Train Pain, Help required

[Shaundak21]

Hello all,
I'm not sure if this is where I should post but here goes.
For the last 6 months, I've been working on a New object. A nyc style metro Train. I'm a total noob mind you :0). Anyway, dispite the many tuts I read and vids I watched I have a few issues with my baby.
I intended for it to have sims stand in/sit and ride it.
so here are my issues. :faceslap:
1.Mesh comes up in simpe by won't apply texture,it's completely black.( I'm using a demo texture i'm still in the development stage.)

2. I can't get the doors to animate. open and close (I made two groups. doors that open to the left and ones that open to the right.) I want them to open at the same time, allow time for sims to get on, then all close.

3.If possible, the whole train to leave the station and come back. (move forward and fade way; then gets back into position after 8 or so sim minutes)

4. I'm pretty sure even if I could get it to work at a little over 2000 polys it seems a bit high.

It wolud be great if someone/anyone could look the file over and help to get it into working order. :lovestruc

Thanks for the help and support,
Shaundak21

[Echo]

Hi Shaun,

I'm going to prefix this by saying that I think you might be biting off more than you can chew for a first project. Why don't you take this one step at a time?

First, make a plain deco statue of a train. Then, when you've gotten an object to show up in game, learn how to manage poly counts. Once that looks brilliant and shows up perfectly and has a satisfactory poly count, that's when you start to look into animation and BHAVs.

If you try to do everything in one big rush, you end up with none of the bits working, and that can be really disheartening. :)

That said, here are the answers to your questions:

1. You've renamed your mesh subsets, but haven't made any of the other necessary changes. The textures are mapped to your mesh using those subset names, so if you change the names they won't automatically show up.
The easiest option is to change the subset names in your mesh to the names that your clone's mesh originally had. That will reduce the number of subset groups you can have, but since you're only using one texture image anyway that's probably not a problem for you.
If you want to add new subsets, there's a tutorial for that here:
http://www.modthesims.info/showthread.php?t=103379
If you want reconnect existing subsets with existing texture resources, you need to read through the scenegraph information here:
http://modthesims.info/wiki.php?title=Tutorials:Understanding%20the%20Scenegraph

2. Your object doesn't have any joints, nor does it have any animation files, nor does it have any code to tell it to animate, which is probably why it isn't animating. ;) There's a tutorial on creating new animations here:
http://www.modthesims.info/showthread.php?t=239160
and a tutorial on creating a new skeleto for a custom object here:
http://modthesims.info/showthread.php?t=270622

3. To do this, you will need to write new custom interactions. That is, BHAVs. There is a tutorial on that here:
http://modthesims.info/showthread.php?t=142907

4. 2000 polys is high for what that mesh is, essentially a long tube with some bench seats on it, but it is not dangerously high for an object which will cover several tiles. If you'd like to bring it down though, there's a great tiptorial on reducing poly counts here:
http://www.modthesims.info/showthread.php?t=289974

Best of luck!

[Shaundak21]

Thank you, I'm getting right back to work on it.