Yes, I get it is just that I was working with 9 mipmap levels, then I tried with 12 but now I should try with 15 levels on a 1024 texture then? if I use a high-reso pic it wouldn't affect the speed of the game as same as with objects, right?

...yes I'm working with HCP+SimPE, was just a try to make a diagonal rail track for a rollercoaster, it needs to be transparent to see throug the rail intersections, but as far as I know the 5x5 and 2x2 tiles places the texture image fixed on the floor without allowing to move it, so I think if I draw the rail doing a loop around a 5x5 tiles space I could place it first and then make the 1x1 tile match with it, but I couldn't rotate it so maybe I need a set of 4 or more tiles to have the diagonal fully functionally on all directions and the surrounding tiles to fill the draw

It is my understanding that texture size DOES affect game speed. Ideally, you want the smallest texture that still looks good. Also, use of non-standard texture sizes (i.e. NOT 256x256) makes them unuseable by Mac players. If you are going the floor tile route, you could have multiple floor tiles that you can put together to make the patterns.

Wouldn't a rug-like object be a better choice for rails? That would be a very easy mesh. So easy, that I'll even volunteer to a straight and curve piece for you if you give me some dimensional info. It would be an excellent "2nd Object" creation project. (The first being exactly as outlined by the tutorial.)

yes, you have a good idea on making objects for the rail track, let me test if the rollercoaster can drive out of the grid, I should try to place some "directional-tiles" out of the grid and see what happens. I guess maybe it could turn a bit buggy, not sure....

Are you using Echo's roller coaster from the carnival series? She has a set of floor 'tracks'.

Late to the party, that's me!

I'm just now learning about creating mipmaps; I just wanted to throw in a quick note. There's a free program called 'DDS Converter' (now on v. 2.1) that is useful for people like me who simply *like* Paint Shop Pro. It converts the common image files (.jpg, .png, etc) into .dds files. I've done a couple of test conversions and imported the .dds files into SimPE by right clicking the image and choosing 'import .dds'- so far it looks good. It also works with Vista x64, which is always a relief.

Thanks for all of you for the great information, btw.