Wow - what a response!
In no particular order:
The roads are Yarnish, imho a better prospect in 09^ than the original. No criticism of the original expressed or implied. Between YARN and Yarnish we have what I reckon to be the best road system in Trainz. Not to mention a couple of 'Yarnish-ish' mods I hope to release with the route. Nothing flash, just a couple of 'No Traffic' road variants and a reskinned intersection or two.
The grade crossing / rail height relationship is easily tweaked because the crossings are ATLS and there is a Traffic Stopper asset (actually two of them in that shot) attached to the road in the center of the intersection. Tweaking the object height of the Traffic Stoppers and the adjacent vertex heights of the road gets things very close.
The asset query:
Oil Tanks: <KUID:117608:60610> on the DLS. 60615 is worth a look too!
Green Bridge: Bridge 2L GB 02 <KUID:171456:39003> either DLS or Built In TS10, easily found either way. I use it as a 'dummy' road with the actual Yarnish road dragged across just above the bridge road surface. Bridge ends are 'Support Tower Misc' <KUID2:124017:10047:1> again either built-in or from the DLS.
Track: Various tracks from Samplaire
here. European in origin it is correct gauge, but not quite right in the track/tie attachments for USA prototype, but you have to be at LOD 0 and very picky to notice! From normal viewing it is fine, specially the low poly versions (used on the route) which have the 3D attachments removed. It's all worth playing around with, the lo-poly stuff has practically no performance impact - the hi-poly stuff though beautifull is stutter-inducing!
Still with me? Now the important bit -
The Stop Bumps.
They are an object with appreciable thickness sunk into the road. They were made for me by Mick to my recipe and he delivered exactly what I wanted. I have used 'floating plane' lines and spline lines and I hate loath and detest both! Why? Roads at grade crossings are rarely if ever horizontal as they approach the track. The road either rises to the tracks or - as in the screenshot responsible for this epistle - dips towards the tracks. Prototype USA 'Stop' lines at grade crossings are a whopping 2' wide. You CANNOT get either a spline or a floating plane to sit remotely close to a sloping road surface over a 2' width. Mick's stop lines are 'rollable' and are set up with the y-z so that they can in effect follow the slope of the road. They sit ALMOST flush and because of their 'thickness' there is absolutely no flickering. From normal viewing distances and angles the 'bump' is pretty much unnoticeable. That particular screenshot is a cruel angle and a cruel distance, they never look worse than that. From the same angle and distance splines or floating alpha planes would outright suck! The best alternative I could previously find was a narrow spline line about 4" wide, which certainly looked 'flusher', but the width looked nothing like a Stop Line.
Are Mick's 'lines' perfect? Well actually they pretty much ARE perfect, the limiting factor is N3V's decision to make .05m the minimum height-adjust increment. In situations like the above where road surface, railhead and stop-line must ALL finish at the correct relative height on sloping ground .01 would be a zillion times better (and would also match the adjustment increment of splines). It's not the line itself that causes the 'bump', nor it's implementation. It's the .05m restriction in the vertical adjustment of objects.
Rollable splines anyone???
Andy
