I now have the palm mod fully working in a bi -mod folder.

So that others do not suffer the same fate of many wasted hours I include below the reason for my month-old problem:

In the vanilla rome folder there is a file in vegetation/sprites called "semi_arid_dense_forest_0.tga.dds"

One of the palm generated files bears also the same name (but is generated as a tga unless you convert it to tga.dds).

It seems that the game will default to the one in the rome directory, which is why those sprites show in-game rather than the palms.

As the vanilla game needs this sprite (?), I assume it cannot be deleted or have its name changed (which is not really practical anyway for installation).

So, reason for problem identified...now to work out how to get it to work without whilst keeping the original vanilla sprite intact...tips anyone?

Has no one else encountered this problem, or is it a BI thing?