MTM2.com

I have a couple of good tiling straight road textures, but they have a clear direction (i.e. they don't look natural in the perpendicular direction). This means that a 90° bend must make a transition from the texture at orientation 0° to orientation 90°.

Does somebody know a paint program allowing to bend a picture around an axis outside of it?
Can't do that with PSP5 (perhaps a later version?)

Well sir, long ago I was experimenting with making curves from straights in PSP. I just browsed and found two such experimental projects from early 2000....

<img src=http://mtm2.com/~forum/images/curvesexperiment.jpg>

What I did was paste the single straight as a new layer, then rotate it about 10 degrees, then place it. Paste a new layer, rotate 20 degrees, place. Paste a new layer, rotate 30 degrees, place. Repeat. If you save my image and zoom in you can see how the overlapping areas would require a lot of touch ups. This method leaves a lot to be desired, and I never did anything with it.

I imagine you might have done this yourself, and would prefer some software to automate the process, but I'm not aware of anything. I looked in the deformation options in PSP6 and didn't see anything useful. However...

I imagine there are "bend" plug-ins available for PSP that would do what you want. So that, perhaps, you could tile your image in one direction until you had a long rectangle, then you select that rectangle and bend it 90 degrees. A search for plugins might be in order (I've never really dealt with any, unfortunately).

I have more <a href="http://mtm2.com/~mtmg/downloads/misc/paint/plugins.zip">plug-ins</a> than you can <a href="http://mtm2.com/~mtmg/downloads/misc/paint/plugins0.zip">shake a stick at</a>, but I've never seen a bend. Sorry.

The best I can think of would be to try and reproduce the straight texture, and if successful, put the process through a template.

Yes I did almost exactly as you say except that I used the parallelogram deformation before rotating and pasting the segments.

Nevertheless I agree with your conclusion:

It never looks really round with 256x256 textures.

hmmmm. another good program idea.
::Programming wheels start turning::

Winterkill's method is the only one I know of for doing this. The problem with trying to let a program just "bend" the road for you, is that the texture grain would be stretched or streaked to fit the new shape. Winterkill's stone road illustrates the problem well; how could any program understand which stone shapes to copy, rotate, and evenly space as you proceed around the turn? There are probably some textures a program could work for, but none come to mind right now.

who knows...

http://www.simtel.net/product.php?id=70669

This software allows to morph one area to another. But as far as I understand the shapes of the areas can only be defined by polygons. The "tube" function which I thought could do the trick indeed creates smooth curves between segments, but also bend the selection into,surprise... a tube.

I'm thinking of something different now:

1) Using a tiling & rotatable texture, then
2) applying "racing groove" and other directional visual by the mean of objects applied to the surface

This technique (used in some other games) has the benefit of sparing a lot of textures (remember: we talk about 256x256 textures), and the drawback of increasing the object count and being practical only on flat surfaces.
I made a one sample trial which works fine, but I still fear the appearance of visual artefacts related to transparent color (00 00 00)

Anybody tried this before?
Anybody with a good tiling&rotatable asphalt texture in stock?

Do not install the program Sqirlz lite.

Beside the fact that it is not very useful, it creates lots of file associations and other entries in the registry which are not removed at uninstall. After uninstall the program can still be selected in the "open with" dialog box for opening unknown file types.

I don't know if there is other stuff left behind (dll, etc.).

Since I could not not detect anything with the firewall and virus scanner, I assume for the moment that it is just badly programmed but not malicious software.

>> Do not install the program Sqirlz lite.

When I read that I immediately downloaded and installed it.

Why? Tracking software behaviour is a necessary hobby of mine, plus I'm the joker who linked you to it. I couldn't put my name on any software recommendation unless I had run it through my own testing processes, which I had not, but I did research the program online and was very confident it was legitimate and useful. I installed it today to be able to let you know what it did or did not do.


>> Beside the fact that it is not very useful, it creates lots of file associations and other entries in the registry which are not removed at uninstall.

Quite right.


>> After uninstall the program can still be selected in the "open with" dialog box for opening unknown file types.

Due to the junk in the registry.


>> I don't know if there is other stuff left behind (dll, etc.).

Nope.


>> Since I could not not detect anything with the firewall and virus scanner, I assume for the moment that it is just badly programmed but not malicious software.

Yep. Sloppy!

In brief, delete these registry keys and you'll be as good as new:



I could create a clickable .REG file to delete those keys and all their sub-keys if you aren't comfortable in the registry (I'm confident you are). The software created those keys when it first ran (none were pre-existing) and deleting those will remove ALL traces of the software from your system - after an uninstall of course. Since they were created after the installer installed, the un-installer couldn't know to remove them.

In summary, the software is quite safe, and effective for what it does I suppose, and the leftover registry keys are quite harmless - though annoying for those who like a clean environment. Quite a lot of programs leave junk like this around after an uninstall, which is one reason why registry cleaners have become popular. This case was not too bad, though the shell-open bits were an annoyance as they showed up in the 'file types' installed programs list. I hope to post more on this subject later....

Thanks Wint

No problem with deleting the registry entries and glad to hear there are no other leftovers in the system.

On my former computer I had a utility identifying all system changes (registry, dll, config.sys etc) between two snapshots, e.g. before and after installing new software.

Can't remember the name of the tool, but I bet you're using something similar.

Any (safe, lol) recommendation in this respect?

>> I bet you're using something similar. Any (safe, lol) recommendation in this respect?

Quite right, and yes indeed.

My favorite (and likely the one you had) is <a href=http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1759,25475,00.asp target=ctrl>InCtrl5</a>, a PC Magazine utility that is and was free and freely downloadable for years (I have the zip if anyone wants it). Another fine one I've used is <a href=http://www.geocities.com/ggmartau/ target=tun>Total Uninstall</a>, which is reliable and free.

The software works by taking a snaphot of your registry and hard drive contents before and after you run software, then reports the changes made to your system. You can track every registry and file addition, change or deletion, which is very powerful information. Generally they only report information, leaving it up to you to take corrective action when needed, though Total Uninstall has the option to undo the changes made to your system. I suspect there are similar tools available in commercial security-suite products, but I'm not familar with any.

These tools can be time consuming to run but well worth the trouble. I never run software, even ones made in this community, without scanning it's every move, and I have tracked quite a few outrageous moves made by supposedly trustworthy software. I tracked the single most destructive act ever done to my computer with InCtrl5, by reviewing the report weeks after the damage was done (it was from someone in this community in fact, using a very bad installer).

The key is making multiple reports, one when you install, then one when you first run the program. A program's first run is often the most revealing, a time when things can get extracted and added to your system. Some programs deserve a report for their second or third runs. Finally, you can get a report after an uninstall, and compare it to the previous reports to see what was missed. Another key is to not do or run anything unnecessary while taking your snapshots, so the report doesn't get flooded with things it shouldn't.


Also, remember this game? http://forum.mtm2.com/viewtopic.php?t=2240

It contained one of the most outrageous bits of "foistware" I've experienced, like a trojan it installed device drivers without warning, secretly, during the program's first run, and left them them there after the game was uninstalled. I'd bet anyone who loaded the game still has them in memory now.

Files:
windows\system\ntkernel.vxd
windows\system32\drivers\prohlp02.sys
windows\system32\drivers\prodrv06.sys

Keys:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\VxD\ntkernel
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\prohlp02
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\prodrv06

It's part of a third-party anti-copying technology that infiltrates systems and is well known to cause many problems for people. I'd forgotten about it until now, after getting quite steamed about it when I first discovered it.

In addition to these files, newer versions of Starforce also include
windows\system\iosubsys\prosync1.vxd

Allegedly the following file also relates to the scheme
Windows\System32\Drivers\ProHlp02.sys

And finally the install directory contains a protect.dll (which normally gets uninstalled properly).