Loading Ground-Level Queue Textures

The queue texture is divided into four parts. We’ve demonstrated this with the in-game generic queue texture:

The texture at the bottom right quadrant is not necessary because queues don’t intersect; they lead into paths, lead into ride entrances, they only place in straights, in straight slopes, in left turns, and in right turns. The bottom right quarter of this image may be left blank. Do take care that your left turn and right turn textures are facing in the correct direction.

You’ll add the three queue textures into your queue texture map the same way you added your four path textures into your path texture maps.

Ground-level queue textures prepared for Path Creator that are not saved in the correct format will either take on a different appearance in your game, or they won’t appear at all so they’ll need to be saved in an indexed format, without transparency, and with maximum colors set to 256. Our handy table here will show you which textures need to be saved in what format for ground-level and for suspended paths & queues.

After you’ve gotten this far in either your path project or your queue project, click on the arrow at the bottom right of the utility interface. This brings us to the final stage in our project.

According to the blue header bar now is the time to add our models. Because we’ve already pre-imported these and set them aside we’re ready to go! Click on the link at the right of center in the display to auto-load your path models. To manually load your models you’d need to click on each grey tab to load each model separately. We're going to auto-load so once we’ve mouse clicked to auto-load we’ll get this display:

All the boxes display already checked by default. Simply uncheck the boxes indicating the naming conventions you haven’t used, leaving in place the naming convention that you have used.

Here’s what our display looks like now we’ve selected our chosen naming convention and have loaded our path models:

You’ll see there at the bottom of the display that the Create my path! Tab is now green indicating Path Creator has all the data that it needs to make our paths for us. Before creating your path you may use either of the arrows at the bottom of the display to scroll back and forth to check over your work.

Create My Path!

When selecting the option to Create my path! Path Creator will create a copy of its progress along with a log file in a transitional folder and then ask if you want to continue the progress of your project by installing it. These transitional folders come with Path Creator. Transitional paths are created inside the folder called My Paths while transitional queues are created inside the folder called My Queues. Each time you create your path or queue the contents of these transitional folders are updated with your latest creation along with the progress log file.

If you’d like to keep track of your progress by way of your log files it would be helpful to give each update of your projects a new number as you go along so that your log files aren’t constantly overwriting themselves. That way each of your path & queue iterations will have its own folder & log. You may give your iterations simple names, for example:

►

Concrete Paths 01

►

Concrete Paths 02

►

Concrete Paths 03

You may choose which folder to install your paths & queues into by making the required changes in the utility with the Settings>Program Settings tab.

Microsoft Windows will overwrite older files with newer files at our request, but will merge the entire contents of newer folders into older folders. In view of this installing paths and queues directly into RCT3’s Program Files folder is not recommended. If you really want to install directly to RCT3’s Program Files folder you’ll need to run Path Creator as an Administrator, and remember each time to delete your older folders prior to installing your new content.

After you’ve completed entering all the details for your project, occasionally Path Creator will crash during the Create my path! process. It is recommended to save your project before creating your path. This way, should the utility crash while creating you can simply re-launch the utility, re-open your project, and pick up where you left off.

Saving And Re-Opening Projects

When this utility is launched there is a viewer to the left side in which are listed previously saved projects.

Unfortunately the list doesn’t scroll, doesn’t always include the most recent projects, and will only ever list seven projects. It’s more convenient to get into the habit of clicking on File>Open Project on the top menu, browsing to, and opening your project in that way. If you’d like to clear the projects listed in this display you can do this through the settings tab.

Occasionally when saving our files the Save function does not actually save our project although we’ll receive a pop-up indicating our project has been successfully saved. To get around this always save your projects using the Save As function.

If you’ve organized and tidied your Path Creator related files and after that have re-open any project you should confirm that Path Creator is still linked to the files it needs by navigating back and forth in the utility with the arrows at the bottom of the interface. If all the fields display in green and your ground-level images still display this will confirm that all the files required for that particular project remain where they are needed. Re-opened projects with missing images and fields displaying in red indicate there are files that need to be located and then re-linked.

Ground-Level Texture Specifics

256, 512, And 1024 Squared

The maximum size for loading textures directly into Path Creator is 512 x 512. Although technically it is possible to create a path or queue set with larger textures than this, Path Creator will clip 1024 x 1024 textures when creating your path or queue. This will result in paths and queues on your terrain that are missing half of your ground-level path and queue texture maps.

For gamers who’d like borders on their ground level paths and queues we’ve included two sets of templates with our download that suggests where you’d put the borders on your texture maps so they appear as they should in your park. The download link for the templates is at the end of this article.

Borders, Corners, And Templates

It is possible, without trimming down your path textures with any templates, to create full-sized, bordered, ground-level path tiles with Path Creator.

Unfortunately this comes with several sets of problems the first being that the game developers seem to have used the single inner corner texture and the plaza center tile texture indiscriminately. I’ve illustrated what I mean here with DarkHorizon’s templates:

The result of this is that our plazas will either be filled with groupings of corners …

… or our border inner corners will be missing because there’ll be a plaza tile in place there instead of a tile with an inner corner.

It would seem that the one place where the developers have gotten the inner border corners spot on is at the bottoms of stairs.

Drag the above toggle

by its edges to a

convenient place on your screen.