Ok, why did this occur. black boards all over the route,

all that achieved was the end of the route ( much of which is below sea level due to the original dem being lowered so much) , is now an inland sea and i cant adjust the water height. However on the plus side the terrain looks ok under the water. Except that once i wander around a bit the dodgy terrain rendering returns . Any ideas of how i can get the water to lower ? should i try again and make the water level lower in both route and merge beforehand ?
 
Ive opened the old version of the route into 2022 and all the performance issues i had with the new version have gone, but of course, so has three months of work, i think something in the DEM that was given me was suspect, as the transdem colors never displayed correctly, so i will just have to start all over again.
If anyone is good at making DEMS, i am prepared to pay for one that would extend this route to crested butte , but they would also have to be able to adjust the height of the new DEM to conform to that of this route, it was lowered by Pitkin for some reason , I cant just get anoither dem and merge it as the height discrepancy is immense.
 
Hi Dan,

So sorry that you are having problems. I have been watching this thread but have not tried to put in my two cents as I don't think of myself as an expert of any kind. I have used Transdem and have data for Colorado which I used to create a DEM for a Rio Grande Southern route. I could possibly create a Trainz DEM base map for you if that is what you need.

Paul :)
 
It's possible that the mesh is corrupted somehow. You had noticed issues before you brought the route into TRS22. That's the problem with working on very long routes. We don't notice things are off due to the size. Slow loading we think is due to its size and we don't notice missing tiles because we're focused on another area of a route.

On my very large fictional route with some DEMs imported, I lost the texture mapping so that all the grass textures I put down became squares of carpet. The last time I saw this was when I converted baseboards from 10 m to 5 m when we got that option, and this is something I definitely didn't do to this area of the route.

Another time, I was thinning forests using the Bulk Update-Delete tool and deleted a swath of pine forests. Like you, I ended up going back to a previous version. I lost months of work because that area was 30 km away from where I was working at the time.
 
It's possible that the mesh is corrupted somehow. You had noticed issues before you brought the route into TRS22. That's the problem with working on very long routes. We don't notice things are off due to the size. Slow loading we think is due to its size and we don't notice missing tiles because we're focused on another area of a route.

On my very large fictional route with some DEMs imported, I lost the texture mapping so that all the grass textures I put down became squares of carpet. The last time I saw this was when I converted baseboards from 10 m to 5 m when we got that option, and this is something I definitely didn't do to this area of the route.

Another time, I was thinning forests using the Bulk Update-Delete tool and deleted a swath of pine forests. Like you, I ended up going back to a previous version. I lost months of work because that area was 30 km away from where I was working at the time.
yes, I often have a look at the whole route to see if anything untoward has occurred. looking just at the map only is not sufficient , as sometimes problems lurk beneath. it would be very helpful if there was some sort of diagnostic tool that could monitor health of a route, but I know its unrealistic to expect that to materialise .
 
Agree, but the definition of "route health" would be very problematic.
indeed, but just a summary of any aberrations that were occurring would be so helpful. Extended database rebuilds can only do so much, I'd rebuilt the database about four times on one week due to to texel issues I'd been having but clearly whatever issue the new extension had wasn't fixed. It can't just have been the DEM either as the areas I'd built by hand were causing most of the issues. if i go back two months the DEM shows no issues. I think it possibly was some problem with SP4 . when I opened the original WIP made in 2019, the track was fine, when I was working on it in 2022, sp4, the track base was doing some strange things along the edges , some areas of ground were showing strange artifacts and performance was , as i said before , pretty dodgy.

If a dignostic tool could have been run to indicate problems, I could have saved myself a lot of angst, but how anyone would create such a dignostic tool, with all the ideosyncracies introduced by muiltiple build versions and hundreds of thousands of assets made by hundreds of creators, is beyond my ken.
 
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I agree that a diagnostic tool would be a nice to have utility. It's not like routes and sessions, and any other content we create, is a one-off thing like so many other games and entertainment. Route creations are here for a lifetime and this is no exaggeration with many people creating routes 20 or more years ago and still building and operating them today.

Have you tried merging your large route into a single baseboard? That seems to fix anomalies such as mesh and grid problems as though something gets reset within the files. It's worth a test.
 
I agree that a diagnostic tool would be a nice to have utility. It's not like routes and sessions, and any other content we create, is a one-off thing like so many other games and entertainment. Route creations are here for a lifetime and this is no exaggeration with many people creating routes 20 or more years ago and still building and operating them today.

Have you tried merging your large route into a single baseboard? That seems to fix anomalies such as mesh and grid problems as though something gets reset within the files. It's worth a test.
I did that John, the extension filled with water that could not be adjusted, under the water the terrain appeared fine, above , it still had the same issues .... I explained it in a post about 4 days ago, on this thread..
 
That is most probably a water effect layer. Easier to delete it than change its height.
  1. In the Layers Palette right click the Water Effect Layer (it may be the only one present)
  2. select the Delete option
Thanks for the advice, sadly, after deletion, the waters still there , and so are the artifacts that are making the route unstable. Quite honestly, even if i could fix this, I don't think I'd ever trust the stability of this terrain mesh enough to continue with it. Better to lose two months work than 5 months work.......
 
Thanks for the advice, sadly, after deletion, the waters still there , and so are the artifacts that are making the route unstable. Quite honestly, even if i could fix this, I don't think I'd ever trust the stability of this terrain mesh enough to continue with it. Better to lose two months work than 5 months work.......
Could you pack up the route and send it to me? I'll take a look at it.
 
I did that John, the extension filled with water that could not be adjusted, under the water the terrain appeared fine, above , it still had the same issues .... I explained it in a post about 4 days ago, on this thread..
I missed that. I had been away from the forums and came back but didn't catch all the posts I was watching. I have way too much going on with non-Trainz stuff to keep up with this too.
 
Could you pack up the route and send it to me? I'll take a look at it.
Thanks for the offer, its a darn big route though and In my efforts to save it, i have multiple versions all with different variations of damage. it would be hard to chose which one to send. Be interested to see if you could find out what went wrong with it, but as i said, i really don't trust it anymore.
. I now have a Dem that i can use to go forward, I have to make a decision as to whether to work in TRS2019 SP5 or to use 2022pe. Deleting multiple boards is about the only real advantage that I can see by using 2022, ,. However, I did a test and it froze up when I tried to delete about 100 boards in one hit, im not doing very well am I ? :-)
 
100 boards are a lot in one go.
Too much to bite and chew at the same time.

Quite a while ago I used the Surveyor 2.0 Marquee Tool to delete hundreds of baseboards from a route (equivalent to about 140km of track). I used "bite sized" chunks of about a dozen baseboards at a time. It worked and I had no problems.
 
Too much to bite and chew at the same time.

Quite a while ago I used the Surveyor 2.0 Marquee Tool to delete hundreds of baseboards from a route (equivalent to about 140km of track). I used "bite sized" chunks of about a dozen baseboards at a time. It worked and I had no problems.
I got greedy and tried a lot of baseboards, I don't remember how many, but it was a lot and everything froze up. Going at it with about a dozen worked fine.

If there's content on the baseboards I'm removing, I delete that first then delete the baseboards. It's a two-step process that ensures that there isn't any chaff bits left behind after the baseboards are removed.
 
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