Seasonal ground Cover - snow at different elevations?

davemare

Member
I operate in the mountains of BC and change the snow elevation based on the month. Objects and track follow the snow elevation correctly. Seasonal ground cover is binary- ie snow when set to 0ft snow level, nothing for any other snow level elevation. I hvae tried changing all other variables in environment. Also tried moving the world origin.

Is there a vsetting that allows seasonal ground cover to show snow at the snow elevation setting? thanks
 
Seasonal ground textures use the same control method for snow as seasonal track and scenery, and snow shouldn’t depend on the month (if the assets have been created according to N3V’s rules). So everything should get snowy at the same elevation as determined by your map’s snowline setting. If you’re manually changing the snowline according to month, then that’s ok but everything that has been equipped to display snow should still do so in unison.

I often find that the screen re-draw required to make snow appear (or disappear) needs to be manually forced by a long zoom out and back in. Could the lack of automatic screen redraw be the cause of your problem?


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Binary On off

Thanks for suggestion. . When I zoom out, and when snow elevation is set to 0, there is snow across the geography. when zoomed at any magnification. When any other snow elevation numeric is set, there is only non snow ground cover showing at all magnifications.

Yesterday I have tried changing this setting in routes that come with TANE and get then same result, so this seems to be an application issue. I am on the most current version of TANE.

I have also change lat/long settings and months in environment to see if this has an effect, with no change in behavior.
 
I’m still struggling to work out whether your problem is due to some technical issue or just a misunderstanding of how seasonal assets work in Trainz. In case it’s just misunderstanding, I’ll elaborate on how Trainz handles seasons and snow. Everything that I say below assumes that the assets involved have been equipped with the relevant textures and have been configured correctly according to Trainz seasonal effect conventions.

Snow on/off is always a binary choice for season-enabled assets. Whether they be ground textures, tracks or scenery such as buildings or trees, snow in Trainz only depends on the altitude of the asset relative to the snowline height value that you set in the Environment tab. It also does not depend on the month, or the location of the world origin.

If the asset is above the snowline: Snow will be ON and any month-based effects (like autumn, winter, spring and summer textures on trees) will not be seen. It will just be snow, whatever the time of year, and all through the year. This actually conforms to the real-world definition of snowline. If seasonal things aren’t displaying snow, then lower your snowline setting until they do. You can use negative numbers to force snow textures if your ground altitude happens to be 0. Tip: use snowline settings that are at least 10m lower than the altitude you want the snow on/off transition to occur at (to allow a bit of error margin for the process).

If the asset is below the snowline: Snow will be OFF and only then can you see any month-based texture changes, such as in seasonal vegetation. The month-to-month timing (the phase) of those changes is determined by the world origin location - specifically, what counts is whether it’s in the southern or northern hemisphere. For example, if it’s in the southern hemisphere, autumn textures should appear in March to May, but if the origin is in the northern hemisphere, autumn should be in September to November. In other words, the seasons are 6 months different in the two hemispheres. The exact latitude or longitude of the origin has no effect on seasonal phasing, except to say that in Trainz, the equator is deemed to be part of the northern hemisphere. Latitude does affect the height of the sun's daily arc in the sky (and therefore the lengths of shadows).

Buried in all those words is one perennial source of confusion, which may be important for your understanding. The months defined as winter in Trainz are not synonymous with snow. For a Canadian this can seem counter-intuitive, even annoying, but it is how Trainz allows for parts of the world where so-called winter months never produce snow (think of Bermuda). You can expect some seasonal trees to be bare in winter months, some ground textures to be rather dull colours, but they should not be automatically covered in snow just because of the time of year, in Canada or anywhere else. The only way to get any seasonal asset to show snow textures should be to lower the snowline setting until it forces snow to appear.

From all that, you can see that you can force snow by adjusting snowline to a lower elevation, but you need to remember to adjust it back upwards if you want to see the other non-snow seasonal texture schemes.


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Hi All
Unfortunately, in TANE and earlier, ground textures only show the 'snow' version when the snow-line setting is set to 0m. This is due to a bug in the way that the terrain and ground textures are handled for the snow-line function. This should be resolved in TRS19, however unfortunately the fix is unable to be applied to Trainz: A New Era.
 
Hi All
Unfortunately, in TANE and earlier, ground textures only show the 'snow' version when the snow-line setting is set to 0m. This is due to a bug in the way that the terrain and ground textures are handled for the snow-line function. This should be resolved in TRS19, however unfortunately the fix is unable to be applied to Trainz: A New Era.

I didn't know about that bug until just now. My apologies to Davemare. Think of what I said above as the way seasons/snow should work.

I must say, in my copy of T:ANE with a map whose ground is at 0 m, I do get snow on ground textures and all other snow-enabled assets when the snowline is less than 0m. I generally plug in a value of -90m. Works all the time. So I don't really know what bug Zec is referring to.


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ground texture snow

Zec

thanks for the clarification. I look forward to a future version with a changing snow line on ground texture

Dinorius_Redundicus

thanks for your explanations. What you describe is how I was expecting code to work, glad to see we both expect the same event.

I guess we can both look forward to an improved experience in the future.
 
What bug?

Hi All
Unfortunately, in TANE and earlier, ground textures only show the 'snow' version when the snow-line setting is set to 0m. This is due to a bug in the way that the terrain and ground textures are handled for the snow-line function. This should be resolved in TRS19, however unfortunately the fix is unable to be applied to Trainz: A New Era.

This is T:ANE SP3 (build 94829) and a scene in which the ground is at 0m elevation. Snowline set at +90m (no snow visible as expected), and then at -90m (snow appears as expected). What bug?

Ground height 0m. Snowline setting +90m

dbYpaA4.jpg



Ground height 0m. Snowline setting -90m
xQZRjks.jpg



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Well that's a bummer! I just came looking for some info on the snowing and here's the reason why it isn't working. I realise this is an old thread, and perhaps those interested have moved to TRS 2019, but given that it was a feature of T:ANE it's a bit of a bummer that the bug prevents it working properly.

Has it been fixed in TRS 2019?
 
If there was a bug in T:ANE as Zec described it, how are the two pictures above in which everything is working perfectly, explained away? Something doesn’t add up here.


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What the images show is that snow can be produced on ground texture if snow line is set to 0m or less.

However, a snow line above 0m results in no snow on ground textures. Snow will be drawn on seasonal trees above a snow line when the snow line is higher than 0m, but not ground textures.

This means you cannot simulate snow above a certain altitude, it's either complete snow coverage or none at all. It would be nice to have a coast to mountain railroad climbing up into snowy territory, or have snow covered peaks in the landscape.
 
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So, I may be missing something here. My route goes from sea level up to high mountains. I set the snow level to 100 mts for the sake of test. I paint a snow seasonal ground texture up in the above 100 mts level and it paints snow as expected. Then I up the snow line setting to 200 mts. The paint still shows snow (no good?). then I paint the same texture at sea level (0 mts) and shows snow. Testing, I set it to .-9 mts and still shows snow. Only thing I can think is that I am using the wrong texture (??). can you suggest a known working texture and how to set it properly?
 
Digging into the matter, I found the following: The texture I used (built-in) does not work. But the ones "Ultra" do. However, the only way for them to change from green to snow is setting the snow level to a minus altitude. it does not matter if I paint at sea level or high in the mountain. Let's say the mountain is at 130 mt. The snow level at 100 mt, and the texture remains green, at sea or mountain. Put a minus sign in front of the 100 snow level set, or a -1mt, and the texture shows snow white. I don't think this is the way it is intended to be.
 
After some more testing, I too must revise my view.

Scenery and spline assets that have been configured to show snow above the snowline all work as intended, whatever the snowline setting is.

Groundtextures configured (correctly according to the rules) only show snow if the snowline value is 0 or negative. That's not as it is supposed to be. So yes, there is indeed a bug which N3V needs to fix in T:ANE.
 
@ nfitzsimmons - this sequence of pictures might unconfuse you.


In this scene, the flat ground has an altitude of 200m, the river spline is at 195m, the river bed and bridge are at 190m. Everything is snow-enabled so should display snow if the snowline height is 190m or lower.


1. Snowline = 300m. Nothing should display snow because the snowline is well above everything in the scene. The expected behaviour is observed.
DGfiJRB.jpg




2. Snowline = 190m. Everything should now display snow because the snowline is either at or below every element in the scene. In practice, everything except for the ground texture becomes snowy. This illustrates the bug.
veNTKxY.jpg




3. Snowline = 0m. Only if the snowline is lowered to 0m (or less) does the ground texture finally display snow. So the behaviour of the ground texture is wrong and totally out of sync with that of 3D objects and splines.
bk0r7bq.jpg
 
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I wonder if N3V people would see your very descriptive illustration... I can replicate it in my set-up.
 
I wonder if N3V people would see your very descriptive illustration... I can replicate it in my set-up.

We know that N3V are aware of the bug because Zec Murphy said so. I think they are doing one final patch or hotfix for T:ANE, so I hope it includes a fix for the snowline bug. As a person who has spent a fair amount of time adding seasonal/snow textures to my assets, it’s maddening to know they don’t work as intended in one of the current versions of the simulator.
 
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