My mistake. I thought John’s information just contained a typo regarding Basemapz. Unfortunately, the information provided may be beyond my grasp of knowledge of the program. IE You reference multiple images. I am talking about one image needed for import to illustrate at scale the track plan to trace over. The “inside of a texture.text file” ??? “.tga files ??? I appreciate the input, and I will do my best to follow the steps, but we will see.
Another thought I had was to find a friend with a Windows base PC. Ask them to download Basemapz, then I send them my image and out put information. They could then create the file(s) needed via Basemapz. Given back to me I could take the file(s) and import through content manager as Basemapz explains. This assumes it does not matter that the generated file came via a Windows machine, to be used on a MAC machine.
thanks again for trying to help.
The reason why I referenced multiple Basemapz is I didn't know the size of your route. A single Basemapz object is a single baseboard. A 2 x 4 N-scale layout I created was 6 baseboards (3 x 3), so keep this in mind as you chop up your plan into chunks.
I was afraid that maybe a bit more difficult than it had to be, but that's Trainz.
About the image.texture.txt files.
Every texture that's used on an asset has a reference file associated with it that spells out how the texture is used and contains parameters for the texture. This file is the texture.txt. When you open up an asset for editing and view the folder contents, you will see various images with their texture.txt files.
Here, this explains things a lot better than I can.
Texture file - TrainzOnline (ts2009.com)
TO better explain the .tga reference, the default image used in Trainz is a TARGA or tga file. The files will have extensions on them, thus .tga as used in Linux and Windows. You may or may not see that on a Mac.
If your image is a jpeg and the TARGA file has been deleted, your basemapx asset will be faulty because there is now no image.
If you copy in your JPEG image and don't delete the original TARGA image, your change won't be recognized, and the asset will be the same as the same as the unaltered one. If you were to edit the texture.txt file to update the file reference to your JPEG, then it will load up and ignore the original image.
Your plan to have someone make the route for you is a good idea as that will save you time. I felt it was a good idea to explain this to you in case you want to do this on your own someday and in case you need to repair an asset that's missing a texture, or so it thinks it does.
I hope this explains things better.