the terrain/texture setup, I could be wrong and can't remember what post explains it further but hopefully you can get this sorted out.

#7 No problem Kevin,
as I said I meant no offence and I'm sorry for my humor, really I was after a bit more information on what you are trying to achieve, I should keep my humor to myself :) .

In the T3D tutorials under using torque script it gives mention to using the correct references with regards to relative paths etc.. I would check the files that Torque has created in the mission to ensure that it correctly references the relative paths. ie ./ current directory ~/ from the game directory etc.. to your images.

Also with the images you are using for your terrain so long as you are storing them somewhere under the game directory it should be fine.

Kind Regards Malcolm.

#8 All textures work for me so long as they are within the game directory structure|(relative path)..game Dev 101 IMO.
- In fact, I remember using 8*4096x3382 textures stitched together on a model and they were placed in a directory next to /game/.

Sure Torque's tools are not elegant nor well thought out for my taste. but..it's ok enough I suppose.

#9 Thanks again, y'all.

Yeah, I was being naive and assuming T3D would allow me to load assets from any location on my computer. (I should have known from my experience with TGE that this would not be the case.) It would be nice if T3D would pop up a message box "Hey, that's an invalid path." as a reminder.

I did get the textures to load once I made sure they were placed in a folder path relative to the game folder.

#10 When using Torque it's a good idea to go ahead and design your project layout for how you expect the end user to see it and then work from within that environment. Much fewer issues like this one occur with such initial planning.

#11 I usually just put my terrain textures in art/textures/terrain. Sometimes I sub under that if I have a pile of them...

#12 @Michael: Certainly. In this case, however, I was just figuring out how to apply a new texture to the terrain. (Yes, I'm a T3D noob -- I'm still in experimentation/learning mode; some things are quite a bit different from TGE.)

#13 Ive had this problem several times in the past.

Personally i like the fact that you must move your assets to your project folder, ive seen applications that should have copied the files where they need to be and cause more trouble that way.

And ive played more than one commercial game that has errored out and given me a long path to one of the devs hard drives.

Perhaps a useful feature for torque would be to disable its ability to get out of the game root folder at all.

#14 @Bloodknight: I agree -- the simplest, most straight-forward solution would be to lock the root path to the game folder and not allow any browsing outside it.

#15 One thing that is causing these problems which has troubled me alot is if you have two files: tex.png and tex.dds in the same folder and loads one of them via the in game editor. It doesn't add the extension and therefore only one of the textures load.
So you shouldn't have more textures with the same name but different file endings in the same folder :P Which seems stupid anw :P