ATTN: Level Designers...

Being level design illiterate, I have a question.. It's come to my attention that the humvee texture for the single player level StreetWars overrides the one for DStrike causing it to give a mismatch error. My question is, when you simply add new textures to an existing texture pack, will it cause problems to levels that used the old texture pack? If so, then we're gonna have a sh*t load of texture packs out there.. I'd appreciate any feedback!

If any additions are made to texture packs, then the texture packs are used in a map then those without the updated texture pack (.utx) will simply not be able to play the map. Unreal does a check of all the packages used within a map before running it, if one texture from a utx is missing, it just won't load.

The Hummvee problem was probably caused by name doubling. When a new texture is added to ANY utx the name need to be original, I tend to tack wierd letters on the ends of names of textures or my nickname, so my textures come out as 'CoN_chainfence'.

Damn, I didn't answer the question.

No you CAN add textures to a pack without it affecting the levels with the old utx in it, no problems whatsoever. That's in my experience anyway. I've got an urban set that I made that I just keep adding to, and adding to, and I've used it in about 3 half finished InF levels, no probs.

Ah, great- thank you RaekwoN.. I'll be sure to make this known on our map depot so hopefully this will be avoided in the future. Of course the problem remains that a level designer might not realize they are naming their texture pack over an existing one, but at least if they are aware, it might cut down on this occurance. If anyone runs into this with Infiltration maps, let me know so I can make this known on our map depot to give people fair warning.

My theory is that you are right when loading your own game, but not when connecting to a server. Then unreal check the GUIDs of each component with the ones running on the server. (true? that's what I interpret when reading the log-file)

This would for instance mean that I have to install Streetwars to be able to play D-Strike on a server which has it installed!?

I had exactly this version mismatch error message when I tried to connect to the SOB-Server last night. I quit the game and reinstalled Infiltration (cause first I thought that I had a newer version). Did not help though. Who knows which version of this texture pack is actually running on our beloved server?

When I am right, than I think it is imperative that level designers have to rename an already distributed file when they modify it; otherwise we get into a real big chaos. Cannot believe that this problem has not occured before (after more than a year of map and mod making for Unreal)

What do you guys think?

Six.


[This message has been edited by Six (edited 09-04-1999).]

I tend to agree with Six, this does sound right, that the checks run at the start would be cross-checking all the .utx's. And yes it should be up to the designers to re-name their texture packs, just adding number codes or something to the end would suffice, Urban_Ver1_2 or something.