Why is my baseboard showing signs of falling apart??

[pipefitter-helper]

Hi All --
My playboard, upon which I am trying to build a large marshaling yard, with all the bells and whistles, is showing what appear to be 'rips'. These 'rips' are not all the same width or length. They appear to not bother the trackage or its function; they are simply there. They do disrupt the scenery, however.

I have tried re-covering them with scenery but have been unsuccessful, so, being new at the game, I am out of ideas.

Has anyone else seen these 'rips' or 'tears' ? I would appreciate any suggestions as to what might be the problem and how to solve it.

Please forgive me if I am in the wrong forum for this issue. I have not found a discussion of this nature - it may be there, I simply have not found it yet.

I am on a 64 bit computer using Windows XP x64, with 4Gig of RAM.

Can someone help, please, possibly point me in the right direction or suggest the correct forum???

Thank You in advance
Pipefitter-Helper

 

[xcrossi]

Are you referring to the wire frame view?

 

[KingConrail76]

Hi All --
My playboard, upon which I am trying to build a large marshaling yard, with all the bells and whistles, is showing what appear to be 'rips'. These 'rips' are not all the same width or length. They appear to not bother the trackage or its function; they are simply there. They do disrupt the scenery, however.

I have tried re-covering them with scenery but have been unsuccessful, so, being new at the game, I am out of ideas.

Has anyone else seen these 'rips' or 'tears' ? I would appreciate any suggestions as to what might be the problem and how to solve it.

Please forgive me if I am in the wrong forum for this issue. I have not found a discussion of this nature - it may be there, I simply have not found it yet.

I am on a 64 bit computer using Windows XP x64, with 4Gig of RAM.

Can someone help, please, possibly point me in the right direction or suggest the correct forum???

Thank You in advance
Pipefitter-Helper

Picturez are worth 10,000 Trainz wordz...please post a screen shot of the problem areaz.

 

[JCitron]

Hi All --
My playboard, upon which I am trying to build a large marshaling yard, with all the bells and whistles, is showing what appear to be 'rips'. These 'rips' are not all the same width or length. They appear to not bother the trackage or its function; they are simply there. They do disrupt the scenery, however.

I have tried re-covering them with scenery but have been unsuccessful, so, being new at the game, I am out of ideas.

Has anyone else seen these 'rips' or 'tears' ? I would appreciate any suggestions as to what might be the problem and how to solve it.

Please forgive me if I am in the wrong forum for this issue. I have not found a discussion of this nature - it may be there, I simply have not found it yet.

I am on a 64 bit computer using Windows XP x64, with 4Gig of RAM.

Can someone help, please, possibly point me in the right direction or suggest the correct forum???

Thank You in advance
Pipefitter-Helper

These voids in the scenery... did they appear after you merged routes? This will happen and is sometimes due to the stitching of the sections together. They will also occur when textures have been filled in regions rather than painted.

I agree a picture/screen capture is helpful for us to assess the situation. You'll need to use something like Photo Bucket to host your image then post the link here for us to see it.

John

 

[pipefitter-helper]

Hi --

ThanknYou very much for the responses!! I need now to figure out how to get a screen shot of the situation. As soon as I get smart in that regard, I will be back with the picture

The question as to whether the problem showed up on the 'wire' under layer or not -- it showed up on the normal game surface; I then went to the 'wire' layer and it was there as well.

Again, Thanks
Pipefitter-helper

 

[nicky9499]

Have you recently played around with the 5m grid function? Newly created routes are 10m grid by default. You need to change this to 5m in the Terrain flyout. Any baseboard that was 10m needs to be manually upgraded to 5m one-by-one. "Tears" or gaps can occur between adjacent boards of different grid sizes.

 

[deneban]

There are also scenery objects that intentionally make a void in the ground.

 

[stagecoach]

Ive had this with texture on some parts of a big asset area. Tried to texture over it with the surrounding area texture but it would not take. I textured with a different texture and it worked fine, I then redid the correct texture and it also worked fine. The grid squares that showed in the missing area did not line up with each other, but lined up between grid squares. All boards are of the 5m selection.

 

[pipefitter-helper]

Hi again,

I finally got some screen shots of one instance of the tearz in the fabric of my baseboard. I have 6 pics which, I hope, will show my problem sufficiently to provide some assistance. These things are random in nature (here today, gone tomorrow) , sometimes there are 3-4 of them on the baseboard and sometimes nothing. They show-up the same way during quick-drive.

I tried to research the issue of "5-squares vis-a-vis 10-squares" on the baseboard. I apparently do not know where to look or I simply do not understand the concept and could not begin to find an answer. Probably it is mostly the latter with a bit of the former thrown-in.

Folks -- I really appreciate the helpful clues you have given. these conversations help me to understand the system a bit more.

The screenshots, such as they are, are :

forgive the immense size of the shots, I did not realize the space they would take up.

pipefitter-helper

 

[mezzoprezzo]

Your first image shows the "tear" right up against a track spline point. Do you possibly have a bad track join there? The rails and sleepers looks suspiciously like the distortion you can get when an additional bit of track is connected in error.

Have you tried breaking the join, deleting any erroneous track, and rebuilding that bit?

 

[JCitron]

Do you have a backup of your project somewhere?

This could very well be some data corruption of your route. I have had spike appear in the past when a route had become corrupted for some reason. I repaired one area, exited, and then loaded again and the spike had relocated elsewhere. The only recourse I had was to reload from a backup.

Trainz TS12 does create backups in the {program installed director}\userdata\backups. The backup folders are dated, day, month, year, but don't remain permanently. You may have lost the route if didn't backup anything to an external location

John

 

[stagecoach]

Those images show the error in the asset not in the texture or the boards. This is common on routes where you have splines placed on the surface that are not fixed in there height. The spline points do move slightly on the ground when just placed and if you use the smooth ground tool this can happen. I always fix the spline points height as this makes them rigid and not bend and twist to the ground surface. Computers are good but the ground only needs to be a fraction out when it you load the route for these to appear at random spots.
The second screenshot up shows how the ground is slightly raised on the left of the track.

 

[pipefitter-helper]

Hey Folks,
My most heartfelt THANKZ to all who responded to my initial plea for help!!

By George I think we got it. I did as Nicky9499 and Stagecoach suggested: I found where they were leading me, in the add ground arena and converted the entire playboard to the 5m-grid. That did not entirely solve the problem but there were certainly far fewer of the tears. Hooray-Hooray:clap: but also Oh Shucks!

I then determined to try the last suggestion made by stagecoach and that was to bite the bullet and start going through the board checking the heights of the splines in relation to the "ground". I had a couple of the "tears" that were teasing me so I went to the base area of each and started fixing the heights of the many splines surrounding those bases. Sure enough, as I fixed the spline heights, and possibly some bad connections in the splines as well, the "tears" completely and totally disappeared. Snoopy's Happy Dance!!!

Again THANKZ to all of you! Not only did you fix my problem for me but I picked up a good education as well. For my preferences, you all should get a gold star!

pipefitter-helper:Y: