inexplicable (non)appearance of ice-river and snow-piles (by dinorius_redundicus)

zsuda

gemmipickin'gimmepiggy
... by the mindfulness of blueodessey, i want my collection of merged layout clippings in tmr17 (march 2018) from silverliner lego207 (smworks) into a new, rebuilt diorama 4 in 1 in trs19...

... i like to use the awesome assets by dinorius_redundicus, as the <kuid:68213:37098> river 100m water02 ice03, seen in jointedrailz' monongahela & western pennsylvania by scratchy, and <kuid2:68213:22076:1> snow pile 01 - 05 (***80:1) ...
... they are "installed from dls" or "modified" ... no errors and only a warning about the "using of an obsolete trainz-build number" (snow piles = 3.3) ...
... although they were there in my trs19 version 105096, as shown by the pics, i couldn't use them in my new diorama in the same version : the snow piles showed up as a lightred triangle, only visible in f9 (wireframe), and the iced river(s) showed an evenly colored spline with an almost invisible "relief" (see pics) ...

... what i tried and didn't help :
- another ice-spline
- changing direction of the spline
- removing water (q)
- resetting ground grid resolution back to 10
- dbr (databaserepair)
- deleting and reinstalling the assets
- dbr again ...

inexplicable-%28non%29appearance.jpg


inexplicable-%28non%29appearance.jpg


... although i'm satisfied and happy with my icy river i like to solve those inexplicable appearance issues ... so, if some one can help me out ...
grtz
daveric

icy-river.jpg
 
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zsuda

As I write this, it is a little too late at night for me to fully investigate the problem. My superficial answer is that sometimes the lazy Trainz system needs to be kicked very hard to refresh the scene and show the ice or snow versions of seasonal assets. I suggest 2 things to try;

1. Make sure the snowline altitude value is much lower than the ground height on your route where the seasonal assets are located.

2. Force the scene to refresh by zooming away and up very high, then zoom back down to the scene.

If these actions do not fix the problems, let me know and I will see if there is anything I can do tomorrow.
 
... thankz a lot dino ...
... in the meantime i was thinking indeed about the ".. snowline altitude value .." and tried that out ... instead of 2000 high it's now -200 .. and yes .. it worked ..
another issue solved ... thankz again for your very quick responding ... and again : all your nice stuff ..
cu somewhere ..
grtz and sleep well in good health ..
daveric
 
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Daveric

I should qualify my suggestion about the snowline. It only needs to be perhaps 20m below the height of the scenery and splines that you want to make snowy. Just enough to avoid confusing the program by having the snowline almost the same height as the scenery objects and splines. The main problem you were seeing was the scene not re-drawing by itself.

You should also be aware of a long-existing fault in how the program deals with seasonal ground textures. Unlike for scenery and splines, snow on ground textures only appears if the snowline value is zero (or negative).

Imagine you have a 1000m-high mountain covered in seasonal trees and a grass seasonal ground texture. You only want to make the mountain peak above 500m snowy, leaving everything below 500m without snow. So you set the snowline to +500m. The trees obey the rules - they get snow above 500m, remain without snow below that. However, the grass remains green all the way up to the 1000m mountain top.

Only if you set the snowline to zero (or less) does snow appear on the groundtexture, but it goes all the way from zero up to the top of the mountain. In other words, you cannot get the effect you originally wanted, which was a mountain only capped with snow from 500m and upwards.

Deane


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thankz Deane for the extensive explanation ... i never thought about the term seasonal objects and/or textures ...
i opened one day my volvo-diorama ... the "normally weathered" ground was suddenly "disappeared" ... from one day to the next ... till i realized that it could be snow (jvc-pbr grass 02) ... on 1 december in europe ..
as my dioramas are "modelrailroads" i avoid seasonal effects as in real world ... i didn't think about the snowlevel, because i create on zero level (geographically) .. so does this winter landscape diorama ... with in my mind the "rollins pass winter" by jango : snow textures (non-seasonal alpsnow, alpsnowground, wdonnertx++rock ..) and snowy objects (non-seasonal houses with snow on the roof ..) ... or aforementioned "monongahela" by scratchy with textures as snc ice 5, sncsl grass & snow 1 .... and your snowpiles and icy river splines ...
... the textures i use in my snowdiorama are snowproof : not seasonal or snowline dependent ... and as you explained : your scenery & spline (snowpiles & river-ice) shows up above snowline, and therefore i have to level my snowline less than lowest height (=/<-50 in my case) ...
... contrary to what you say : ".. snow on ground textures only appears if the snowline value is zero (or negative) ..", i experienced that the "seasonal snow" appeared in my volvo-diorama with a snow altitude 2000.00 ...

if i can summarize it :
- labeled as "seasonal" is depending of (non)winter months (which in turn depends on the world hemisphere) .. regardless of the snow altitude or groundlevel ...
- labeled as "snow altitude" (as yours are described in config.txt) is depending of the value in the environment settings .. regardless of the season (time of the year) ...
if i'm stubborn or wrong then i do hear the objections, please ...

grtz
daveric
 
Maybe there is more to it than I thought, but I demonstrated with screenshots exactly what the bug does in this old post here. At the end of that same thread, Tony Hilliam admits the bug is real but said it is too much work for N3V to bother fixing.
 
... i understand what you're pointing at in that t:ane thread ... by using code "season-selector" it becomes too complicated for me ... i'm already pleased with making your assets visible by changing the snowline value ... and to stay simple : in my snow diorama i will use only snowproof (= non-seasonal) textures and set value snow altitude below lowest ground height ...
thankz again for your time ...
grtz
daveric
 
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