I'm trying to make a base-game version of the Maxis "Surfing the Universe" poster that came with the University EP - I know that in theory this should be possible, as HugeLunatic has already made a base-game version of the BV travel poster, which picks up existing recolours of the EP mesh.

I've tried several times, but I keep having the same problem, as shown in this screenshot:




The mesh shows up without a texture (placed on the wall and on the right in the design-mode pop-up), although it is correctly linked to existing recolours of the Uni mesh (centre of the design-mode pop-up), but weirdly the default texture appears separately (on the left of the design-mode pop-up).

Can anyone tell me where I'm going wrong with this, please?

Well, you can't really have a basegame object that is slaved to an EP object. The idea of basegame compliant objects is that you don't need anything but the basegame to use them, but if your poster is slaved to a Uni poster, people will need Uni to make it work correctly.

So you have to extract the mesh, the default texture and the recolor textures of the Uni poster and put them into a whole new basegame compliant clone that isn't linked to anything and that has its own recolors.

The problem with the missing texture in your poster now looks like either you forgot to add an entry to the GNMD or you forgot to do a 'fix integrity' after linking the SHAPE.

Thanks for you reply.

Yes, this is a standalone clone (cloned from a base-game painting, and containing the extracted mesh and texture from the Uni version), and not slaved to the EP version in any way, so Uni is not required for it to work (I'm testing it with an AnyGame Starter base-game configuration). I referred to HugeLunatic's standalone base-game BV travel poster as a guide, as this picks up existing recolours of the EP mesh by having the same GUID and same internal names for the subsets, textures, etc., and I have tried to do the same.

I'm pretty sure I did do a 'fix integrity', but I'm not sure what could be missing from the GMND - could you possibly give me some hints on this?

What I did was clone with all boxes unticked, I didn't actually clone a base game item and replace textures or meshes.

But since you have a blue texture, you most likely have a typo in a name in the GMND, SHPE, GMDC, TXMT, or MMAT.

Ahh, thank you - I didn't think of trying that!

I've tried this several times from scratch, always with exactly the same result, so I'd be really surprised if it were a typo, but I agree that it does look like that.

Anyway, I think I will try your original approach instead and see if that works.

Thanks again!

What could be missing from the GNMD is the entry for the 'tsMaterialsMeshName'. Or - the one that I always forget - the extra entry to the Datalist Extension in the cObjectGraphNode. But that's only is you were linking it to a master object.

But I may be misunderstanding something here. You're trying to make a basegame clone that picks up recolors of an EP object, yes? I don't understand the point in that. If you don't have a certain EP installed, you won't have any recolors of object from that EP either, would you. So why not just make a normal stand-alone object and not have to mess around with internal model names and such.