Layout building is an uphill battle that never stops.

JonMyrlennBailey

Well-known member
When a large layout is worked long enough it eventually develops involuntary sinkholes, black spots, spikes and other types of ugly cosmetic "cancers".

Every time you spend hours or days fixing these things, sooner or later new bad things pop up and sometimes they just keep getting worse or more frequent.

It is like trying to constantly fight weeds in a prize Japanese garden or wildfire in high winds on dry days.

Trainz is a game you don't play but have to FIGHT like a soldier at war.


We don't need surveyor tools so much as we need high-tech combat weapons to lick this whole thing.
 
Does this happen to you in TS12 ?

This is why I lay track using TRS2006, and I never have these problems (I could always import the end product into 09, 10, 12, T:ANE)

I suspect that editing your route, or (OPR) other peoples routes, mess's up the layers, causing all the sinkholes black spots, and spikes, where you are editing or replacing textures

You should see my front yard ... it is so chock full of weeds, that I spend $100 on home made weed killer per year (1 gal vinegar, 1 tube of salt, one 20 bottle of dish washing liquid) stir and spray :hehe: Home made (non toxic) Agent Orange total vegetation killer
 
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I use TS12 exclusively and do my own terrain (hills, rivers, creeks, ditches, cliffs, etc. etc.) and never have these problems. The only time I have these problems is if I use the "Replace Asset" tool and replace textures, some splines and track.

IMHO TS06 is VERY unstable. It is the only version of Trainz that gives me Fatal Crash error.

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Only @ 6 times per year TRS2006 gives me a fatal error, usually when I lay track for 12 hours straight without saving then try to delete and redo a delete of a Quad track spline ... or delete thousands of baseboards without "Save As" then add a train ... CTD :hehe:

The CM works flawlessly on my ancient Toshiba Satellite 105 integrated graphics laptop

TRS2006/TC1&2 Trainz Railwayz, Full Version, Build 3337, trainz-build 2.6, SP1 by Merscom, the most simplistic, user friendly, version of all, so simple a child could lay Class V trackage

$9.99 New In Box

http://www.ebay.com/itm/Trainz-Rail...850007?hash=item33ad00e897:g:U78AAOSwbqpTzxHS
 
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I, of course, work on somebody else's route: Mojave Sub in 2012. I add in things like: asphalt parking lots, gravel-covered barn yards, etc. I use textures heavily as well as ground tamping.

I add in my own amenities: lakes, rivers, ranches, farms, dams, trees, schools, parks, churches, horse-drawn wagon animation, operating aircraft, boats, tree orchards, summer cottages, an island, train stations, upgraded railroad yards and airports. A great deal of ground had to be excavated deep and textured with mud, sandstone and sand soil, to put in my reservoir, about 7 miles in circumference, with dam in an otherwise flat piece of southern California Kern County desert. I prefer LOTS of 3-D static objects as people, animals, vehicles and the like.

My trains and cars run over the narrow mid-section of the reservoir via bridges which I installed. This is Highway 58 from Bakersfield to Mojave and the former SP now UP train line. I even have Vulcan's float plane landing and taking off on a closed loop around this man-made lake near the lake-side marina.

I have actually driven this piece of road in the real world several times. I think BNSF trains also run this Mojave Sub nowadays.

Cutting and replacing train boards from older incremental saves has become a regularity with me. I have now made it a habit to inspect the entire layout closely especially after a lot of texture edits and ground edits.

It is also making sense now to edit the layout in one direction only as starting from the east portal and working toward the west portal. Sometimes it is just easier to "saw off" a good half of an older save to replace that half that went bad after heavy texture work down the train line on the other half. I have to use Merge Routes/Layers a lot for this. I try to cut the route (deleting a line of ground squares) in half where there are relatively few splines crossing the train board borders or where there is an remote rural area not heavily populated as in a large city borders as these are tedious to tie up again after a merge routes repair. I use temporary pieces of track to mark the squares to be removed and replaced so as to avoid confusion. The track used as place marks shows up as blue lines in map view overhead.
 
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If you consider Trainz a combat situation requiring tactical gear...perhaps maybe you're playing the wrong game. May I suggest joining the army in fighting terrorists?
 
Too old. I am an army vet. I fought diesel trucks as a mechanic in the service already. Don't need tactical gear for Trainz, come to think of it, just a tactical SOP: routine inspections; vigilance. Methods to the madness.

Computers and software can be as fickle as women.
 
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When some other person puts ground textures on layer 4 ... and then you meddle with the OPR (OtherPersonsRoute) and overlay your own ground textures on layer 1 or 2, it screws up the whole route, causing sinkholes, black spots, and spikes
 
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The Mojave Sub, some Other Person's Route, only has these following layers listed by default:

route-1
camera spheres-1
session-1

I edit Mojave Sub textures in route-1.

Do authors "hide" layers somehow?
 
The Mojave Sub, some Other Person's Route, only has these following layers listed by default:

route-1
camera spheres-1
session-1

I edit Mojave Sub textures in route-1.

Do authors "hide" layers somehow?

I don't think that textures can be hidden and are always part of the route layer.

Since I have upgraded to T:ANE, I have not had any holes in the terrain along the seams on my nearly 12 year-old route I started back in December 2003. In TS12 and below, especially TRS2009 and TRS2010, this was a particularly bad problem.

John
 
My personal experience; I've only had sinkholes once and that was when extending my route via cutting and merging. We've all run into the odd spike/sinkhole once in a while. But if the situation is so serious on your end - every time you save, really? - until you're basically declaring war on a computer game...maybe you're doing something wrong?
 
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