The Nuclear Bomb Approach To Grading

[coRioGrandeSouthern]

I have been a purchasing fan of Trainz since I discovered Trainz in 2009. I would be more amenable to investing more in Trainz if the Developers of Trainz spent as much time improving their base tool features as they do on adding new features.

To wit, what I call "The Nuclear Bomb Approach To Grading".

I recently found the Cass Scenic Railroad layout beautifully designed by JClinton and others. If Trainz can have time-sensitive shadowing and lighting and TurFX and rain and snow and other amenities, why can't we have grading that is just as realistic?

If the goal is to create realistic scenery and special effects, wouldn't that by definition include road grading and track alignment in a realistic manner as well? After all, this is a Train Simulation, and trains use road grading and track alignment that does not include huge gaps. Right?

I have encountered issues like the above in EVERY layout I have downloaded since 2009. Will this core tool ever be improved?

Just my two cents worth of frustration. Thank you for reading my rant.

Other than this issue, I do enjoy Trainz and all the hard work and creativity that goes into creating this amazing pastime.

 

[schweitzerdude]

I have encountered issues like the above in EVERY layout I have downloaded since 2009. Will this core tool ever be improved?

Looking at the pic, it seems to me that the "core tool" aka Trainz software is not the problem.

The problem is that the route creator did not spend enough time going over their route carefully to ensure these issues are fixed before putting the route on the DLS. You can fix this easily yourself although you should not have to do it.

I can even show you examples of built-in routes offered by N3V that, if you spend the time and look closely enough, you can find minor errors that should have been fixed, despite additional review by N3V.

But if you got this route off the DLS, then the "extra set of eyes" that N3V would provide did not occur and the result is what you see here.

 

[coRioGrandeSouthern]

schweitzerdude, I appreciate your comments. And I agree with you in part that the core-tool is not the problem. It isn't, and yet it is, in my perspective.

If longitude and latitude and sun placement and its arc across the sky can be replicated in the Trainz environment;

If TurFX and rain and snow and shadows and lighting and light color can be replicated in the Trainz environment;

If locomotive smoke and steam and sounds can be replicated in the Trainz environment;

If the physics of a fully loaded train and its cargo and braking and acceleration can be replicated in the Trainz environment;

How hard can it be to fix core-tools to be more realistic?

 

[wreeder]

I'm going to assume that you downloaded the route by lachy10 that was made for TS12 which was a revision of the route made by jclinton for TRS2009 SP4/ TS2010 which used the DEM based layout made by fishlipsatwork for TRS2004. That is the real cause of the problem. fishlipsatwork used a program called HOG or Hand of God to make the DEM based route. While this was a great and free program, it was not very accurate when it came to matching up the terrain shape and the path of the tracks it indicated on the terrain. A great amount of terrain shaping was needed if you assumed the track's path was correct. Now, in flat landscapes this was not a big deal but in mountain routes it was a real pain. I built several narrow gauge routes based on fishlipsatwork routes and it was very difficult to get the grades correct and remember to reshape the terrain to fit those grades. Then when the five meter grid was introduced and I imported those routes I saw the same issue you are seeing. Places where the terrain was carefully raised to meet track now had gaps. I assumed that the grid format had changed and the conversion to the new format caused the gaps.

Now that being said, I totally agree that a better tool is needed to be able to shape the narrow ledges that narrow gauge lines are famous for as the current tools make a 60 meter shelf unless you do like me and carefully adjust the terrain point by point. I eventually gave up and used SirGibby's ledges with track to get a more realistic look.

 

[schweitzerdude]

schweitzerdude, I appreciate your comments. And I agree with you in part that the core-tool is not the problem. It isn't, and yet it is, in my perspective.

If longitude and latitude and sun placement and its arc across the sky can be replicated in the Trainz environment;

If TurFX and rain and snow and shadows and lighting and light color can be replicated in the Trainz environment;

If locomotive smoke and steam and sounds can be replicated in the Trainz environment;

If the physics of a fully loaded train and its cargo and braking and acceleration can be replicated in the Trainz environment;

How hard can it be to fix core-tools to be more realistic?

My suggestion. In the route, check that these three spline points of the track are at the same height. I am willing to bet you a beer that they are not.

1. The spline point at the junction
2. The spline point to the left of the junction on track A
3. The spline point to the left of the junction on track B

If they are not the same elevation, that is the problem. Fix it then smooth the terrain under the track.

If it is still not quite right, go to the spline point to the right of the junction and adjust the height as well to the same as the other three. Smooth again.

 

[coRioGrandeSouthern]

Thank you for your comments, WReeder. SirGibby is a very talented and ethically responsible creator of amazing content. His Ledges are beautiful and even when I don't need the Ledges to cover up glaring shortcomings, I enjoy his creativity and attention to detail.

And your assumption was spot on.

 

[coRioGrandeSouthern]

Thank you again, schweitzerdude, I will give your suggestion a try. I appreciate your help.

 

[JCitron]

While the old HOG routes are great in many ways, they do have some interesting issues. The TIGER overlay map doesn't always line up as mentioned. This puts the map sometimes more than just the wrong place, I mean it'll put the tracks through a hill instead of around it, or a river where the road or railroad is because the ground is graded for both are next to a river, but the map has shifted over just enough to cause this.

The other issue with HOG routes is they are all much lower resolution and only use a 10-meter grid. This means that there are bigger steps on the sides of a hill and for grades and smoothing out the grade doesn't happen because everything moves in bigger chunks. The newer 5-meter grade is better, meaning it's 4 x higher resolution, but that comes at a cost of extra memory, but HOG never had that in the first place.

Upgrading an already textured 10-meter resolution route to 5-meter resolution can cause weird problems with the textures because they lose their reference on the terrain. I made that mistake only once when my textures became perfect squares and rectangles after the conversion. I was able to fix this on my route, but it was a lot of work. This is fine for manual texturing, but when it comes to maps on the terrain, this isn't possible due to the specific location of the textures.

I agree the people that upgraded the route should have done a walk through and fixed those locations. This is not a difficult thing to do, it's just time consuming, but we do have to keep in mind that assets made available to us on the DLS are shared with us out of generosity and in many cases the original creator made it available for us to enjoy as much as they do.

Route building is also quite time-consuming. Even a small complex route can take many years to get right and then session development can be many months as well if that's included. There are a couple of routes of mine that I am currently renovating and I'm finding things that weren't obvious when the route was originally built, and I'm particularly picky over floating splines.

Part of the issue we have now is this has to do with shadows. In the olden days, shadows didn't exist except on trains with their hard-coded shadow-map meshes. Today, we have auto-generated shadows which means that even track and roads that never showed that in older versions now have apparent floating splines. Since this route is of that age originally, I'm going to bet that's the case here. The original author most likely never noticed the track floating because there was nothing to make it obvious. The fact too that this is a 10-meter grid means that smoothing the terrain below means the terrain above can get pulled down more easily as well.

As noted, there are ways to compensate for that by using retaining walls and ledges as needed. Maybe in the future, we'll be lucky and have a 50K x 50K squares and never have to worry about this problem, but we will also need the processing power and memory to handle such a mesh.