The floating dinorius redundicus cars and trucks.

This happens in TS12. They are various scenery cars and trucks.

I often find myself having to readjust these STATIC vehicles' ride heights periodically. I think sometimes they shift after an ext. db. repair or a reinstall of TS12 and/or a route.

I will set the ride height at whatever it actually is at the point the vehicle is placed so the tires aren't buried in the ground and so that the shadow is just at the surface.

On ground they should be at 0.00. On a yarn road they can be something like 0.25 to 0.40, however.

Often over a given route I will have several of these critters placed of the same model as a cement mixer or Chevy Cheyenne pickup both on hard ground AND on a spline road or slab. This means the same model may have duplicates at different ride heights. I may have a red Cheyenne on hard ground set at 0.00 and another one on a YARN street parked along the curb at 0.20 so the shadow is just at the surface of the pavement.

Is there a solution to permanently lock the ride heights even if they may vary over the same route for the same model?

Other static cars by different authors don't seem to have a shifting ride height issue.

You can adjust the height of the assets, and other settings of them, by getting the properties by using the ? in the Surveyor Scenery items pullout.

Their height above the surface is to take into account thick roads, or as they were in the olden days before YARN and its relations, the thin ribbon roads that floated above the landscape. You weren't born yet in the Trainzing world to remember elevator steps as carz climbed hills or the famous floating A-Team white vans, which was the thing back in the earliest Trainz days through TRS2004 SP1 when we asked for no more elevators.

John:

I have used the Properties to set the car heights. I suppose I have to do that each and every individual DR vehicle I set down in addition to using the Height tool in the objects tab.

Ok, let's say I set a DR car down on the ground, a parking lot painted in asphalt, on one part of the layout: a blue/white Cheyenne truck. So, I would use the Height tool to get the truck at ground level. 0, zero. Then should I make sure the Properties setting is also 0.00?

Then I place another blue/white Cheyenne in another parking lot at ground level: would I still have to set Ride Height under properties for that one as well?

Then I place yet another blue/white Cheyenne by a YARN street curb and need to set it at 0.20 to keep the ground shadow at road surface level. Would I need to set Properties for 0.20 for that particular instance of a blue/white Chevrolet Cheyenne pickup by dinorius?

Mr. redundicus has many static scenery vehicles with similar editable properties for RIDE HEIGHT.

I think some of his are not editable, however, as certain Mack dump trucks.

I seem to have the most trouble with inevitable floating with the DR-authored Ford Crown Vic police carz, the cement mixers and the Cheyenne pickups.

Sometimes, if memory serves me correctly, his Ford police carz would even sink down below the ground surface a few notches as time goes by.

I suppose so ... too bad

Yeah sorry about all the bother. It's to do with the Andi06 traffic script that manages float height, nightmode etc. It was a good idea at the time (TRS2004), but when TS2010 came out it wrecked the script. I was so pissed off that I never found the enthusiasm to update everything by removing the script.

If I remember correctly, if you use the ? properties on one vehicle to reset the height, all others on the map are adjusted at the same time. Might need to verify if that's true or just a Trumpism.

Also, I can't remember how to ensure the adjustment is made permanent. Something to do with saving the Session?

That's OK, Mr. D R:

On my model TRAINZ layout, I don't think I will use more than 50 of your vehicles. I think I will try something. I will verify under Properties that the Ride Height is correct for each and every car placed as they can vary for the instances of the same vehicle used multiple times on the layout. Cheyenne trucks on the spline street as well as Cheyenne trucks on bare ground. I think ride heights have been only altered under certain conditions as a db. repair or something.

Perhaps, I can check them while editing the Session as well.

JonMyrlennBailey said:

Sometimes ... his Ford police carz would even sink down below the ground surface a few notches as time goes by.

Click to expand...

Maybe it's the cheap asphalt roads you are using. In the heat of summer they tend to melt causing cars to sink and get stuck.

Perhaps, I could do something like this; use red Cheyenne trucks on YARN roads only (+0.20) and blue Cheyenne trucks on bare ground only (0.00) if the set ride height of one particular content item were to affect all the rest globally. That means I can't have a DR cement mixer on the road and others in the concrete plant parking lot (bare ground sprayed with asphalt) on the same route as the ones in the parking lot might go airborne by 0.20 if the one on the YARN highway remains at that same height.

I am using static cars on my scenery motor roadways since this is a MODEL layout and boatz ATLS crossings don't work reliably in TS12 anyway. I just can't stand carz that get hung up at crossings tooting their horns, ghosting through trains or parking right on the tracks. Traffic under Edit Environment is thus Disabled.

Someday when I start to use TANE seriously (I will need a fancy gaming PC which is out of my budget right now) I will have to try out TRC Traffic Stoppers by vincentrh since his TRC grade/level crossing gates have proven to me to work very well in TANE. I hope his carz-crossing management content is just as good for controlling carz at crossings as it is for controlling the crossing gates themselves. From what I understand, road carz behave naturally at crossings under TRC equipment. No stopping on tracks, etc. Vincent doesn't offer much in the way of TS12-compatible TRC content.

You can adjust your Carz and Truckz globally using the values, and then go back and manually raise or lower the ones you need to in order to overcome their placement on the terrain or on a road.

The thicker YARN roads were created to overcome the floating carz and A-Team vans we had in the old days. This all came out of an idgit move during the development which only got worse over time. What happened is someone got the zero-inclusive thing mixed up and set the offset from the surface wrong on the road splines, causing the road splines to float a wee bit off the surface like strips of poorly laid down pieces of paper. With the traffic, the carz were enabled to run on the floating roads, but someone got that mixed up and made the carz float magically off the surface. Along came those awesome YARN roads, and the cars now have road under their tires. That worked fine until the carz height was then fixed in later Trainz versions to the proper height off the surface, which now causes carz to dig into the roads.

Thanks, John:

The majority of those static cars are placed by me on bare ground as parking lots anyway. I spray my parking lots asphalt (bare ground) and then use White Line Unbroken spline to make the spaces by hand. I set the spline points to -0.09 below the ground level altitude since these lines will float above the ground otherwise. I use parking lot spline as a template to draw the white lines. I hate the looks of the parking lot spline anyway.

Perhaps, the global values for the DR scenery cars then should be 0.00 by default for all of them. I would only have to adjust the ones put on YARN roads but leave the global values alone, I guess. I'll try that


PS: Incidentally, White Line Unbroken,along with the Ruler, is a handy marking tool to use in Trainz building for many different things as keeping a row of trees (or light posts on a station platform) perfectly straight.

You sure know how to sweat the petty thangs' ... It must take all the joy out of Trainz

Deane and I talked about this ages ago privately.

I like the idea of using the parking lot lines as a ruler. I need to do that for things like trees along a roadway, lights, etc.