Question: Board size limit?

[RJPugh]

Greetings, all.

Is there a size limit for a Trainz-2010 route? I ran a route through TranzDM yesterday that was only partially successful. Near as I can tell, the eastern end of the layout was chopped off, as if with a guillotine. The rest of the route rendered perfectly, but it is a long route (east-west) so if there is a limit, I could have easily gone over it. If I have to divide the route into two parts, I will.

For those who are curious, I'm experimenting with a portion of the Trans-Siberian. Specifically, the stretch from Irkutsk to Ulan-Ude. Lake Baykal has some amazing scenery! The route is a fairly simple one. It's largely a single track mainline with standard sidings and spurs at the towns and industries along the way. The kicker is the length from east to west. It's almost 500 kilometers! Once I have the route plotted out, I'll start looking for Russian scenery.

Thanks,

RJPugh

 

[cascaderailroad]

You can make a route with too many baseboards, and the huge route will be in too many MB of size, and will not save in Trainz CM as a CDP

 

[dragonharh]

Windows 32 bit system = 500mb
Windows 64 bit system =1GB

this verys on the amount of items in your route, it goes by size not baseboards in other words you can have 1500 baseboards and use 150mbs or a 800 mile long map and that's 400mbs it depends on the size and system spacts you have.

 

[JCitron]

TransDEM usually doesn't have a problem exporting data so I'm not sure where your problem is here. You can select areas and with the spline placed in that region that section, within the marquee, will be exported. With the 32-bit version, I have had TransDEM crash to the desktop when exporting large routes, however, this is less of a problem with the 64-bit version on a system with 32GB of RAM that's running a 64-bit Windows OS.

There will, however, be a problem with importing a large route such as this into Trainz its self. Content Manager will barf and TADDaemon will have a bunch of hissy fits and crash, which in turn will cause a database repair. (You can't tell I discovered this one the hard-way, right!).

That said, you might want to divide this up into small digestible sections, below the 500MB limit for Content Manager and company to import properly. Then when it comes time for operation, you might want to consider iPortals because the shear size would be impossible to operate, or even load once the route is completed and merged.

John

 

[cascaderailroad]

A DEM from Harrisburg Pa Rutherford yard, to Pittsburgh Pa Conway yard, would be @ 225 miles long ... and by being 4 baseboards width all the way, it might be possible ... but this would involve cutting down hundreds of thousands of unneeded baseboards from my DEM. If I made one big DEM, not cut down, it might have short of a million baseboards ... much too big for Trainz to handle. So I am breaking it down into at least 4 separate iPortal segments.

 

[JCitron]

A DEM from Harrisburg Pa Rutherford yard, to Pittsburgh Pa Conway yard, would be @ 225 miles long ... and by being 4 baseboards width all the way, it might be possible ... but this would involve cutting down hundreds of thousands of unneeded baseboards from my DEM. If I made one big DEM, not cut down, it might have short of a million baseboards ... much too big for Trainz to handle. So I am breaking it down into at least 4 separate iPortal segments.

I have a DEM from Brunswick, Maine to Rockland Maine with some side areas in the surrounding towns of Camden and Union. The total mainline length is only 65 miles and I trimmed the boards down to 3 on each side of the tracks. This was over 750 MB and Content Manager crashed. I ended up importing sections, trimming more in Trainz then merging the complete area together. I was then able to merge that into another route I'm working on.

The problem when deleting baseboard prior to exporting to Trainz is we don't want to chop off hills as that can look pretty odd and difficult to fill in around the area. In the end I'll trim back baseboards more once the track is laid and I can walk the route and see what isn't necessary to keep.

John

 

[Vern]

I have encountered Transdem not exporting the full range of defined boards on a very few occasions, but reloading the DEM, maps and vector lines then re-exporting usually puts it right. For the OP, you have ticked the route filter on the export screen? Otherwise I believe Transdem tries to export the whole of your DEM area rather than however many boards either side of the vector line you have specified.

Might also be worth trying the option to use 5m boards around the route only with distant scenery rendered on lower res 10m boards. This reduces the .gnd file footprint significantly.

 

[geophil]

There was a problem with crescent-shaped routes, where in some occasions a few baseboards were indeed cut off at one or two edges.

Normally, the centre baseboard of the export rectangular box becomes the origin in the route baseboard coordinate system. However, for crescent and other oddly shaped routes, that centre baseboard may not be on the export list, because it's too far away from any track. In that case TransDEM relocates the baseboard origin to a baseboard that actually is exported. This relocation function was already implemented into the very first version of TransDEM that wrote the Trainz route files itself, back in 2006.

Unfortunately, that implementation had a bug. It was only last year, with helpful input from a TransDEM user, that we actually could figure this out. Once the cause was identified, the fix was rather easy and applied in TransDEM 2.5.1, June 2014.