TG2 to TG3 Population Conversion

[dorianvan]

So I take a simple TG2 scene with a single population of trees, open in TG3, hit render and the trees are there. My goal is to utilize the cache settings, so I select the population, click perform an action\upgrade selected pop to v4, repopulate, and trees are gone (only little dots appear). What am I missing?

[Dune]

Perhaps you have to re-attach the object to the population?

[dorianvan]

Maybe so, but easier said than done for me. Shouldn't this be automatic? Maybe it will be soon. Anyway, how do I change it if that's the problem? Thanks

[Dune]

I don't know what I can say here as an alpha tester, better wait for one of the staff to answer this. But it should work and will! But what you need to do about it now, I don't know. I'll do a little test...
If you change it to populator v4 this (see images) should happen. Old pop is now called (Pop v3) and disabled. New pop is in its place, and should load the instances from the 'old' object file. You should be able to delet the old 'Pop v3'.

[Oshyan]

We're working on improving the upgrade functionality. In the meantime if you're having a problem with it, likely the solution is to reconnect the object inside the populator v3 to the object maker input on the populator. Easiest way to do that is go to the new v4 populator, find the "object maker" field, click the button to the right with the green +, go to Assign Object, find the object you want and select it. Now, what I prefer to do is go to the internal network of the old populator, select the object node and Ctrl-X to cut, then go to the internal network of the new populator (right-click and choose Internal Network in the node network view, or open settings for the node and click the gear network next to the node name and choose edit internal network), then Ctrl-V to paste, and finally connect the object output to the Object Maker input at the bottom. The reason I take this approach is then you can delete the old v3 node.

As I said the upgrader will be improved so this kind of workaround shouldn't be necessary in the future.

- Oshyan

[dorianvan]

@Ulco, thanks; once re-attached per Oshyan's methods, it worked perfect.
@Oshyan, thanks; both approaches worked. I like to keep things tidy, so for me deleting is better, especially when there's lots of different populations.

[Klas]

Could this be so easy?
Edit your tgd, find populator_v3 replace with populator_v4

[dorianvan]

Is there a way to convert all the populations at once, or do I have to go through each population at a time?.....Never mind, it doesn't take long to do. Thanks for the help!

[jaf]

Could this be so easy?
Edit your tgd, find populator_v3 replace with populator_v4

I didn't try an extensive test, but what klas wrote seems to work fine and it's quick and easy.  Just make sure you know the caveats of doing search and replace on multiple items in a file.  For example, don't do a search for "_v3" and replace with "v4" or you will likely change version 3 shaders that don't have version 4 updates. Spell out as much as possible to narrow the search and replace down.  Again, what klas wrote seems safe.  Oh, and always try it first on a copy of the xml file you want to change/update so you can recover if things go bad.

I suspect Planetside is not too "keen" on editing the xml since if your unsure of what your doing, it's easy to screw things up.

Many thanks to PS for adding the name of the population as they are being created.  This makes it much easier to identify a population that is very slow do to a mistake entering the population data.

[DannyG]

Any plans on this conversion being updated?

[Upon Infinity]

Could someone tell me where the option to upgrade population is?  I haven't seem to have stumbled upon it yet.  Thanks.

[Dune]

Here, for the image quickly done with the grass clump. That small button left of 'populate all'.

[DannyG]

This tab is greyed out and not working

[Dune]

Because it's already V4. It was just to show the location.

[DannyG]

My question is in regards to an auto updater? Oshyan made reference to possible future updates. It seems you still have to manually replace v3 populators with v4. The populations I am seeing with the Greyed out v4 update mentioned above are still v3 populations in the network