Explaining Trainz Terms to Non-Trainzers

jordon412

33 Year Old Railfan
Mods, please make this thread a sticky.

As we all know, not everyone in the world does not know the various terms used to describe the features of Trainz. It is because of this that I decided to start this thread. The point of this thread is to post examples of ways to use everyday objects to explain features related to Trainz. I'll start it off:

Dependency:
A dependency is something that is needed in order for something else to work. For example, in order to start the car, you need the key. The key is the dependency.

Reskinning, mesh and textures:
Reskinning is customizing Trainz stuff by changing the textures on the mesh. Think of the mesh as a bedroom. The textures are the paint that goes on the walls of the room. Reskinning is basically 'repainting' the room.

Content:
Content is everything in Trainz. For example, our house would be considered content for Trainz.

Can anyone come up with any others?
 
Asset: an object or texture in a game that can be installed into your Trainz game.

Say your room is your new route. Assets are the tables, chairs, bookshelves, bed, and other objects.
 
Don't know if filetypes for mesh's are handy but...

IM - The current standard of Trainz Meshes.

PM - The previous standard of Trainz Meshs no longer supported for various reasons.
 
Yeah, mesh.
What's a mesh?

A mesh is like the spiderweb hanging in the corner of the ceiling. It can be invisible but if you spray it with a fine mist of water then you can see it more clearly.

A mesh is like a piece of the fly-screen that covers the window. It is made of wires, inter-meshed with each other. If you cut out a part of the screen and mold it into the shape of an automobile then you have the makings of a Trainz asset. To complete it, paint it in a nice red texture. Then add more dependencies: wheels, number-plates etc.

Of course, there are too many wires in the mesh, so there are more squares than are really necessary to make the most efficient mesh. To simplify the model, remove the squares that aren't really needed. Those squares were four-sided when the screen was flat but now some are distorted.

What's a square that isn't square any more? A polygon, or poly for short. Too many of those make the mesh more complicated than it needs to be, and takes longer to render.

What's render? To display the asset Trainz needs to load the mesh files and the texture file and then work out what should be seen and what is hidden by the foreground. As you circle around the asset, the picture changes. Different parts of the model are displayed and parts you could see before are now hidden. This is rendering, ja?

What's hidden? Stuff you can't see, but you know it's there, right?
 
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Mesh for Trainz: the 3d geometry of an object to be rendered (drawn) in the game. Also includes mapping of the images (textures) that are applied to the surfaces to give them colour and detail. Optionally includes details for animations that can give movement to parts of the object. Trainz now only supports Indexed Meshes that have file name extension of ".im".

Progressive meshes (invented by a staffer at Microsoft, and file name extension of ".pm") were originally used in Trainz to facilitate automatic Level Of Detail (LOD) polygon reduction. These require more CPU time than reloading more than one IM meshes and also were a bit unreliable giving poor results. PM meshes have been superseded in Trainz for a long time. They contain all the IM mesh data plus more stuff to control the poly collapsing, hence the game can still render them.
 
I agree there is a need for the contents of this thread to be easily located in one place. And as it happens, there is already a place for the information: <http://online.ts2009.com/mediaWiki/index.php/Glossary>.

Instead of re-inventing the rail, I suggest reviewing that page, and making necessary additions and corrections there, so it is all in one place.

ns

I will go ahead and re-post the point of this thread.

As we all know, not everyone in the world does not know the various terms used to describe the features of Trainz. <snip> The point of this thread is to post examples of ways to use everyday objects to explain features related to Trainz.

Here are a few examples of the point of the thread.

Asset: an object or texture in a game that can be installed into your Trainz game.

Say your room is your new route. Assets are the tables, chairs, bookshelves, bed, and other objects.

A mesh is like the spiderweb hanging in the corner of the ceiling. It can be invisible but if you spray it with a fine mist of water then you can see it more clearly.

A mesh is like a piece of the fly-screen that covers the window. It is made of wires, inter-meshed with each other. If you cut out a part of the screen and mold it into the shape of an automobile then you have the makings of a Trainz asset. To complete it, paint it in a nice red texture. Then add more dependencies: wheels, number-plates etc.
 
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Paintshed - A old tool used to reskin Trainz objects. Found in Trainz Community Edition (Original Trainz) thru Trainz 06. Currently, it is no longer supported.
 
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