TS12 does not merge routes cleanly.

J

JonMyrlennBailey

Well-known member
I modified a built-in route. Over time, some train boards started to go bad with random "bottomless pits" and such. I copied the original route to use as a board donor. On this donor route, I punched out all the boards except the ones I wanted to transplant to fix my route in progress. On my route to be repaired, I punched out all the bad boards then merged the donor route (with replacement boards only) to my valuable route work in progress.

The good transplanted boards filled in the bad ones I punched out. The topology looked neatly meshed where the merged boards joined but there was an ugly black seam line along the borders of the transplanted boards. The texture/color did not mesh seamlessly.

Is this a known issue in TS12?

Is there a fix or specific procedure I will have to follow for a flawless merge or will I have to use Paint to touch up the texture along the seams where the colors did not join nicely during the train board merge?

See my signature for my TS12 build, please.
 
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I'm pretty sure that you have to learn to deal with it, as there is no fix ... you are modifying other peoples routes, so certain problems will continue to crop up.

Until you have a DEM, and merge them, and find a 9 mile long, 20m wide rift, that needs stitching together with track, and smooth spline ... it is fun fixing that stuff ... paint away

You can fix a pit or spike using a small piece of track, placing it just to the very outside of the hole, and smooth spline ... bink ... gone
 
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Did the other people who created these routes plant some sort of "booby trap" in them? Some sort of piece of bad script to cause harm to the map whenever outside editing is detected ?

How does Trainz distinguish "other people's" routes from ones I might make from scratch on my own anyway?

Nobody has answered my question with regards to the pertinent computer science principles and theories behind this issue.

The people who publish these routes for distro and packaging use the same damn software to create them as I am using to modify them.

I don't believe that the random spikes on the map are purely a matter of modifying the work of others. There is more to it than that.

Computers don't have emotions like hate or personal grudges. Humans who create software or computer files with ill-intent, however, DO.

I use many different editing applications, Trainz aside, to create files or PC-based work and none of these programs involuntarily modify content without input
from me.

For example, Microsoft Word does not render any text on documents unless I manually placed the text there myself. You will not find the word "damn" on any
Word document I created (or even edited if it was somebody else's original creation) UNLESS some human (me, the original creator or otherwise) typed the word "damn" on it.

The MS Access database program does not, on its own, delete a field from a data table unless only I (or some other human) tells it to do so.

Could Trainz content creators be purposely planting malware in their submissions for distribution?

Who is to say that Trainz game creators are not designing the sims to do bad things on purpose?
Maybe some Trainz software creators hate their employer and are sabotaging the Trainz games we buy
by actually programming them to do undesirable things like random spike placement.

Kind of like the disgruntled Coca-Cola employee who poisons a batch of the soft drink product because he
was given a termination notice from his boss.

Cascade, I hope you are not doing this sort of thing yourself.

I suspect foul play.
 
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As I said: When a creator uses copy/paste of textures, the route remembers those copy/pasted textures ... and when you alter a map, or punch out portions, and re-merge other blank portions into the holes ... it confuses Trainz, and Trainz makes a black texture, and Trainz makes a spike or a hole ... because it has lost something that it knows should be there ... but it is not there any more ... because you edited it.

TRS2006 did not have this problem, as it was a simple version, and worked flawlessly, and had no layers

When 09, 10 came out, the versions became much more complicated, and problematic ... and when 12 came out, it made it even more complicated ... and now that the ultra complex T:ANE has come out, everything is screwed up.

Some of the textures, or copy/paste may be on a different layer, and when you punch it out, and re-merge, it screws the whole ballgame up.
 
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You are quite something. Suggesting that the routes people spend hundreds (if not thousands) of hours of effort on and providing them to you free of charge are intentionally laced with malware.

The idiocy in here is mindboggling.
 
I first edited the NEC, and NS Reading Lines, and I learned allot from it, but it never made it anywhere, as editing a route may turn out more difficult than making your own.

Practice makes perfect

BTW: What type of route are you looking for ?

Mountainous, urban, rural ... etc ... ?
 
I fail to see the underlying computer science in all this. The areas on my map that have been 'automatically' changing with spikes, black spots and holes are remote areas that have been not even touched by my Surveyor tools. When I clone an original route, the copy should still retain all the memory addresses for "every square atom" of terrain and texture as the original. Only the spots on the map touched by my Surveyor tools should be affected. Why remote places on the cloned map I have never even touched in edit become adversely affected, I don't have the foggiest notion. Everything rendered on a map is in memory somewhere, it is in the form of some binary machine code. What is involuntarily changing the coded information (terrain height in meters) to create a spike or hole where a spot of level ground used to be at the memory address for that particular spot of ground? I take it that Trainz route files or mapfiles contain specific addresses for everything one sees on a Trainz map. Every spot on the map must have some logical address.

Is Trainz forever jinxed?

Why are things changing by themselves that I have not laid an editing tool to?
 
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I don't do much modification to existing routes anyway. I add a few train stations, people, trees, vehicles, telephone booths, animals, wagons and so forth. In Topology, I will pound the ground in few spots to make a couple small canyons with rivers or creeks flowing through them. I enjoy boating and want to reflect my water-craziness on my Trainz layout. I tamped out a few square miles of ground to make a deep depression for man-made reservoir, filled with Topo water, with a dam even.

But, thankfully, maybe by sheer luck, none of the areas on the map edited by me have yet been affected by the mystery spikes, black spots and holes. Most of the areas where this occurs is in the "virgin" areas of the map untouched by my Surveyor tools and most of that along the outer edge of the map. The were only a couple of spots near or on train tracks that had this phenomenon occur but still in areas I have not edited myself.
 
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I was not merging blank portions into holes. I was taking board copies from the original route and merging those into my cloned map to fill in for the corresponding bad boards that I had deleted ahead of time.

Another thing, whenever I merge boards for repair of a cloned route, I make sure I remove some extra (good) boards surrounding the damaged boards because the damage is along the edges of the boards where two adjacent boards join. This provides enough overlap so that all contaminated board edges should be removed and replaced with good (original) board material. This is the analogy as to when a surgeon cuts out a cancer along with some good tissue surrounding it to make sure every malignant cell is gone.

I always keep a copy of the original route for 'spare parts" if needed for 'cannibalization'. I will clone a map of that solely for the cannibalization procedure.
 
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Jon,

What is happening is you are altering the color-tables that are in Trainz so textures are getting lost and this is causing the peaks and holes you are encountering on your route. Let me explain...

Trainz, all versions, has a limited number of textures it can hold per route and per baseboard. The number have increased over the years, but there is still a limited amount of color-space memory allowed. In the early days of Trainz up through to TS12, there was a total limit of 256 textures. In TS12 I believe this has been increased to 256 per baseboard rather than the whole route. Don't quote me exactly on this but I think this is what the numbers are now. Think of this as a bank that stores the total number of textures allowed both route-wide and per baseboard.

At any rate, when a route is made, people add tons of textures, some more than others, and in addition to that, they swirl them to create mixed textures. The very act of mixing and blending textures is really creating yet another texture and subtracting from this bank. Then on top of that, people copy and paste these blended textures all over or fill areas with them. This now eating up the total number of textures allowed on the route and per baseboard, thus depleting the amount of additional textures that can be used.

When you are merging in another completed route, you are now increasing, if not going over the limit of, the number of textures, thus, Trainz starts dropping them. This also occurs when pasting and causes those funny lines along baseboard edges. Now the colors in this table are not just used for making pretty baseboards. There are other colors used to represent height and these are found in the greyscale side of the color-space table. With height maps, also known as displacement maps, black represents zero or the lowest point on the mesh, while white represents the highest point on the mesh.

Remember I said Trainz is dropping the colors as it runs out of color space? This is causing those deep dark holes as these colors become black voids, and black means going down to the lowest point that Trainz can handle. This may all be caused by the introduction of displacement maps in TRS2009, which I think is when they arrived and this would make sense as this is also when this bug occurred. Has it been fixed in T:ANE, probably not as it's not a major issue; just an annoyance which never got addressed. Maybe some day this will get on the fix-it list, but I doubt it.

John
 
Thanks, John, for clarifying this. Trainz evidently has some design shortcomings and texture count limit, I guess, is one of them. As far as the random spikes, holes and black spots along the base board edges is concerned, I have had this happen much more severely in T:ANE back a couple months when I was trying to modify a map in it. I have a thread on that here somewhere. TS12 has actually just been doing this rather mildly in comparison.

I only use (textures) colors in my route edits that were there originally in the built-in map I modify with one or two exceptions: I use grass or lawn textures to plant an occasional lawn as in front of a church or in a park and I use a mud texture to line the bottoms of bodies of water (rivers, lakes, streams, etc.) I create so the surface of the water appears darker and more natural when viewed from the top down.
 
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JonMyrlennBailey said:
Thanks, John, for clarifying this. Trainz evidently has some design shortcomings and texture count limit, I guess, is one of them. As far as the random spikes, holes and black spots along the base board edges is concerned, I have had this happen much more severely in T:ANE back a couple months when I was trying to modify a map in it. I have a thread on that here somewhere. TS12 has actually just been doing this rather mildly in comparison.

I only use (textures) colors in my route edits that were there originally in the built-in map I modify with one or two exceptions: I use grass or lawn textures to plant an occasional lawn as in front of a church or in a park and I use a mud texture to line the bottoms of bodies of water (rivers, lakes, streams, etc.) I create so the surface of the water appears darker and more natural when viewed from the top down.
Click to expand...

Well, now we know the issue still exists in T:ANE. I haven't done any route building; just importing and updating what I have already for now.

You maybe not be adding any additional new textures, but you are adding to the total number of textures on the route. Remember the bigger 'bank' and the smaller account I tried to explain above. In fact this is a better explanation the second time around.

In the old days video cards, for example, would pallet swap if they weren't capable of displaying 16.7 million colors in an image. I'm not sure if you remember this, but if you only had a video card that could only display 256-colors, you'd get a weird color-shift effect on some images when they loaded. This is the color-table substituting and removing colors so the image could display. In away this is happening in the game code to do the same for the route in order to accommodate your increased number of textures, though they may still be the same ones, some others get lost.

The limitations actually are on the computer systems, and probably on the display drivers, though I'm not sure. While things have surely gotten better since the early days, they are still there so we have to learn to live within the budgets that are given to us.


John
 
The number of texture TYPES or each and every spot on the map covered with texture?

Is my texture budget in terms of total map area actually COVERED in texture?
I could simply remove some of the boards on the outskirts of my map to reduce texture population if this is the case.

There are some boards that are never viewed anyway from the viewpoint of the railroad tracks where all the sights and action of
the game is focused.
 
So you delete allot of unnecessary baseboards to cut down on textures ... who is to say that the same textures that you deleted on those baseboards, are not widely spread, all over the route ... you might delete a couple here and there ... but you have to admit failure, and that you are doing something wrong. There is a point when you have to come to grips, that all your hard work was in vane ... and it is time to scrap the route, and re-start all over again, and redo it the correct way ... honestly I never had any of these problems, but if I found that Trainz was that much of a disappointment, I would give it up. When you alter a route that is running perfectly ... and edit, and punch holes in it, and merge areas back into the holes, there is where your root of the problem lies ... it wasn't broken ... you messed with it ... you broke it ... you can not fix broken
 
Just because Trainz doesn't do everything you want it to, exactly the way you want it to doesn't mean there is some conspiracy or intentional malfeasance on the part of it's developers or those that create for it. It just has limitations, and sometimes...there are just bugs. It's always been this way. No need for paranoia. Also, you can't compare Trainz to other programs like MS Word or whatever. That like comparing apples to elephants.
 
If the original route was so 'perfect' why were people here condemning original routes because they were so full of "copy/paste" textures that route authors, who made routes to be packaged inside Trainz editions, use, allegedly?

That a route, packaged in Trainz, was crafted with evil copy/paste textures (whatever that means) is not MY fault.

I am not about to give up Trainz. Not just YET. TS12 "bottomless pits" and "mystery spikes" were still MINOR enough for me to fix without too much hassle.

You don't scrap your 3-month-old Mercedes because of two flat tires.
 
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I once scrapped a 3 y/o route because all the terrain was deformed, by me prematurely hitting the smooth spine tool, before I had the gradients all perfected ... I re-did it the right way, in 3 months time. Sometimes a route is not salvageable.
 
JonMyrlennBailey said:
If the original route was so 'perfect' why were people here condemning original routes because they were so full of "copy/paste" textures that route authors, who made routes to be packaged inside Trainz editions, use, allegedly?

That a route, packaged in Trainz, was crafted with evil copy/paste textures (whatever that means) is not MY fault.

I am not about to give up Trainz. Not just YET. TS12 "bottomless pits" and "mystery spikes" were still MINOR enough for me to fix without too much hassle.

You don't scrap your 3-month-old Mercedes because of two flat tires.
Click to expand...

You are allowed 256 textures per baseboard in TS12 HF4. Prior to this it was 256 per route. These textures exist in layers on each baseboard that are hidden layers which you don't have access to. When you paint or paste a texture down, you are putting it on a layer. If you go back and paint or paste again, you are putting another layer down on top of the previous one, however, the previous layer still exists. They do this to allow texture blending so you can have grass blend into dirt, and dirt blend into mud, and so on. One all 256 texture-layers get filled, the bottom-most texture will move off the stack. If this is something that is used, as it maybe exposed somewhere on the baseboard, but covered elsewhere, you will have holes and peeks. As I said, when the original author pasted and copied, and rotated the textures, he put down many layers. When you merged a route together, you are probably pushing at the limits and causing some of the issues you are seeing.

The border bug always existed, now that I think about it more. In fact in TRS2004 we would have black outlines where the textures were pasted down while today these black outlines become holes and sometimes spikes, or sometimes stripes of missing textures along a baseboard join. These are all fairly east to fix, though annoying, and something that probably got put at the bottom of the fix-it list. Given the small number of people working there, and the changeover in developers, this issue got bounced around and lost.

I agree there's no reason to scrap something over a fairly annoying but solvable issue.

John
 
I was always under the impression that when a texture was painted over with another one, the old texture was 'erased' and the new one took its place. Trainz designers evidently forgot to include a "texture eraser". Another strike against the game creators. The texture eraser (to clear all textures down to a blank board) should be at least an option if one doesn't want to blend textures in layers anyway.

When one repaints a car, isn't it customary to strip away all the old paint (and rust) away down to bare metal then prime and paint it?

Trainz is a sloppy design.
 
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