Merging, Building, Suisse and a few other things

[tractorking]

Hey all first post here.
Ive been a sim guy from the first version of flight sim on apple IIe.
In fact Im a Flight Instructor and owe a big part of my career choice to
Flight Sim. On to my story.
Had MSTS it was entertaining for a while. Uninstalled, bout a year later,
tried it again but my disk was scratched so it would stall on the last disk.
Saw Trainz picked it up, installed, messed with a few session but at the time I thought MSTS sessions seemed more comprehensive and had a better feel to the cab, However I knew there was something more to this either via downloads and what not, I just had a feeling I was missing the key.
So one day I decided to see what the Surveyor was all about. I tried MSTS route builder but it didnt seem simple even though Ive layed scenery in MSFS before.
Well to make a long story short, my girfriend hates me my dog is bored and half of Switzerland has been created over the last month.
It has had its ups and downs. Trainz is Brillent yet buggy, in fact I believe the program steadily tears itself apart unless you defrag frequently and a
fresh reinstall seems to get things smooth again. I had to completely tear down my PC and start fresh, Trainz is now thye only program on that machine and seems to be running fairly smooth although still with ocassional crashes and shut down errors (P4 3.2 1.5g-ram 256m gt6700)

Even through all the ups and downs(and lost routes due to bad patch procedure). I am in love with it.

Ive built the SBB CFF FFS (Switzerland) from Biel/Bienne through Neuchatel and around the mountains to France (Le Locle/Chaux de Fond)

Heres my questions:
1) when merging even if I dont connect the boards except with say a tunnel from on board to the other(space in between) the track splines break at stations, I belive you all know about this but is there a solution?

2)Where can I find all the fabulous grass I see in the screenies, I tried some that I found in my stock but it was way to frame rate heavy and seemed to make thing stutter. Is there a FPS friendly grass, it looks great, I do prefer smoothness over detail but a nice bit of both would be groovy.

3) I am also looking for any other Swiss creators. Ive downloaded some good stock but would love to colaborate and possibly if the merging can be solved start a community project to complete Switzerland and merge all the seperate boards.

Any help is appreciated and all you MSFS people, if you have flying questions, I teach it for a living, fire away!!
btw-loved the Cessna flt with the SP1 scenery

[Dermmy]

Hi tractorking, welcome aboard!

(1) Have a look here.

(2) Are you running 04 or 06? Your computer specs should be up to it, but all the '3D' grass is a bit of a frame rate killer.

Cheers


Andy

[tractorking]

sorry shoulda said it before, Im running '06

Also, do you guys lay textures first (iene overall base texture) or leave it blank and build 3d then texture.

Any good tips will be great, I also found that curve tutorial on Utube
any other tuttorial links would be helpfull

Yeah I saw that link before I posted and tried using both a methods, I also tried leaving a gap and connecting with a tunnel.
Funny thing is, I went to quick drive once and everything seemed to work. told one driver to travel through 3 diffrent maps
with no problem ( although I didnt watch the whole trip) but then when I went back to surveyor and then back into Quickdrive all the spline were broken and I got the "No path" message due to the splines being torn apart.

Im just wondering if there is a way to merge with no spline breakage, I can just go back and fix em but before i spend that time i would like to see if there is a solution.

[seward]

Hi Tractorking, welcome to the Trainz Forum. You asked:
"Also, do you guys lay textures first (iene overall base texture) or leave it blank and build 3d then texture."

I do it both ways, depending on how I feel, and what type of landscape I'm working on. There is no right or wrong way of doing this, just personal preference.

I know that of lot of Trainzers do lay the track and lineside objects first, but those yellow lines don't do my eyes any favours, so, I usually 'paint' the baseboard I'm working on an overall pale green.

[tractorking]

Ive been setting up one texture (grass) and terrain sorta how I want it and then I start laying track, like the real world.

I can see the benifits of leaving it flat laying your route and then adding terrain as long as its a flat route.

[Dermmy]

I leave the texturing till after the track is down and tweaked because I find it a heck of a lot easier to make small terrain alterations while I can still see the grid...

Andy