Finally made a 3-channel object into 4-channel - but have remaining doubts...

[Inge Jones]

After wasting weeks going down an apparently blind alley of tweaking the TXTCs, I have discovered turning a 3 channel castable object into a 4 channel castable is as simple as (in the OBJD, material blocks) changing the rgb complate reference from 0x0333406C-0x00000000-0xFAFB98B5B96A98C9 to 0x0333406C-0x00000000-0x6C320A2F418A30C6, adding a new materialblock for pattern D, and making a set of 5 complate overrides in the parent material block for the pattern D related data (tiling etc). Just copy pattern C will do.

Now my conundrum is that in all EA objects, TXTCs have the same count of superblocks as there are castable channels. There has to be a function in this, yet in all my ingame tests I can't see anything lacking in the newly 4-channeled object when I don't change the TXTCs according to this superblock convention. I have tried both with and without also changing the TXTCs and notice no difference.

Does anyone have any theories as to what vital role the Texture compositors do actually play and what might explode if one doesn't update them according to EA convention?

[BloomsBase]

I managed to do this in TSRW with the s3PE plugin.
Only replaced the existing XML's(presets) in the package with ones from a 4 color object instead of relinking.

After editing the Mask texture(add a alphachannel and changing the format) the object showed up correct with 4 recoloroble channels.
This object is a base of future vehicles i wish to create so errors should come out soon enough i hope.

[Inge Jones]

I didn't manage to enable the 4th channel in the CAST user interface until I had done that final step as in top post, although of course to make it actually *do* anything, you need the supporting edits to the complate overrides