(Apologies for possibly posting in the wrong thread - if so please let me know where I should post this instead. I saw the dev thread is invitation only so not trying there.)
Hello all,
evaluating all the train sims available currently makes TANE my favorite since it has just about all the features I consider important to have in a train sim. The addition of procedural track and now interlocking towers sealed the deal for me
- so TANE has been the one I've been spending more time with including when considering creating my own routes.
I have come up with a few things that are still difficult for me to do and which are stopping me from more serious route building so any answers or tips here will be appreciated. Thank you for all taking the time to read through this.
1) Placing OHLE gantries near track - I thought of extracting laid track data, modeling the spline, and then placing gantry objects along it at the proper intervals to emulate this. Alas, Trainz does not seem to use the cubic spline algorithm I guessed it would so at least for now this approach is a non-starter. I am looking for a way to automate this task though and still have enough control over it that I can come up with realistic gantry object placement. I do like electrified routes so this is a rather big deal.
Being able to "walk" the track from trainz script and then doing the math in the script would work too if anyone can point me in a direction allowing me to do this.
2) Placing track with realistic curves to match route parameters - thankfully I saw that the trk files simply contain lists of XYZ points showing where the different spline points lie along the terrain and TANE does all the hard work of modeling the track spline between these. Again I'm looking to be able to supply the points so that it renders what appears to be a proper curve with the appropriate radius similar to what is available in another sim. This is not so hard but would require me to study the gnd files to better get the coordinates of where the track should be. It would also help enormously with laying double and triple track main line sections. I know this is possible since TransDEM does a portion of it when creating route layouts from DEM files. Still It would work best with point 1 above.
3) Documentation on how to use the various features of the current and past versions of Trainz such as the functionality in Surveyor or the various file formats used by the sim. I have found bits and pieces including some excellent tutorials on how to manually lay good-looking track but so far no repository. Any suggestions here would be welcome.
As for the rest I think Surveyor has all the features I'd need to do everything else for any route build
Hello all,
evaluating all the train sims available currently makes TANE my favorite since it has just about all the features I consider important to have in a train sim. The addition of procedural track and now interlocking towers sealed the deal for me
- so TANE has been the one I've been spending more time with including when considering creating my own routes. I have come up with a few things that are still difficult for me to do and which are stopping me from more serious route building so any answers or tips here will be appreciated. Thank you for all taking the time to read through this.
1) Placing OHLE gantries near track - I thought of extracting laid track data, modeling the spline, and then placing gantry objects along it at the proper intervals to emulate this. Alas, Trainz does not seem to use the cubic spline algorithm I guessed it would so at least for now this approach is a non-starter. I am looking for a way to automate this task though and still have enough control over it that I can come up with realistic gantry object placement. I do like electrified routes so this is a rather big deal.
Being able to "walk" the track from trainz script and then doing the math in the script would work too if anyone can point me in a direction allowing me to do this.
2) Placing track with realistic curves to match route parameters - thankfully I saw that the trk files simply contain lists of XYZ points showing where the different spline points lie along the terrain and TANE does all the hard work of modeling the track spline between these. Again I'm looking to be able to supply the points so that it renders what appears to be a proper curve with the appropriate radius similar to what is available in another sim. This is not so hard but would require me to study the gnd files to better get the coordinates of where the track should be. It would also help enormously with laying double and triple track main line sections. I know this is possible since TransDEM does a portion of it when creating route layouts from DEM files. Still It would work best with point 1 above.
3) Documentation on how to use the various features of the current and past versions of Trainz such as the functionality in Surveyor or the various file formats used by the sim. I have found bits and pieces including some excellent tutorials on how to manually lay good-looking track but so far no repository. Any suggestions here would be welcome.
As for the rest I think Surveyor has all the features I'd need to do everything else for any route build