Bear Creek and South Jackson roads partially hidden

[DDedicos]

I believe that the author of the route, Horace Fithers, is no longer active in Trainz, but I'm asking if anyone who has this route has this problem. There are portions of the route where it is obvious that the roads are there, but then they disappear beneath the terrain. Any help is appreciated!

 

[dangavel]

I seem to remember that Horace had some issues with his creation . Can't remember the details, but he came from "real "modelling and he could not handle the things that stuffed up what he had already made. it may have had to do with him using an early version of a trainz 2019 which he updated to a new build but it resulted in some faults, like the roads disappearing , someone offered to help him fix the issues but he had had enough of the games foibles by then and he disappeared in a fit of exasperation. I imagine its just a matter of making the roads higher by using surveyor. his youtube channel is still up Btw. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCKkZbM2b7FJAAIj5a6mEjzA

 

[JCitron]

There's nothing stopping you from fixing the route. The route is extremely well done and with some patience, you'll have something you can drive and enjoy.

What happened is he built the route originally in an early version of TRS19. The initial versions of TRS19, like earlier versions of Trainz, required users to tamp and lock down roads by clicking on the spline points to prevent the roads from floating whereas later versions, just as it is now, allow roads to sit on the surface of the terrain and lay flat without tamping them down with bridges being the exception and required a click on the spline points to prevent bridges from collapsing.

This isn't the only problem. the ground textures are PBR textures and road assets that don't always work well with PBR textures. To fix this, you need to spread out the the textures under the roads by painting a wider area under the roads. or by disabling the 3d-effect of PBR textures. You do this by setting the Shader to "Basic" in the Performance settings.

There are many other things that occurred only to add insult to injury such as the destruction of TRC crossings, thanks to the changes in program code that broke them multiple times requiring reconfiguring them in the session instead of the route and then reconfiguring them again in the route. It also didn't help that he had objects on the wrong layers, including placing trains on the route instead of in a separate session, causing trains to derail due to other trains being buried under the terrain.

 

[dangavel]

There's nothing stopping you from fixing the route. The route is extremely well done and with some patience, you'll have something you can drive and enjoy.

What happened is he built the route originally in an early version of TRS19. The initial versions of TRS19, like earlier versions of Trainz, required users to tamp and lock down roads by clicking on the spline points to prevent the roads from floating whereas later versions, just as it is now, allow roads to sit on the surface of the terrain and lay flat without tamping them down with bridges being the exception and required a click on the spline points to prevent bridges from collapsing.

This isn't the only problem. the ground textures are PBR textures and road assets that don't always work well with PBR textures. To fix this, you need to spread out the the textures under the roads by painting a wider area under the roads. or by disabling the 3d-effect of PBR textures. You do this by setting the Shader to "Basic" in the Performance settings.

There are many other things that occurred only to add insult to injury such as the destruction of TRC crossings, thanks to the changes in program code that broke them multiple times requiring reconfiguring them in the session instead of the route and then reconfiguring them again in the route. It also didn't help that he had objects on the wrong layers, including placing trains on the route instead of in a separate session, causing trains to derail due to other trains being buried under the terrain.

He created that route very swiftly , and really very well considering he was new to the game, he had a real talent, its a shame he left, if he had persevered he would have been a valuable route builder. I must admit it brought my laptop to its knees at the time as I think he used a lot of really large assets as well as a lot of turf fx. I could run trains but only on the lowest settings.

 

[Forester1]

I am curious if this is one of those shader things with PBR? Try setting shaders to basic or something?

 

[HPL]

The route was ruined by some game update and the author gave up. You will have to reset road heights manually.

 

[DDedicos]

Thanks to everyone who has chimed in on this. I’ve done the shader setting thing and no luck. I’m still learning my way around Trainz, being a long time MSTS/Open Rails user, maybe I’ll try modifying at a later time. Right now, I’m trying to understand the seemingly involved process of creating sessions for my routes that have none. Thanks!!

 

[JCitron]

He created that route very swiftly , and really very well considering he was new to the game, he had a real talent, its a shame he left, if he had persevered he would have been a valuable route builder. I must admit it brought my laptop to its knees at the time as I think he used a lot of really large assets as well as a lot of turf fx. I could run trains but only on the lowest settings.

It's an amazing route and I beta tested it for him. For a beginner, it's truly amazing how quickly he moved along through the building process. At the moment, I'm still struggling with an area on one of my own routes I've been working on since the early days of TRS2004.

He didn't use TurfFX but did use a lot of PBR textures and early ones at that. TRS19 used to struggle back then with those textures and that was one of the reasons why I shied away from them for a very long time. Even now with the improvements in both TRS19 and TRS22 and family, they can push a computer hard.

 

[netjam99]

There's nothing stopping you from fixing the route. The route is extremely well done and with some patience, you'll have something you can drive and enjoy.

What happened is he built the route originally in an early version of TRS19. The initial versions of TRS19, like earlier versions of Trainz, required users to tamp and lock down roads by clicking on the spline points to prevent the roads from floating whereas later versions, just as it is now, allow roads to sit on the surface of the terrain and lay flat without tamping them down with bridges being the exception and required a click on the spline points to prevent bridges from collapsing.

This isn't the only problem. the ground textures are PBR textures and road assets that don't always work well with PBR textures. To fix this, you need to spread out the the textures under the roads by painting a wider area under the roads. or by disabling the 3d-effect of PBR textures. You do this by setting the Shader to "Basic" in the Performance settings.

There are many other things that occurred only to add insult to injury such as the destruction of TRC crossings, thanks to the changes in program code that broke them multiple times requiring reconfiguring them in the session instead of the route and then reconfiguring them again in the route. It also didn't help that he had objects on the wrong layers, including placing trains on the route instead of in a separate session, causing trains to derail due to other trains being buried under the terrain.

I did'nt know that about bridges! Thanks. Wondered why they sometimes filled up with terrain on their own it seemed.

 

[JCitron]

I did'nt know that about bridges! Thanks. Wondered why they sometimes filled up with terrain on their own it seemed.

Yup. The same with tracks too.

There's another issue you might be interested in to be aware of.

Sometimes bridges are classified as roads instead of bridge assets. This is done through a setting in the config.txt file.

When a bridge is classified as a road, the same with a rail bridge being classified as track and not a bridge, smoothing terrain can fill in the valley under the bridge if you happen to clip the edge of the bridge with the cursor.