... very simple. Copy the Scenery\Vegetation folder that AP installs from RSC\ECMLS to RSderek\WearValleyRailway Durham: default / AP Veg and Sky
Really transforms the route, these old "comical" trees were putting me off. Back then, they were saving resources, being mostly low poly spherical cap models holding the leaf textures. AP's trees breathe new life into Derek's fantastic route. near Brancepeth Bishop Auckland
Thanks Spikee1975 I haven't touched this route in years, but went back in to try this and really enjoyed it. Makes a good route even better.
Most interesting. I'll give this a try within the next few days. This opens the door for potential improvements to a good many routes!
Yes. I was browsing the vegetation used in WVR, and it matched the filenames of the AP replacement bins for ECMLS.
Nope. Just browse to RSC\ECMLS. Next to the .ap file, there's a Scenery folder that is installed by the AP Vegetation EP. Just copy this and the Vegetation subfolder to RSderek\WearValleyRailway. See above what it contains - these are the AP replacement blueprints. Delete blueprints.pak after copying.
Does this work for other older UK routes; or just this one as it’s one of the few where the file names match? It would be good to improve other routes that aren’t included in the pack like the original ECML and the S&DJR among others for example.
No. It is just replacing the artificial looking DTG 3D near trees with models from AP. They work on a per route base, if the assets use the same name throughout DLC it may work with the set of AP's ECMLS trees. The routes you mention don't feature 3D vegetation iirc. You'll have to enhance them in the editor, placing trees yourself. (Replacing the 2D assets with 3D ones would probably give you performance issues, as these trees would then also appear in the distance where they are not supposed to be. Feel free to experiment and share your findings.
Before I go ahead with some experimentation with AP Vegetation on routes that don't have it automatically applied; how can I tell through the game files what is a 3D Asset and what is not? Asking as I don't want to end up replacing 2D vegetation with 3D vegetation as to not cause lag; the AP Vegetation Pack description says that it is "Optimised so as to not affect frame rates (FPS) compared to existing 3D assets" but yknow I can't be 100% sure how valid this statement is. Either way I do have a backup folder for the route's scenery folder that I plan to experiment with just in case. At a guess I would assume the GeoPcDx vegetation files with "near" in the name refers to 3D assets but please correct me if I'm wrong as I'm relatively unfamiliar with vegetation scenery file structures. Also wondering if there is a way to view TSC's model files (eg. GeoPcDx) in other programs to see what I'm swapping in an easier way instead of having to view them all individually in-game to see. Whatever the answer I'll see if I can figure something out.
Watch out for anything with "FF" in the filename. These are generally the photo-textured pseudo-3d trees that are essentially a plane visible from any angle. You probably don't want to be replacing those with genuine 3d assets.
Curios to see if these would work on the WCML trent valley, West Highland line, WLOS, WCML North, Edinburgh to Glasgow?
Why not test yourself? Unless you're one of those who unpacked all .ap files and created a mess thus, unable to distinguish between original and modded files then, it's just copying the Scenery folder from an AP-enhanced route assets folder (and finding the right one to use). I'm sure Trent Valley would have been taken care of by AP, but Thomson Interactive are very strict and do not allow any modification of their route, same as Allaboard (Rich Garber). Though I'll make some tests and post my findings here. Basically it's going through the assets files, check for their names and see what AP used to replace these with in other routes. WCML North is a different thing, as it's older than the DTG trees AP replaces, it's using 2D vegetation almost everywhere. Must be done in Route Editor manually, else replacing 2D foliage will affect distant vegetation, resulting in serious FPS loss. West Highland Line definitely needs a treatment to remove the lineside "fake plastic trees" (I think this will be easy, wait a bit.)
Alright after a few hours of messing around with vegetation files I have finally found what seems to be a consistent way to swap vegetation (UK at least) with AP vegetation. I am very tired it is currently 12am in Australia right now but here we go! So first of all I would like to present you with the results of DTG Vegetation to AP Vegetation swap for the Riviera Line in the Fifties Route; certainly looks even nicer now! So for routes like Riviera Line in the Fifties it's a relatively similar process to what Spikee1975 put up originally with Wear Valley however is more tedious and will probably be like this for most other routes. Wear Valley's vegetation swap is luckily in line with all the files in the ECMLs vegetation folder which makes things an easy copy + paste swap as shown above like I mentioned. whereas Riviera Line in the Fifties doesn't fall into this easy way and things get more tedious as this route requires specific pieces of vegetation from two separate routes this being Great Eastern Main Line London-Peterborough and The Riviera Line: Exeter-Paignton and unlike ECMLs folder; you can't just copy + paste the entire Vegetation folder as only specific pieces of vegetation are used and not all contents of the folder from the original Riviera Line and the GEML. So now let's get into how you sort of figure out what vegetation pieces you need to copy + paste over... First of all most routes nowadays would be compressed within the .ap file of a route and if so you would need to extract them out. To do this I use a free program such as 7zip by simply rightclicking the .ap file and clicking "Extract Here". If you have any 3rd party enhancements or mods applying to a route it may prompt asking to overwrite files when extracting the .ap file; click "No to all" to make sure it doesn't overwrite your modded files with default files. Make sure after this you back-up the routes asset folder once extracted as the following process can definitely be susceptible to breaks which can cause major visual glitches for a route (which I will elaborate on at the end). For the Riviera Line in the Fifties Route it's .ap file is labeled as "ExeterKingswearAssets.ap" and can be found under the directory of RailWorks>Assets>DTG>ExeterKingswear If you don't know where to find a Steam DLC route asset folder, go and find the route on the SteamDB website, go to it's page there and change the "app" section in the page URL to "depot" and it will show you it's default install path therefore showing you where it's Asset folder is. Example: Riviera Line if the Fifties "App" SteamDB Page https://steamdb.info/app/325960/ Riviera Line if the Fifties "Depot" SteamDB Page https://steamdb.info/depot/325960/ As you can see changing the "app" section of the URL to "depot" has pulled up a page with file directories and whatever starts with "Assets" is the directory you are looking for. Now that you've extracted the .ap file navigate to the Scenery>Vegetation section of the routes folder and you can see it's list of vegetation assets. Now what do we need to replace here? To figure this one out we navigate to AP's Vegetation Enhancement Pack scenery folder which can be found under the directory of RailWorks>Assets>AP>VegEP>Scenery and simply don't go further into the folder than that. Now here's where the tedious stuff sorta begins. From now on I'll be using the Riviera Line in the Fifties as the example for this process. So the first in line for the Riviera Line in the Fifties vegetation is the file of "Black Ash_tree" so to find out if AP offers a replacement for this vegetation asset search up that file name in the "Scenery" section of the AP Vegetation Enhancement Pack folder. Great news, they do offer a replacement for this asset; it should come up with "Black Ash_tree.GeoPcDx". No need to copy any files from the folder itself; what we need is the .bin file for the asset which can be found at the origin of the asset. To do this hover the mouse over the .GeoPcDx file and it's full directory will appear within the AP folder and it'll tell us where it's origin is; for this file after your personal computer director it should say RailWorks>Assets>AP>VegEP>Scenery>Trees>RSC-GEML and this tells us that it originates from the GEML route folder under the RSC provider folder in the Assets directory. Now we navigate to what should be something like RailWorks>Assets>RSC>GEML (extract the GEMLAssets.ap file here if you haven't already) and then continue to Scenery>Vegetation and this location should have Black Ash_tree.bin which you now copy and paste into the Riviera Line in the Fifties vegetation folder at the directory of RailWorks>Assets>DTG>ExeterKingswear>Scenery>Vegetation and there we have it now that asset is swapped with the AP enhancement version. Now do this process for the other vegetation assets of the route that AP offers a replacement for. Sorry if that was a complicated explanation; like I mentioned I am tired so it may have been a bit rough at points so ask if you have any questions. I did this process for the original Woodhead route and it uses much less assets that have AP replacements but still a much smaller few from the GEML and Original Riviera Line route and also worked just fine for the original Woodhead route. Some trial and error came up working this stuff out where what I saw the most was strange black tiles / boxes in the route either in the ground or floating, literally anywhere. This happened because I did some silly mistakes of accidentally moving the files over through drag and drop and not copy + paste! So make sure you ALWAYS copy + paste and not simply move the file with drag and drop which sounds like a silly mistake but it's a small one you might accidentally overlook like I did. Also upon an experiment of copying the GeoPcDx files over from the AP Vegetation Enhancement Folder itself I noticed in circumstance a) where no .bin files were swapped, .GeoPcDx files only, resulted in major flashing glitches all over the place b) with both .bin files and .GeoPcDx files swapped I noticed some trees that were originally there just straight up disappeared but I can't be 100% sure if that issue was related to the .bin + .GeoPcDx situation. But anyway it did prompt me to only swap over the .bin files from the other original route folders (in this case as mentioned it was the GEML and original Riviera Line route) and doing just this worked just fine and it does as well for Wear Valley as Spikee1975 instructions included only swapping .bin files from the original ECMLS folder anyway. I hope this helps.
You don't ever need to copy geos - they will only work (DRM) in their own Provider\Product folder. All you need is exchange the bin to point to the AP\VegEP folder's models.
If it's only the RailWorks/Assets/DTG/ExeterKingswearSceneryVegetation you need then that's the only folder you should extract there is never any reason to extract the whole .ap Just open the .ap with 7zip (right click and then open with) and drag out the scenario folder it wont actually remove it from the .ap it will simply copy paste it. Drag the copy from the 7zip window to the same location as the .ap so it sits alongside it, you then edit this folders contents to your hearts content without stuffing up the original or over bloating your Railworks installation.
Thank you for the feedback from you both. I have been learning slowly this file structure business over the past few months through forum help and various trial and error messing around. There was a thread somewhere else on how to replace track on routes through file manipulation with TS-Tools which I did for the original Portsmouth Direct Line route which was annoyingly troublesome! Eventually I got it and multiple times changed the track height so trains would match the 3rd rail but I’ll have to manually add buffers later; as the replacement removed those which is a pain!
You don't even need to extract something. It's just about using the correct AP .bins next to the .ap, eventually renaming them so they override the .ap contents.
I am aware that you don’t need to extract the .ap file to actually get a swap to work as I learnt that through TimeOfDay weather swaps but here my main reason for extracting the .ap file was to see what was inside the vegetation folder so I could see what assets in the route had AP replacements.
Yeah, extracting though means copying the archive contents to another place. You can simply just open it without any extraction process.
That's 7zip File Manager, my main tool for organising my files. Opens ap, rwp, rpks and such natively like a normal folder. FreeCommander is also fine and opens each known archive with a double click. Windows Explorer - no thanks
