Kunos... please... stahp updating livery preview pics

Seriously, I love you guys and everything you do, and I'm not one to complain about regular updates... but don't you have more important things to do besides "improve" livery previews for the hundredth time? Every time I rearrange liveries how I want them, a new preview update (that, honestly, doesn't look any better than the previous "improvement") screws all my work up. Anyone else here that's OCD about modifying their AC files will probably agree, it's a massive pain for no real improvement. The livery previews are FINE. Please, leave them be...

 

Every AC patch runs iirc a file verification, all original files in the Steam game folder that got modified get changed back. That includes the livery previews that to my knowledge received their last major update with patch 1.5.

Would probably *be nice to implement a switch to turn that off somewhere. Or make files placed in the Documents folder override the game folder, something like that.

Edit: forgot a word*

 

The verification is necessary and the previews are kinda OK at the moment.
So I perfectly understand the OP and I also understand Kunos why they need all their files to be identical.

I'm afraid this is half glass full situation.

But to have to choose which folders the game to verify ... please, that is too much.

 

Only if they're missing they get replaced

 

For what I remember (and you can blame me for pointing the devs of some of these issues), when liveries were updated in 1.5.0 with a new position and filter, but file sizes and compression were all over the place, so when the new tool came out at 1.5.x (5?), they received another overhaul to make them all to one standard. But wrong a filter was used so cars looked blurred, hence the overall update that came first with 1.6. In the last 1.6.2 patch the preview update was at least meant to fix a preview image that was left at 4K resolution (didn't notice changes on other cars), and the 370Z came with new previews surely because the 3D model was changed, it should have been very minor.

Your custom previews wouldn't be modified back just for failing verification, because patching won't do it for files it won't replace, but simply at those 3 major overhauls (1.5.0, 1.5.x, 1.6) the update put preview.jpg on those folders. But now that shouldn't need to be repeated, because what was meant at 1.5.0 seems now finally done (even if it took 3 tries that upset your work), except probably for cars that will suffer further 3d modifications (some in the Japanese Pack come to mind). IMHO, I prefer to have them looking the same as the cars ingame when they're updated. So after the last (probably definitive) overhaul, having them occasionally replaced also alerts you when your previews aren't also up to date on older cars.

As someone who also messes a lot with previews, my advise is to back up your custom previews. It's quite simple, a dumb way is to copy your cars folder to a temp folder, and run a batch file that will delete everything but preview.jpg files, and keep the file structure intact. By this way, you'll just need to copy them over if they become replaced, or if you reinstall your game from scratch. And it takes a lot less time to do than generating previews.

 

@Chazz Ranger
Here's a way for you to backup your previews:

Go to assettocorsa\content\, copy (don't move!) "cars" to , as an example, d:\previews, so you'll end up with d:\previews\cars\<all car folders you had ingame>
Then, inside d:\previews place the following text in a delete.bat text file.

Code:

for /R %%i in (animations) do rd /s/q "%%i"
for /R %%i in (sfx) do rd /s/q "%%i"
for /R %%i in (texture) do rd /s/q "%%i"
for /R %%i in (ui) do rd /s/q "%%i"
FOR %f IN (*.*) DO IF NOT [%f]==[preview.jpg] DEL /Q %f

By running it, almost every file under d:\previews\...\ will be deleted, except for the preview.jpg files under their correct <car>\skins\<skin name> folder structure. Then you can just zip the cars folder to backup current preview.jpgs, and paste over when needed.
You can of course use it also to clean a single car folder added later to it.
Hope it helps!

PS: If anyone knows a more elegant solution to just copy preview.jpgs while preserving their structure please let me know of it!

 

Argh, can't edit the previous post anymore. I was trying to simplify it in the last minute it but it doesn't work as intended (tested on an already clean folder, doh).
Please use this instead, it's less elegant but should cover most other files:

Code:

for /R %%i in (animations) do rd /s/q "%%i"
for /R %%i in (sfx) do rd /s/q "%%i"
for /R %%i in (texture) do rd /s/q "%%i"
for /R %%i in (ui) do rd /s/q "%%i"
del *.acd /s
del *.db /s /ah
del *.dat /s
del *.dds /s
del *.png /s
del *.ini /s /ah
del *.json /s
del *.kn5 /s
del *.knh /s
del *.ksanim /s
del *.pdf /s
del *.psd /s
del *.txt /s
del preview_original.jpg /s
del original_preview.jpg /s

Again, take much care to run this batch only inside where you have your copied cars folder for cleaning, as it'll massively delete files under the folder its in, and all following subfolders.

 

No, and that's also a large part of the problem - most files in a folder where an update occurs will get overwritten back to their original
For example, I modify livery licence plates, they get reverted back to originals with every livery update. I modify car shadows, they get reverted back with every car update. I modify many files in system/cfg, the all get reverted back to original with any update to that folder... etc.
Clearly I need to stop tinkering so much

 

Clearly ac needs to have a feature to turn that off I didn't know that

 

Really, it's a small price to pay for having a sim with such moddability that I can fine-tune so many details to my own liking. It's only an hour of my time at most, depending on the update, to put everything back the way I want it. I have all my modded files backed up obviously, so usually I can just copy/paste/overwrite stuff, depending on what changes KS made

 

If you're in the cars folder (will also create cars folder on D: )

Code:

xcopy *preview.jpg d:\cars\*.* /s

From anywhere (assuming steam path is default)

Code:

xcopy "C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\SteamApps\common\assettocorsa\content\cars\*preview.jpg" d:\cars\*.* /s

 

But of course! I completely forgot that a simple xcopy would replicate the original dir structure instead of overwriting source /s preview.jpgs repeatedly in the root of the destination folder. Thanks!

 

Give me a break , I haven't needed to use xcopy in the last 20 years, while the regular copy has seen much more use to replace things at a specific location.

 

No problem Thanks, although you're waaay more computer saavy than I am. All your posts on this thread went so far over my head NASA is currently calculating their reentry trajectory
Guess I should start learning how batch files work...

 

I've been redoing some of my batches for reorganizing my stuff, so I'll PM you some instructions in a bit that should make these batches more clear. I guess it'd be way OT to continue in this thread.