Surveyor 2.0 - Discussion Thread

wreeder said:
Tony,
can we have random rotate when placing ground textures?
Click to expand...

I think you already have it : for a french keyboard it's the [^] and [)] keys, clockwise and counterclockwise but you can read at

https://online.ts2009.com/mediaWiki/index.php/Help:Surveyor_Paint_Tools#Direction_Tool

Click LMB on the Direction indicator and rotate the pointer to change the orientation of the texture as it is painted onto the baseboard. The '[' and ']' keys can also be used to rotate the Direction pointer.

[Mode edit on]You have to let your finger pressed the key while you maintain left-mouse-button the landscape [Mode edit off]

Regards
 
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Hi Jean,

Glad to meet you. I guess I wasn't detailed enough with my request. As you say, you can rotate with the keyboard shortcuts but you are limited to just 45 degree angles. But you can manually move the compass to any angle. Using the keyboard shortcut will produce a recognizable pattern over an large area. The random rotate object feature will rotate to any angle including fractions of a degree. What I am requesting is a random rotate function for ground textures with the same freedom of rotation to better hide the pattern of using the same texture.

But now you have me thinking that it would be nice to be able to pick several textures that work together well (think desert textures that are of similar colors) and have the brush randomly paint from that selection of textures with random rotation applied as well. This would make covering large areas with realistic textures a snap. Many of dmdrake's texture sets would be perfect for this usage.

William
 
It is still difficult not to lay down patterns, even changing angles. Sometime it helps to vary the radius of the circle as well, but depending on how large the repeated pattern is, may just give you more or fewer squares. (Does it seem odd that we use a circle to texture baseboard squares?) I do like the idea in your second paragraph, William. It can currently be attempted manually, but would be great if you could load in multiples at a time. That would take a fair bit of programming, though, I would think.
 
An interesting piece of history is that in the first version of Trainz and UTC the smallest radius of the texture brush was 4 grid squares but with TRS2004 it was made just one grid square in radius and the texture was applied to the center of the square with it fading out as it crossed the sides of the square. This made it easy to create straight edges. TRS2006 changed the way textures were applied to the grid by having them be applied to the intersection of the grid lines. This caused the diamond shaped pattern that we still have to deal with today.

William
 
Wait until you see the Scrapbook Brush and Scrapbook Clone tools. Perfect for creating your own texture palettes. With the "unlimited" brush size, painting 100 baseboards is quick and easy. :)

Note that since the heightmap textures have a "direction" they do not blend and rotate as well as the old textures. There is also a significant performance hit to doing that, as there is for having hundreds of different textures in a route.
 
Any new Train simulator has a big chance to fail, why?
It lacks Tony and his crew, 20 year experience, a loyal userbase
a few hundred active content creators and 1 million assets ready to be used


Back to topic, the Scrapbook Brush and Scrapbook Clone tools, sounds great
Another thing I came across, is numerical relative placement
You can grab, set and use a height now in surveyor, for FI a spline point
Later lets say you want to lift those points 20cm, currently you have to do that by hand
if there would be a little box where you can put a relative height and use it, would be great
I found out the hard way changing 200km of catenary spline points recently.
 
G.M. said:
Any new Train simulator has a big chance to fail, why?
It lacks Tony and his crew, 20 year experience
Click to expand...
Take some time to read about the company, http://simrail.eu/en/about-us

The company SimKol sp.z o.o. is a Polish manufacturer of simulators and training software for the railway industry. Our team currently consists of over 20 people - it is made up of specialists associated with rail transport for almost 10 years, as well as professional programmers, electronics and computer graphics. Many people employed in our company have contact with the railways in their daily duties, which means that we remember the smallest details when executing orders. The experience gained guarantees that our products are of the highest quality and the maximum level of realism.

Today is a special day - the release of "SimRail 2021 Demo" on Steam next festival.
You will have the opportunity to ask some questions to the developer and see the real gameplay.

Zrzut_ekranu_394.png
 
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Can we get a slight QoL improvement on this & the current version of Trainz? Make it so that the UI boxes don't overlap the menu buttons.
Screenshot%202021-10-01%20102446.png
 
@RailRoadEngineer, a discussion thread for Surveyor2 on a Trainz forum,
is not the place to promote a new competition Sim.
Am an architect for over 30 years that does not make me a specialist or the best,
can program in C++ if i want, but does not make me a programmer.
In weekly contact with real train drivers in my country,
and they play Trainz in their free time, why? don't think I need to answer that.
if you quote, do not leave out the important bits :) wish you succes with your new sim.


@PerRock, good point, you also see a name of the current selected item on top of that window
better place would be the top bar of the entire window
essential to see what is selected and on which layer you are at all times.
 
Has N3V considered a feature that automatically places user inputted textures depending on the height, slope and properties, of the terrain? e.g. A system that automatically places a particular snow texture on mountain peaks greater than a certain height, adds rocks on high slopes, and adds user inputted textures underneath water?
 
A feature that I sued to absolutely love, which went missing a few Trainz versions ago, was "Alt M M M G" or "Make Me A Map George" where random landscaping, texturing and trees/shrubs were placed across a baseboard or two. It enabled me to make many a fictional layout and tinker happily for hours with surveyor.
With the quest for realism and trying to turn Trainz into a "Simulator", sometimes I feel the Developers are forgetting "the Trainz legacy" and the original "Brew Crew's" ideal that this was to be a model railway simulation and I hope N3V never lose sight of that. The appeal across all ages came from its versatility and the ease of use of Surveyor, coupled with the fact that if there is an error in an asset, the game itself doesn't crash around your ears - unlike Trainz' main competitors.

I very much like the look or Surveyor2 and hope it is as easy to use.
 
Good afternoon from France !

I used Flight Simulator 4 to learn to fly and from version 5 to version X to create planes, stories, adventures, landscapes, etc.
I acquired P3D without being able to create much and quickly gave up MSFS 2020 which is just a simulator that is too complex to program.
Trainz allows me to continue to create, to believe myself that I am a demiurge or a programmer ...
As long as thzt will be possible, I'll be there ...

Anyway this forum is read and fed only by demiurges and programmers !

regards
 
sterrett said:
A feature that I sued to absolutely love, which went missing a few Trainz versions ago, was "Alt M M M G" or "Make Me A Map George" where random landscaping, texturing and trees/shrubs were placed across a baseboard or two. It enabled me to make many a fictional layout and tinker happily for hours with surveyor.
With the quest for realism and trying to turn Trainz into a "Simulator", sometimes I feel the Developers are forgetting "the Trainz legacy" and the original "Brew Crew's" ideal that this was to be a model railway simulation and I hope N3V never lose sight of that. The appeal across all ages came from its versatility and the ease of use of Surveyor, coupled with the fact that if there is an error in an asset, the game itself doesn't crash around your ears - unlike Trainz' main competitors.

I very much like the look or Surveyor2 and hope it is as easy to use.
Click to expand...

There is a utility that allows for the random placement of trees across the landscape. It's not the same, I know but at least that's still here. I used to love using M-M-M-G as well and then build a route based on the landscape. It was that latter part that led me to take existing routes, or those generated by HOG and TransDEM and put in railway lines where nothing ever existed. It takes a lot more work doing that, but the results can be not only quite nice, but also quite convincing.
 
Allo allo Jean
I played MS FS too in the early days and learned to fly
1 day 3 friends of mine (1 is a real pilot) and me rented a Cessna plane
and flew over the delta works south west of my country.
after a few km in the air the pilot gave me full control of the plane
and I flew it like I was a pilot for many years, the pilot stared at me and said , how on......
I just shrugged and said, I played MSFS for a year :)
My landing still is bad (but we made it alive)


Yes Jean that is the biggest fun of Trainz, its an open system and we can all contribute, modify create
as long as that stays, it has no competition :)


Agree with sterret "Make Me A Map George" is a fun way to start something, hope it can return.
Are procedural embankments planned? maybe we can make embankments like procedural track (no rails ofc)
never tried :)
 
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pware said:
All that shows me is that SimRail is a "pretty screenshot generator" - for all I know it may be terrible at railroad operations, layout construction, driving experience, etc.
Click to expand...

Play the demo before you make inane remarks. It is already far more realistic than TRS19 will ever be.

In regards driver operation and realism in railway operations.
 
lovetrainzloathen3v said:
Play the demo before you make inane remarks. It is already far more realistic than TRS19 will ever be.

In regards driver operation and realism in railway operations.
Click to expand...


Then I guess, I am afraid to say, that you actually never had the chance to play TRS19 with proper assets.

As a person who did try SimRail demo, all I can say is that it is horrible. Not even good for screenshots. The only thing more real than TRS19 is the cab, and even that is hypersensitive with controls. There is no pause menu, drawing distance is miserable, camera is pathetic, the optimisation is terrible and the in-cab controls and keyboard shortcuts are not explained at all.

TRS19 is far better game than SR2021. Give it few more years of development and it might be on par with TRS19, but by that time next Trainz game will be out. Right now SR2021 is even worse than Train Simulator.

Also, stop trying to advertise and defend that terrible game. If people are interested in it, they have other places to talk about it.
 
At the risk of dragging this thread on topic again, I would like to express my hope that this new version of Surveyor will keep the ease of use for those that have fallen in love with it for that, but also add some much needed options for people who are running into its limitations. I am eager to try the multiselect tool for moving and rotating objects. For me that would be a prime selling point already.
 
According to Tony's original post that announced Surveyor 2.0, you will have the option of using Surveyor 2.0 or Surveyor 1.0. Possibly (and this is my speculation here) through a settings option so it should be possible to switch between the two.
 
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