Does Topology tools or Smooth Spline cause map corruption?

JonMyrlennBailey

Well-known member
Map corruption: unwanted spikes, new pieces of spline or track to involuntarily be added to existing spline points, broken/disconnected spline points (Carz disappear into spline points in roads), sinkholes, black spots and blank spots (texture missing in spots, bare train board exposed)?

I often have this trouble with eraser track and YARN road components. These items like to "edit" themselves periodically.


To date it is rumored that:

1. editing the maps of other authors
2. using Undo too much repeatedly
3. spraying new textures over existing textures

all cause bad things (unwanted changes) to happen to a map.


I was wondering, can getting "tamp-happy" with ground edit tools, Up, Down, Plateau or Smooth Spline also cause trouble? Is Topology editing known or suspected to cause issues?

Lately, I have been doing a lot of topo editing followed by a tad of texture editing and found corruption upon my map following inspection of the entire map with a fine-tooth comb.

I tend to "pound" the devil out of my ground to "massage" it into shape as perfectly as possible. Using wire frame view makes seeing the shape of the ground much easier than when covered with texture. The crisscrossing lines are a good yard stick to guide me when adjusting ground height.

I am also a loose cannon with that Smooth Spline feature. I hate ground that is uneven that roads lay upon.

I hate track ballast that looks sloppy along the ground also.

I can't stand building that are on uneven ground either.

In the building trades improving the ground for neatness and practicality is called grading.


I am beginning to wonder if any kind of editing, as adjusting spline heights, adding switches or signals or even placing trains on track, of maps in Surveyor can cause bad things
in the long run.
 
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If you really want to mess with OPR (OtherPeoplesRoutes) and risk breaking them, make a clone of the route, and go right ahead fixing things on the cloned route, that aren't broken in the first place

Personally I never sweat the small stuff ... and just have fun running a train on a route

My first route that I learned all about Trainz on was: "NS Reading Lines" on USLW

I tugged and pulled it apart, until I knew what made it tick ... it was a fun learning experience

My favorite small route is "Down East Fishing Village" by Gfisher
 
It is not enough to play with my trains alone but to have them look good and run like a Swiss watch as well.

Of course, I always clone the work of others before monkeying with it. It seems like altering the textures
is the biggest culprit of all. It has gotten to the point that I make an incremental backup of a layout BEFORE
attempting to do any texture editing including spraying some shadow under a few trees.

Using textures is now the most horrifying prospect and risk as an editor of OPR and it makes me gun shy
and nervous to open up that dreaded Paint tab. I also get scared if I hit three or more Undos in a row
wondering what I may have screwed up this time somewhere on the map.

After any Paint work comes a painstaking inspection of the entire map. First a scan overhead then
a close-up check of all tracks and splines. Sometimes a sinkhole or dark blotch will be spotted track side
or road side that was missed in the overhead visual scan. One time a sink hole took out my entire post office
in Tehachapi, California along the Mojave. I put the route in winter mode during inspection
to remove the foliage from some of the trees. This makes possible sink holes easier to spot
while on Sinkhole Patrol.

Another time, I found a surprise sink hole hiding under a piece of YARN road I had deleted
for replacement of a defective YARN intersection coz traffic cars were disappearing into thin air at the spline point. Sink holes can hide
under buildings or virtually anywhere on a map. A YARN intersection is defective when a piece of YARN road either won't join it
or the road is warped if it does join and the straighten-spline tool won't fix it. Again, I have found corruption of YARN roads
and modules a consequence of using Paint during an inspection that follows a texture application.

The Mojave Sub is in earthquake-prone California by the way.
 
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Yawn.

This might come as a surprise to you kid but the Mojave Sub you're working on right now doesn't exist in any earthquake zone. It's just a bunch of bits and bytes running in a program that can't even simulate dynamic lighting much less any sort of tectonic physics.
 
well, in the "real world", anyway

who knows what gremlins are lurking inside my PC messing up my "virtual" Mojave Sub, only the Trainz Shadow knows!
 
"complete" only if you want no eye candy like trotting horse wagons, farms, wild animals, hunters with guns and dogs, bleating goats and sheep, barking dogs, quacking ducks, honking geese, goobling turkeys, braying burros, ox carts, ass carts, neighing horses, meowing pussy cats, grunting pigs, fishing boats, Greyhound buses, porters, taxicabs, majestic big leaf maple trees, train stations, parks, churches, school houses, children, bicycles, cops, helicopters, soldiers, tanks, jeeps, tractors, bulldozers, road graders, steam rollers, yellow school buses, MOW trucks and speeders running on the line, small animated smoking grass fire along the track with a firemen and a fire engine, bodies of water, speeder sheds and flying airplanes

I have a neat scene in the Tehachapi Mountains with a pack of wolves on one side of the track facing a small deer herd on the opposite side of the track. The wolves are in position for the kill. They risk running across the track for a train to run them over and save the deer.

Another track side scene has a black bear along the tracks with hunters, a dog and pack horses ready to bag the animal.

How about a small track side hobo camp?

In Trainz, I can incorporate most if not all of all my favorite real-world things (boating, camping, hunting, flying, fishing, farm animals, wildlife) so driving locos does not ever get boring.

the original Mojave Sub packed into TS12 is bare bones
 
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.....is up to you
This.
This a thousand times.

I'm trying to not sound mean here, but seriously....
Stop blaming Trainz for not being able to handle the roads you overlap over other roads because they don't look just exactly right... Stop blaming content creators, the majority of whom's work you're downloading that they created for free with no compensation... Stop telling us about every little quirk you encounter when destroying those same creators' content because it doesn't match your exacting specifications to the scale inch. The majority of the "issues" you've posted seem to be unique to your routes. I too am sometimes a little overzealous when trying to get things "right" but I've never encountered much in the way of what you're posting. The worst I've suffered is completely losing a route to some kind of table corruption that caused my splines to fly all over the place - Yes I posted about it, but that was a pretty major problem, and unfortunately the route now sits in my route list untouched, a casualty to the complex but sometimes buggy database system that is Trainz. Some things are unavoidable. Others can be avoided by accepting that there are limitations to the system.

Every time you repaint a texture, adjust a spline point, add objects, the system is rewriting that point in a gigantic database of everything involved in the route. Coordinates of spline points and objects, textures and heights applied to every given coordinate (there's an entry for each and every spot on the grid... every 5m or 10m square has it's own entry.) Computers are not infallible, maybe there's something in your installation that's causing parts of the table to corrupt and interfere with the writing of these data points. Have you tried completely uninstalling and cleanly reinstalling Trainz? Checked your RAM and HDD for errors or bad spots? Tried a database repair? Or are you just assuming that everything in your system is as perfect as you expect your perfected routes to be and therefore assume there's a problem in the program that somehow no one else (or very few) has ever encountered?

For the record, Straighten Spline cannot straighten a spline between two fixed point objects (ie a single spline between two intersections with no mid-points). It can also only straighten so much if you go through and straighten every section - your straightening fights itself at that point if things are not lined up properly.
 
If carz are disappearing at a spline point at a fixed road junction, this is due to the road being disconnected. Put in an extra spline point on the road just before the fixed intersection, delete the spline in between these two spline points, and reconnect the road.

Multiple undo operations have always been an issue and it's never, ever been good to do more than may three or four at a time. This is due to the memory buffer holding all this information, and the issue is compounded by the number of objects and the size of the routes. The good news is at least in TS12 this did not crash the program completely, however, spline objects, especially those attached to fixed objects, can get screwed with very badly. In TRS2004 through TS2010 it really was worse, there was that risk of losing everything with even a couple of undo operations. I got quite adept at doing things without resorting to the undo, or rarely using it and that has been the case even today.

The pits and peaks are related to texturing. If you look carefully, you will see that these follow along seams and sections. There is a finite limit to a given number of textures on a route, which today even in TS12 is far higher than it was in previous versions of Trainz. In TS12 the limit is 256 textures per baseboard. As textures are added, they will be added until they reach that limitation. When you've reached that limitation, other textures will fall off the stack to make room for the new ones. This can cause holes in the texture cover, which will cause holes in the mesh.

The color table in the game engine is made up of a specific number of usable colors by the user plus the greyscale textures used to represent height information. For user-generated textures, there is no true black, white or greys. These are reserved for heights with black representing the deepest, lowest point on a route or baseboard, and white representing the highest points. There's also a bug which is compounded by this, which has existed since the earliest UTC release back in 2001. When using the texture fill tool, the textures do not fill out completely to the edges, which causes black borders along the seams.

Starting with TRS2009, or thereabouts, the color-tables were changed to include the height information in the same table structure. This was an added advantage because it increased the total number of textures available to the user by freeing up memory space. This now causes the more obvious spikes in addition to the holes and chasms, which got worse as our routes have gotten larger and more complex. To add insult to injury, as we merge routes together, the color-tables need to be combined together as this then becomes a single route rather than two smaller, or large routes. In addition when this occurs, colors are dropped from the tables, and there are now holes and spikes. It's these black borders, remember black is the lowest point on the route or baseboard, becomes a hole or chasm. With the old black-border issue still there since UTC, we now have lines of chasms and sometimes spikes.

The problem, however, seems to have gone away finally in T:ANE, but is still apparent in TS12 perhaps due to the different underlying game engine and the increased amount of program memory available with the 64-bit program.

John
 
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I think you guys are bashing JohnMyrienneBailey unfairly. (JCitron excepted) I agree with his desire for perfection. Getting it right takes hours of work and some creators just aren't willing to do that.
Mick
 
To avoid sink holes and spikes in TS12 don't ever use Replace assets for ground textures, you will live to regret it and be repairing deep holes and pointy bits for the next year. When you initially replace the ground texture using replace assets, it appears to be OK however you may see some darkish spots, these are what often morph into sink holes or spikes the next time you open the route however sometimes they need a prompt, such as using the smooth spline or altering the terrain.

TANE doesn't suffer from this if anyone is wondering.
 
My unwanted peaks, YARN screw-ups and sink holes are undoubtedly from spraying new textures over old ones. This is what close inspections of the map have revealed to me time and time again immediately following spraying the ground.

Paint, with its inherent risk of screwing up OPR's, is a necessary evil. If I add a new track or road to the map, I have to spray ballast or gravel along the track or road or it will look stupid. If I add a new parking lot on top of existing soil texture, it too must be "paved" with the proper asphalt or concrete texture. When new trees are added, shadow must be sprayed underneath them. When adding a body of water to a sandy terrain, dark brown mud texture has to be applied to the lake bottom or river bed to look natural through the translucent water chips on top.

I have accepted by now that I have a lot of patchwork to do whenever I reshape another person's route.
Trainz is inherently weak software by design and perhaps my PC hardware is not the boldest on the market to boot.

I don't know of any other gaming software that offers the ability for the end user to edit or build his gaming world from scratch as
in Surveyor.

While driving trains in Trainz, I really don't think of it as a "game" but more of a computerized toy. With games, there is competition
or something at stake to win or lose. A race car simulator would be more of a game to me.

The real game (or challenge) for me is editing the maps of others in Surveyor and battling the sink holes. It is risky business.
 
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Jon,

It's all about moderation... You add a parking lot, add your texture but do it so it blends into the already laid textures. A texture here, a texture there won't do that. It's when you're replacing large sections that will cause the problem.

This issue with YARN intersections has always been there. In T:ANE they're now broken due to miss-referenced attachment points so there are some intersections without the ability to attach roads, while some attach the roads, but at an odd angle, making kinks and swales in the attached road. These issues sadly stem back to how the asset was constructed in the first place. They worked well enough in their old days, but now they're inherent faults are now appearing as the program becomes more complex. This is no reflection on the original author; it's just a sign of how things change over the years.

You have to remember too that this is probably the only program out there which allows an end-user to create a complete interactive environment with a fair amount of ease, and to use components now which are going on 15 years old. Yes, some of these assets were built back in 2001 and 2002! I've been using this since December 2003, and some of the same assets I used back then were old and are being used today on one of my routes. The issue too is the nearly unlimited building capabilities make routes extremely complex, and probably more than what the computer can handle. If the route is sluggish when open for editing in Surveyor, it will be even more sluggish once the consists are added.

I agree this is more like a gigantic model railroad than a game. You, and many others including myself, can only imagine what it would have been like if we had this as children. I don't think I would have left the house because this stuff, when it works well, is the stuff dreams are made of, or at least those dreams by railroad and model railroad enthusiasts.

John
 
John,

On my latest map in modification, Mojave Sub, extensive texture over-spraying was done by me. Yes, I paid the price by having to spend many hours repairing the consequential damage to YARN splines, texture and terrain that followed.I also did extensive topo work. Using Plateau, I dug a lake 150 feet deep and about 5 miles in circumference in the flat Mojave desert. The original desert texture was sand, of course. Imagine the amount coverage of this lake bottom with dark mud texture to cover up the sand. Then spraying the wall of the cliffs surrounding the lake with a sandstone texture of this big body of water. In the real world, no civil engineers would build such a big reservoir by excavating such a huge amount of earth.
 
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John,

On my latest map in modification, Mojave Sub, extensive texture over-spraying was done by me. So was extensive topo work. Using Plateau, I dug a lake 150 feet deep and about 5 miles in circumference in the flat Mojave desert. The original desert texture was sand, of course. Imagine the amount coverage of this lake bottom with dark mud texture to cover up the sand. Then spraying the wall of the cliffs surrounding the lake with a sandstone texture of this big body of water. In the real world, no civil engineers would build such a big reservoir by excavating such a huge amount of earth.

Yeah, but our world isn't completely flat either and made of a grayscale image used to lift up meshes. :)

That kind of work won't cause the chasms and peaks. It's probably related to using the texture fill area tool. Remember what I said about the black lines where the textures don't line up? It's usually along these lines where the chasms occur.

If you zoom way out and look at the route from a map view, you can see a dotted line following along baseboard borders and sometimes filled areas such as I mentioned.

John
 
Still, that lake used a lot of texture over-spraying to make the bottom the correct color for a body of water. Not just color blending: that desert dry land turned lake bottom went from total light sand to absolute dark mud brown. Of course, I figure by now whenever I open up the Paint tab and "have at it" liberally, I am asking for trouble elsewhere on the map. I enjoy my custom textures but have to take the punishment that comes with them. No big deal any more. Making a back-up before committing to any amount of serious texture work always saves me in the end. The same goes for the track side farm that I made with many acres of wheat fields, corn fields and hay fields that I had to spray to get the proper look.

Incidentally, all my texture work for my Mojave mod is complete. My last greatest mod is re-positioning all the track-side telegraph poles through the Tehachapi mountains so they are not running through deep canyons, over hill tops above tunnels and along the sides of cliffs but more or less placed close to the track and removing any barbed wire fence that looks weird like running along a hillside that is almost vertical.

The original Mojave Sub in TS12 <kuid:487560:69000> is a creation of jointedrail.
 
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