There is a suggestion section of the forum??? Sounds like the moderator should move my thread then...
Disappointed....
- Thread starter mogeley
- Start date
There is a suggestion section of the forum??? Sounds like the moderator should move my thread then...
Well how is that the Donner pass has been released?
http://forums.auran.com/trainz/showthread.php?t=51886
Maybe they are using SimCities terrain editor :hehe:
No where near 1000 however height range is sea level to around 3500 feet.
As a programmer by profession one learns to estimate how long these kinds of things can take even when the existing coding is unknown. Applying a height map transformation is extremely simple. It is going through each selected vertex and adding or subtracting from the current height. These functions should already be written including the interpolation as the image height maps already perform the same task.
I never mentioned "The Sims"... But did you look at the video for the SimCity terrain editor? If you saw it and tell me that you would not like features like these, then there's not much more to say.
So are you trying to do the entire route on one baseboard?
I created a map of the Grand Canyon and I know that's 7000 feet plus. I wouldn't see ever having to go more than 1000 feet within the maximum drawing distance within trainz. It's all about perspective, evidently since it's been done Donner Pass never goes above that supposed 1000 feet within the maximum drawing distance. That doesn't mean that it's not graded correctly or that the world elevation doesn't go up that 10,000 feet plus.
If you're wanting to do the Donner Pass and then zoom out and look at the entire route in a single view, my only question would be... WHY?
Obviously there are elements of Surveyor and route creation in general which could be improved and I'm not going to list them all again.
However I must join with those whose jaws are dropping in disbelief and agree that out of all the sandbox train sims, Trainz Surveyor is by far the easiest in which to create a route. MSTS is pretty much obsolete and has major hardware compatibility issues, at least on my laptop. But even in its heyday it was a stubborn beast to work with and prone to crashes, lockups or trashing weeks of work in an eye blink.
If you feel terrain painting is hard in Trainz...try Railworks. at least in Trainz for large spaces, or areas of repetitive terrain type you can grab, copy and paste large swathes at a time - including trees to make forests.
I will not hear anything adverse said about Transdem which is a superb utility (as an aside one the like of which Railworks is crying out for). If you are getting stepped terrain, as others have mentioned you are using it wrong or loading in poor quality data.
There's really little point in comparing the editors in Sim City 4000 (which ISTR can't even install or run on Vista) which provides a "God" view of a relatively small square area, with a train sim editor capable of simulating a close up detailed view of a 100 mile plus railway line. Last time I played SC the transportation/railway representation was crude to say the least, not even on par with Transport Tycoon or RRT2/3.
However I must join with those whose jaws are dropping in disbelief and agree that out of all the sandbox train sims, Trainz Surveyor is by far the easiest in which to create a route. MSTS is pretty much obsolete and has major hardware compatibility issues, at least on my laptop. But even in its heyday it was a stubborn beast to work with and prone to crashes, lockups or trashing weeks of work in an eye blink.
If you feel terrain painting is hard in Trainz...try Railworks. at least in Trainz for large spaces, or areas of repetitive terrain type you can grab, copy and paste large swathes at a time - including trees to make forests.
I will not hear anything adverse said about Transdem which is a superb utility (as an aside one the like of which Railworks is crying out for). If you are getting stepped terrain, as others have mentioned you are using it wrong or loading in poor quality data.
There's really little point in comparing the editors in Sim City 4000 (which ISTR can't even install or run on Vista) which provides a "God" view of a relatively small square area, with a train sim editor capable of simulating a close up detailed view of a 100 mile plus railway line. Last time I played SC the transportation/railway representation was crude to say the least, not even on par with Transport Tycoon or RRT2/3.
I found the SimCity's terrain editor to be rather simplistic and more like a toy than surveyor.
But let me guess you miss your little bulldozer?
Not so. When we did the DEM for the Darjeeling route, the height difference from the lowlands (450ft) to the top of the mountain near Batasia Loop (7864ft) was included in one route. That is a difference of over 7,000 feet.
Bill
The sizes of hills are also small. As I've said before the kind of terrain I'd like to bring in is several thousand feet in difference in a single tile. If you try to make terrain this tall it comes out stepped. This is because the DEM data is being converted from a real number to an Integer when it is saved as a grayscale TGA this limits the number of height steps to 256. Personally I have used PNG's which support 65536 steps. These still come out with stepped terrain. Of course I'm wanting very tall hills and mountains. Unfortunately even at maximum displacement threshold the height is still not anywhere close to what I would like.
Was this with using Trainz and it's height maps only or using a 3rd party software to apply the height maps accurately???
mezzoprezzo
Content appreciator
Hi mogeley.
I’ve just watched the Sims youtube terrain building video.
I agree, it does look easy. That’s because it’s very inflexible and designed for people at all skill levels to get a reasonable result very quickly. Great for beginners, but as soon as you become proficient, Trainz has much more versatility with many more tools, enabling a much more professional and realistic looking end product. Surveyor already does all of the things that you suggest, with the exception of automatic terrain texturing. Who would want that in Trainz? It would be a retrograde step IMHO.
I could see no method of adding and blending textures, much less the ability to create and add your own textures, or those of others. Texturing is one of the joys of Trainz Route creation. It allows an infinite number of end results and the ability to create prototypical landscapes. Everyone’s creations are therefore totally unique, as is evident with what you can see in the Screenshots section.
And we’ve not even looked at the effect different skies, water, time of day, good and bad weather fog can add to the atmosphere. Something which the Sims landscape seems to be sadly lacking.
I always have to thank the creators for providing and sharing such great stuff, whether it is a new loco, improved tracks, derelict stuff, buildings, vegetation, new routes .. the list is endless. It is they who have raised the bar with ever improving assets and reskins. Some of the work is breathtaking. That is where the real advances have been made IMHO. Treat those creator well everyone!
With regard to building high on one “tile”, by which you presumably mean one baseboard, 750metre by 750 metre, where in the world does a cliff or mountainside like that exist? I cannot find it here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cliff
Cheers
Casper
I’ve just watched the Sims youtube terrain building video.
I agree, it does look easy. That’s because it’s very inflexible and designed for people at all skill levels to get a reasonable result very quickly. Great for beginners, but as soon as you become proficient, Trainz has much more versatility with many more tools, enabling a much more professional and realistic looking end product. Surveyor already does all of the things that you suggest, with the exception of automatic terrain texturing. Who would want that in Trainz? It would be a retrograde step IMHO.
I could see no method of adding and blending textures, much less the ability to create and add your own textures, or those of others. Texturing is one of the joys of Trainz Route creation. It allows an infinite number of end results and the ability to create prototypical landscapes. Everyone’s creations are therefore totally unique, as is evident with what you can see in the Screenshots section.
And we’ve not even looked at the effect different skies, water, time of day, good and bad weather fog can add to the atmosphere. Something which the Sims landscape seems to be sadly lacking.
I always have to thank the creators for providing and sharing such great stuff, whether it is a new loco, improved tracks, derelict stuff, buildings, vegetation, new routes .. the list is endless. It is they who have raised the bar with ever improving assets and reskins. Some of the work is breathtaking. That is where the real advances have been made IMHO. Treat those creator well everyone!
With regard to building high on one “tile”, by which you presumably mean one baseboard, 750metre by 750 metre, where in the world does a cliff or mountainside like that exist? I cannot find it here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cliff
Cheers
Casper
Why on earth would you want several thousand feet in a single tile????
Realistically the train could not climb it...
:hehe:Actually around 400 GB, if my estimation is correct. Total area for the US is about 10,000,000 km^2 (wikipedia). 10 m grid with single precision floating point per value (4 bytes). Compression may reduce to perhaps 1/4, but even then still 100GB. Factor 100,000?
SCNR.
My problem with Trainz is also the reason I stopped creating a long route I had started using Blender. I was creating a number of animations all which turned black in Trainz. I posted a trouble ticket a long time ago and posted a long thread on this site - no solution offered by Trainz developers or anyone else. So the route sits unattended.
To the original poster - many on this site don't like change - too bad. Keep posting your suggestions because it is people like you who help the product move forward.
To the original poster - many on this site don't like change - too bad. Keep posting your suggestions because it is people like you who help the product move forward.
Plenty of posts on the forum about this, problem is more likely graphics card related. If you have an Nvidia400 series card turn off the Hardware compression in Content manager options. Most of us with 400 series cards have had to do this.