Luddite Annie goes Plus.

K

KotangaGirl

Pre-Grouping Railways Nut
So after a response from Tony to my concerns with TS2019 I forced open my wallet (creaking rusty hinge sound) and paid for a Plus sub. The exchange rate between the US dollar and the NZ dollar is pretty dire, but I should be able to budget for it Ok.
After having my Classic Tinware version of TS2019 in extreme lockdown against being updated for some time I made the decision to permit updates only to the DLC that I actually want and to continue to exclude the rest. To my surprise that went Ok and after doing an EDBR nothing was broken, nothing was inexplicably made faulty, I didn't suddenly have hundreds of missing dependencies, my computer didn't burst into flames, or the world suddenly come to an end (or at least not any faster than it's doing at present).
That darn black menu box was a confounded nuisance though. I would be doing something with selecting downloads and TS2019 would playfully slap another one over the top of the one I was using. This must've happened a dozen times and it was very annoying. Surely there must be a way to turn it off or or is it going to hang around like a curse forever.

I did notice though that my TS2019 splash screen does not as yet have a 'Plus' icon. So for the present time I am nonplussed, - in a manner of speaking. I would guess that this would be set to rights after Easter when the N3V team are officially on deck again.

So after having working solely in TS2012 for months to do route building I decided to have a go at seriously using the surveyor tools in TS2019 SP1 to do some route building. Waaaay back when TS2019 was first released I started on converting one of angelah's old TS2004 routes, - her Summer K&ESR route, - to TS2019. I had got as far as doing most of the large bits that needed sorting, but then SP1 and all of its beta tryouts happened and suddenly the forum was full of tales of woe. In response I locked down my copy of TS2019 and went back to TS2012.
Now it was time to return to TS2019 ('Cover me chaps I'm going in'.). And it was all a bit of an anticlimax really, - surveyor was much the same as it's always been apart from the trendy designer black menus with their confusing 'hunt the tool you want' roulette option instead of having them conveniently on the menu bar. But I managed to cope with that and didn't think too many dark thoughts about things that worked well being changed. I don't get on very well with change and I don't much like 'new' either, but I imagine I'll get used to it.

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Well done on being brave and experimental Annie.

Next you'll be telling us that you like diesels after all , vintage ones of course :hehe:
 
Valley of the (Poverty Stricken) Kings

Thanks all. And no Graham, - there will be no diesels. I come from a steam era railway family and my uncles and grandad would turn over in their graves if I started messing around with diesels.

Angelah's K&ESR layout is old, but I didn't really realise how old it was until I found this in a cutting. Unfortunately there was no gold, or ancient artifacts inside it so it must've been built by Egyptians who were a bit down on their luck.

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New Zealand beautiful absolutely! TRS19, yer, I bit the bullet, and my tongue, swallowed a few words and like many others I see, bought it. No problems as such (so far, touch wood), but scratching my head at all the floating roads, in the Warwick route and C&O Hinton. The scenery is mostly far more realistic, and sun reflection impressive, almost too good lol. Look forward to seeing what else you come up with.
 
The worst part I'm finding as I approach route building is that an awful lot of the assets I like to use aren't loaded into my TS2019 install. My TS2012 folder is easily over twice the size of my TS2019 data folder so I'm endlessly (or so it seems) having to download assets from the DLS.

When I was younger I had the good fortune to live in some beautiful remote places here in NZ and I also did a fair amount of bush walking. Where I live now in the Waikato is also brimful of stunning landscapes and I was fortunate enough to get out and see some of it before I became ill.
Paul you just reminded me that I haven't watched the LotR movies for far too long so I must get the DVDs off the shelf, blow the dust off the cases and have myself a little binge watch.
 
Congratulations on the move over to the new world.

Remember you always have old versions and I'm sure you have backups as well. As duly noted as well, things are the same as always with a bit of new in there as well. It's kind of like Windows in that respect! You did go about it the right way, though. I did a full export of content, except DLC and locked built-in assets, and spent the next 5 weeks repairing stuff. This was before stuff was updated on the DLS, and I will say this. The next time I change versions, it's going to be a cold break and run away. The time I spent repairing hoarded only helped me understand where things were broken, but outside of that there's no other use for it other than wasting my time. I have since weeded out gazillions of assets I haven't looked at since 2005 probably.
 
Yes I'm taking care to do this properly John and I made certain to have a backup copy before I started on this adventure. Like you I most probably have loads of assets sitting in my hard drives that I haven't used for ages that I should really clear out to create some space. But by Sods Law you can depend that the moment I get rid of something I'll find I needed it afterall.

When I kicked off this experiment I said I was going to transfer my M&GNJR layout over to TS2019 to become my test piece to see what I could do using TS2019's surveyor tools and to see what improvements I could make. This is a functional layout, though I will admit it's a bit rough around the edges and it's been needing attention for a while now. I was going to overhaul it in TS2012, but this seems like the ideal opportunity to put TS2019 through its paces instead.

Transferring everything across wasn't too difficult despite the amount of assets I'd made myself that weren't on the DLS. A small handful of older assets and legacy builtins threw up faults. I could fix some of them, but with others there was too much wrong with them so I decided to give them the toss. They weren't essential by any means and would be easy to replace with similar assets later on.

It's going to be a real Arbor Day very soon though since I originally used a lot of older billboard trees, - which were adequate enough in TS2012, - but just plain awful in TS2019. Unfortunately I'm going to have problems with Malc's lovely hedges though since TS2019 has utterly ruined them and it is just about impossible to do without hedges when building a line set in Norfolk. This is a worry since I would eventually like to move my large Norfolk layout over to TS2019 and that has hundreds of miles of hedges, - and I'm not exaggerating either!

So some pictures. I took these right after transferring the layout and all I have done is give the lighting a quick adjustment. The computer I'm using is an i5 with a GTX660 and 8Gb of RAM. Later on I'll shift everything across to my new dual quad core Xeon, but for the present time I want to use the kind of computer the majority of Trainz customers might own.

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As a content creator who specialises in pre-grouping era reskins I was of course very interested to see how my models looked in TS2019. 80% of the rolling stock I run is my own work, so I was delighted to discover that the basic 'litho' coaches I made a while ago didn't look at all too bad in TS2019. I was also pleased to see that the reskins of the late Ben Dorsey's engine sheds I've been working on look reasonably good as well.

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KotangaGirl said:
. Unfortunately I'm going to have problems with Malc's lovely hedges though since TS2019 has utterly ruined them and it is just about impossible to do without hedges when building a line set in Norfolk. This is a worry since I would eventually like to move my large Norfolk layout over to TS2019 and that has hundreds of miles of hedges, - and I'm not exaggerating either!
Click to expand...

Been spending a lot of time trying to solve the hedge issue, which is screwing up my L&B route, spend a couple of hours a week trying varies things, not got there yet though, despite dozens of test hedges so far.
 
It must be very disappointing for you to have your hedges trashed like that Malc. I guessed you'd be working on trying to find a solution and I certainly don't envy you the task. It goes without saying that I wish you every success, - and that's not just because of the hundreds of miles of of your hedges on my layouts either.
I noticed that the normal mapping on my goods wagons is flattened out in TS2019, - not enough to ruin them though. Possibly I notice it more because I made the reskin textures, though no one else has said anything. Otherwise all the old legacy engines I own are looking very nice indeed in TS2019 which is certainly a bonus.
 
Yeah why did N3V break billboard objects again? Granted the Speed Trees are good to an extent, but there are cases where they don't work in all places, and there are cases too when older routes are imported and replacing the trees with Speed Trees doesn't work due to the spacing, scale, and types of trees.

The two asset-types I struggle the most with are tracks and trees. I think I have more of both of those in my assets because I'm always on the search for the ultimate type, but even after decades I never come right on top of the goal. In some ways it's like chasing a rainbow and that pot of gold.
 
To be perfectly honest John most of the TS2019 Speed Trees just look strange and nearly all of those that have exchanged themselves for TS2012 trees will get replaced. I went through billboard trees getting killed when my copy of TS2009 3.1 was 'upgraded' so it's a bit disappointing to have it happen again. I was going to replace them anyway, - it's just that the need to do so has now become a lot more urgent.

Trackwork is something that I have difficulty with too since most of the current crop of procedural tracks are representative of trackwork that's been groomed by modern ballast tamping machines. On top that a lot of them look like plastic trainset track as well. With the K&ESR layout I posted pictures of earlier I'm using the old legacy Uk Norfolk track because it looks believably scruffy and worn. My M&GNJR layout uses Uk Bullhead Wooden 09 which is perhaps just a bit too perfect in the ballast department, but will do. Magic track with self installing checkrails, frogs and moveable point blades is all very well, but if it looks awful and plastic it's useless as far as I'm concerned.
The only place I have used procedural track successfully is on Winter layouts where the 'plastic' ballast is hidden under snow and can't be seen.
 
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Malc's CL Hedge-01b seems to be the best choice at the moment. With it having a variegated texture the damage done by TS2019 is a lot less noticeable. Even some of Malc's excellent trees are taking a hiding and the ones made for TANE aren't completely immune.

Having sizeable TS2012 trees replaced by teeny weeny TS2019 trees isn't very amusing either.

I tracked down the very last handful of missing dependencies and was embarrassed to discover two of them were mine. They were assets I'd done back in TS2009 days and somehow I'd missed them.
 
Hmm, the more I read this the more you are putting me off bothering to use my copy of 2019.:D
Have enough hassles with SP3 and older assets , don't need a new set of complications.
 
The annoying thing about TS2019 Dan is that it shows a lot of promise, but it also has all these small irritating shortcomings. That's why I thought I'd do a kind of diary of my progress as I continue with using TS2019 to do some layout building. At this stage I'm keeping things simple and basically using TS2019 like it's 64 bit TS2012 and keeping away from the expert level 'magic' stuff.

I'm still 'nonplussed' so animations and traffic aren't working. The first time I saw a car sitting stopped on the road I gave it a little prod with the mouse pointer thinking it might be tired, but then I remembered the curse that lays upon the digital lands for those who own but the Classic version and are unplussed. It's a bit annoying when installing signals, - proper signals that is, - because the semaphore arms can barely manage a very slight droop towards the clear position before the curse takes hold of them.
 
KotangaGirl said:
The annoying thing about TS2019 Dan is that it shows a lot of promise, but it also has all these small irritating shortcomings. That's why I thought I'd do a kind of diary of my progress as I continue with using TS2019 to do some layout building. At this stage I'm keeping things simple and basically using TS2019 like it's 64 bit TS2012 and keeping away from the expert level 'magic' stuff.

I'm still 'nonplussed' so animations and traffic aren't working. The first time I saw a car sitting stopped on the road I gave it a little prod with the mouse pointer thinking it might be tired, but then I remembered the curse that lays upon the digital lands for those who own but the Classic version and are unplussed. It's a bit annoying when installing signals, - proper signals that is, - because the semaphore arms can barely manage a very slight droop towards the clear position before the curse takes hold of them.
Click to expand...

Good Day KotangaGirl,

I see you are busy as usual, congrats on your new Trainz Program, looks like you'll be busy for some time to come, with all the usual things that come in to play when you upgrade to different versions, glad to see some of Vintage items made the transfer to newer Trainz.....Enjoyed all the nice pictures you previewed to us......:D

Really happy you protected yourself with lots of Backups........;)
 
Great work Annie! I share your concern over hedges and trees. I standardised on Malc’s stuff as they perfectly suited the kind of routes I like to build. My main WIP, Stainmore, has been dormant for some time now pending outcomes with 2019, but just having gone ‘Platinum,” I am in process of porting it over, - so we’ll see how it goes, but I really want to keep Malc’s trees and hedges as the just look right.
Best wishes
Ian
 
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