Luddite Annie goes Plus.

KotangaGirl said:

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I'm still 'nonplussed' so animations and traffic aren't working. The first time I saw a car sitting stopped on the road I gave it a little prod with the mouse pointer thinking it might be tired, but then I remembered the curse that lays upon the digital lands for those who own but the Classic version and are unplussed. It's a bit annoying when installing signals, - proper signals that is, - because the semaphore arms can barely manage a very slight droop towards the clear position before the curse takes hold of them.

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I'm writing a script to control signals at the moment and my randomly chosen signal seems to work OK. Can you quote a kuid.

BTW, in my work for the CRG I came across of pseudo broken speed trees by RMM. This is a false alarm and the few I checked were not broken but probably marked faulty due to a missing library that was later uploaded. Anyway, some of the trees I looked at were very nice and well worth a look.

<kuid2:218467:24512:1> Sig M&H home by chrisaw. However all of the M&H signals no matter which build they were made for are doing this in Surveyor so it's not just this one. In Driver though they are fine.

I have used trees by RMM before so it's nice to know that they will work in TS2019.

Thanks for your good wishes and comments Ian and Blue.

This translation thread for RMM trees is to be recommended. https://forums.auran.com/trainz/sho...-rmm-English-translations&highlight=rmm+trees

KotangaGirl said:

<kuid2:218467:24512:1> Sig M&H home by chrisaw. However all of the M&H signals no matter which build they were made for are doing this in Surveyor so it's not just this one. In Driver though they are fine.

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Thanks, I'll try it out in my signal test route. I confess I was more interested in whether I could make it change rather than watching the animation.

I got the impression RMM is converting his/her billboard trees to SpeedTrees V6.

pcas1986 said:

Thanks, I'll try it out in my signal test route. I confess I was more interested in whether I could make it change rather than watching the animation.

I got the impression RMM is converting his/her billboard trees to SpeedTrees V6.

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Sure he is not updating the 700 + v6 SpeedTrees of his that are on the DLS?

I'm continuing to work on the K&ESR Summer layout since with it very close to completion it would be silly to go off and start on something else.
I am now 'plused' with a pause function that can be switched off and on and mysterious surveyor options that were greyed out before now active. I'll have look at using the new unified surveyor later on after I've done a new back up and laid in stocks of garlic and holy water. I'm not good with 'new' and the unified surveyor is 'NEW' with capital letters so I'm going to take my time with getting used to it (poke sniff.....).

Other delights I have found with working in TS2019 is that when I tried to run a barbed wire fence spline through the middle of hedge spline like I've done dozens of times before in TS2012 a big black dire warning message box popped to tell me that attempting to connect two vertexes together that were incompatible would bring about the total collapse of the entire universe. Possibly I exaggerate a little, but I was a bit wide-eyed 'What the heck is this!' for a minute or so. I wasn't trying to join anything so what gives?

And after changing a few hundred more trees with replacing the old TS2004 billboards with RMM trees and M: Ultras I needed to sleep so I went to save what I'd done. I got a lot of tripe from another message box about needing to save the session layer too which is dead daft since all I was doing was replacing trees. And later on when I opened the route just to have a look at something I got the same message box again. I'd done nothing except look and didn't touch anything so what on earth is going on? No wonder new chums end up being confused over ending up with hundreds of sessions named 'Default'.
I do have to say though some of those old TS2004 billboard trees weren't too bad at all in TS2019. I'm talking about the ones that don't turn into ghosts or odd looking green cardboard cutouts by the way. I may still use some of them in the background areas of the layout since they look perfectly Ok at a distance and it's not until I get up close that I can see that they are billboard trees.

Still a bit to do with fences and hedges and I've been repairing merge holes and trenches that angelah must've missed finding before she uploaded the original layout. My main focus has been on tidying up stations and sorting out signalling which takes a while since I'm fussy about things fitting properly together. The original layout was basically early BR and as I guess you can predict I'm taking it back to an earlier era. Angelah used some kind of mapping software to lay out the route so it's scale length and everything is in the right place. I'm checking things against ancient OS maps, but I'm not going madly finescale over it. If it all looks basically right and plausible without any glaring anachronisms that will do me.

Latest snaps from Northiam station. Still some odd things to do, but it's getting there. The locomotive and coaches aren't really K&ESR, - I just fancied giving some of my 19th century models a run.

More driving lessons. That young Wallace certainly seems to be able to attract the ladies. Though some of my other engines with footplate crew have had the awful circumstance of a TS2019 Driver doing a hideous chest burst act with the original driver. Not good at all.



Northiam station.





Heading for Robertsbridge.

Love the screenshots Annie.

I only have Platinum but I love the Unified Driver Surveyor interface, it has saved me heaps of time in fixing issues with my routes that I spot when I am in Driver mode. You have to remember that when you switch between Driver and Surveyor (in any direction) Trainz immediately goes into Pause mode. Not really an issue in Surveyor (except you won't see animations like smoke) but in Driver (and Surveyor) just tap the P key to get going again.

The constant reminders to Save the Session after only editing route layers I initially reported as a "bug" but was told it was necessary for the UDS. If I know that I have only edited route layers then I ignore the request to save the session. So far the sky has not fallen in.

I am enjoying your "reports from the front".

Thanks very much pware. Despite odd teething troubles and getting used to new things with TS2019 it's all been a good experience for me and I certainly want to keep on going with what I am doing. It might be taken as measure of how interested I am in TS2019 that I haven't fired up TS2012 since I began this experiment except to save something to CDP so I could transfer it to TS2019.

Thanks for the pointers about the Unified Driver Surveyor interface. I can certainly understand how useful it would be, - it's just me having to get used to a new way of working.

KotangaGirl said:

Thanks very much pware. Despite odd teething troubles and getting used to new things with TS2019 it's all been a good experience for me and I certainly want to keep on going with what I am doing. It might be taken as measure of how interested I am in TS2019 that I haven't fired up TS2012 since I began this experiment except to save something to CDP so I could transfer it to TS2019.

Thanks for the pointers about the Unified Driver Surveyor interface. I can certainly understand how useful it would be, - it's just me having to get used to a new way of working.

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I've assigned F8 for the search box, quicker than messing with menus! or three fingered keyboard shortcuts.

Beautiful pictures; Northiam looks amazing! Notwithstanding all the issues - it might all just be worth it?
Best wishes
Ian

Beautiful Route, Ann!

That is really beautiful.

I use a lot of RMM's trees more so than any of the others. They have the best color and size for the most part and look close to the species they represent.

I've never found any Pro-track that really fits the bill. Like the line you are working on, mine are based on my local region where tracks are not as pristine as we have here. I've gone through great lengths to find better ballast, even going as far as to reskin good looking track to make it look worse, but as you noted it looks like model railroad track no matter how we cut it. The only thing I have found that makes the track look questionable is to bury the ties a bit more than the connecting mainlines and that is okay for most places.

I suppose with this being a hobby the way it is, we have to compromise and use our imagination as well to get the effect we want much like a physical model railroad that's nothing more than a bookshelf with a fiddle yard attached.

I also use mainly rmm trees and shrubs, although a few of my small multi twisted bill board bushes work very well as do the shrunken versions as in CL small plant 01 to 03.

Thank you for the encouraging comments everyone, - they are really are appreciated.

What I particularly like about RMM trees John is the variety with each type of tree as well as the range of sizes. Some of the old TS2004 billboard trees were big trees and angelah used them to good effect. Attempting to retain the visual appearance of certain areas of the layout with nothing but the seemingly present fashion for small trees is pretty much doomed to failure. Fortunately I was able to find just the trees I wanted in RMM's extensive range of trees. Even though Angelah's Sussex layout seems to have not that many trees at first glance there are actually a considerable amount of them altogether over the whole length of the layout, - and as well as that Angelah used a wide variety of tree species so in many ways this layout has been a bit of a challenge to update while also retaining its essential character.

I think I looked at every type of track that was in anyway suitable to see if there was something better than what I'm using and there just plain wasn't. But as you say in the end it comes down to using our imagination to fill in the gaps.

Edit: Just noticed your post Malc. Our posts must've crossed. Yes some of your trees and bushes are perfectly fine in TS2019 and I've been figuring out which ones I want to use for my M&GNJR layout. I'll be replacing some of the undersized and 'all the same' stock TS2019 Speedtrees on the K&ESR layout with some of your small trees and bushes as well.

JCitron said:

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I've never found any Pro-track that really fits the bill. Like the line you are working on, mine are based on my local region where tracks are not as pristine as we have here. I've gone through great lengths to find better ballast, even going as far as to reskin good looking track to make it look worse, but as you noted it looks like model railroad track no matter how we cut it. The only thing I have found that makes the track look questionable is to bury the ties a bit more than the connecting mainlines and that is okay for most places.
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Do you have any photos of what you need? I have a partially completed Pro Track project that is a solution looking for a problem.

Norfolk Track by rumour3 Trainz build 2.0 <kuid2:79563:50004:1>
Why do I like this track despite its simplified detailing? No high ballast shoulder with an implausibly perfect straight edge; ballast is dirty and is composed of stones of varying sizes that don't look like they have been put in place by robots; And it doesn't look like it's made of plastic or as if it was extruded from a giant toffee machine.
A good many TS2019 screenshots that I see posted here on the forums are let down badly by track choices.

KotangaGirl said:

{pic removed so not to quote it}

Norfolk Track by rumour3 Trainz build 2.0 <kuid2:79563:50004:1>
Why do I like this track despite its simplified detailing? No high ballast shoulder with an implausibly perfect straight edge; ballast is dirty and is composed of stones of varying sizes that don't look like they have been put in place by robots; And it doesn't look like it's made of plastic or as if it was extruded from a giant toffee machine.
A good many TS2019 screenshots that I see posted here on the forums are let down badly by track choices.

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Yes that's part of it.

pcas1986 said:

Do you have any photos of what you need? I have a partially completed Pro Track project that is a solution looking for a problem.

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Thank you for the offer.

Here's some screenshots for examples:



The crookedness isn't a problem. I can do that myself rather easily! Note the overall poor quality of this track. The closest I can get to it is using the Jointed Rail US #132 track with the grey ballast.


The engine is sitting on the rusty version of the track which I use extensively in yards, otherwise, I use a modified version that uses JR's TEX Sparse grass or something like that. The track to the left is the track in better condition.


My peeves with the Pro-track have always been here since the beginning:

1) Too clean and pretty
2) Ties too thin and too sparsely spaced compared to what should be on a mainline.
3) Rails too thin for a mainline at least for US purposes.

This is true of all the Pro-track regardless of the creator. Placing the track for me has never been an issue and I've had good results with the switches and other aspects of it. It's just the look of it I don't like due to the reasons mentioned.

Mostly I'm looking for lighter rail sections, but that's because I model light railways and minor railways from the pre-WW1 era, - however I can appreciate that for modern day mainline use that much of the 'modern' trackwork on offer is too light weight.
For one of the light railways on my Norfolk layout I tried so many different tracks with all of them not looking anything like I wanted. In the end I used a legacy lightweight flat-bottomed rail only track and set it down at ground level. <kuid2:439337:101528:1> SAP Lightly Rusted Track Rails Only SG

I found some of the old TS2004 FMA tracks by hottrainz to be of use on one of my Norfolk tramways, but I find it strange that with all the evident skill some of the content creators for Trainz can bring to bear that I'm having to use old legacy track in order to achieve a realistic result.

Northiam station revised. After studying the 1908 25 inch to the mile OS map, various old photos and reading what little historical information I could find I realised that Northiam station as modelled by Angelah wasn't correct in a number of details. Now I'm wondering how far do I go with this. There's supposed to be a large cattle market beside the station yard and two staff cottages. The main station buildings are based on the preservation era and not what was there when it was a working railway. There never was a signal box at Northiam, but that was easy to deal with. If i don't watch out this could go from being a quick tidy up job to becoming a historical project with me doing reskins to create representations of the original buildings and goodness knows what else besides.
Or do I just leave it as a sort of generic light railway somewhat based on the K&ESR. I'd like to try and make a good job of revising this layout, but having already once before burned myself out with a 1880s GWR Broad Gauge layout based on a historic location I'm a bit wary about starting off another project based on an actual prototype. (sigh).

Obviously what's there looks good. The real question is how far do you go, in being authentic? That's going to be a balancing act between what you want versus what is practical. Not many will notice the finer details of accuracy so one needs to bear in mine what is good from the players point of view. But then all route builders have to do that balancing act.