Slow add water tool in TANE!

What's the fastest way to add water chips over 900 square miles of route board? I'm now building a new tropical island route and adding water is tedious. It's nice there is a speed tool for adding texture to the grid over a wide area fast. There should be a speed tool for adding much water fast. Like an OCEAN!

The Copy/Paste tool is super slow and may hang up forever if you try to stamp too large a chunk of real estate over the boards at once.

Here is the description of my new route so far to give you the enormity of the layout:


Route Begins: August 2022
Route Completed:


Route/Ground Dimensions

Route boards form a cross 38.87 miles long east to west and 84.56 miles long north to south.

Each of the cross's four arms is 9.40 miles across.

Total board area = 1,071.56 square miles

Each and every ground square area = 0.20 square miles

Total number of route boards: 5,358


Island Dimesions

Island Length: 25.25 miles east to west

Island Breadth: 5.25 miles widest part north to south

Island Perimeter: 63.55 miles

Island Approximate Area: 115 square miles, 73,600 acres



This is a tropical island theme. The fictitious island is etiher private or goverment controlled by some nation. I don't think the richest person in the world can purchase an entire private island at least as large as about 125 square miles in area. Anyway, I'm running an American standard gauge railroad. The fantasy railroad is for some super rich man who fancies "a full-size train set" to play with and is to offer passenger/excursion service aroud the island for locals and tourists. There is also to be a runway large enough to accomodate a Boeing 747 jetliner. I call the island Preston Island. About 90% of the Trainz board area is to be coevred in sea water, some 900+ square miles. Big drivable jet airplanes will fly over the ocean to approach the island for landings. I will use drivable aircraft. I want to have an ocean view below while in the in-cab mode for the jetliners. The Trainz board has to be considrable in size for realistic jet aircraft speeds and approaches.

Some tropical islands I've observed on Google Earth do not offer enough flat, low land area for a Boeing 747 size runway. I may construct my airfield on the water alongside the shore line built up on piers as they do in Japan. The rich man who owns and operates the railroad on the island needs a place to accomadte hsi priavte custom Boeing 727. The American President may visit the island and the airfield shoudl acomated Aire Force One to boot. Have any Tainzers here modeld an island or maritaime theme? Of course I need a cove with a wharf for a supply ship to land and unload those standard guage locomotives and Pullman heighweight cars. There needs to be some track along the wharf. Think of all the ballast, track ties and steel rails that have to be shipped in to the island as well and the dump trucks and heavy equipment for this monumental civil engneering task. I don't think any cargo plane in the world can haul an SD40 locomotive. Think of all the steel and concrete needed for the big airfield.

It's ironic that TRAINZ is Austrailain based. A huge island surrounded by untold gallons of salt water. Yet, Trainz Surveyor tools seem limited in speed and power when it comes to ocean-size Trainzing tasks. The water add tool is great for a little inland boating lake or a river, but for a maritime setting? Come now! It's going to take me hours if not days to spread out all those water chips. The water tool radius is just too small. It's like painting a house with a toothbrush!

Water is laid the same way as ground textures. Select the place water and increase the cursor to the maximum. Click to lay the water and at the same time hold the right mouse button down and move around the baseboard. it should take no more than 10 minutes.

stagecoach said:

Water is laid the same way as ground textures. Select the place water and increase the cursor to the maximum. Click to lay the water and at the same time hold the right mouse button down and move around the baseboard. it should take no more than 10 minutes.

Click to expand...

That's NOT the same as "Fill Grid L" feature in Paint where texture is added wholesale to any bare grid squares route-wide. I undertand the ADD WATER Tool in Topology, and maximizing siensivity and radius, but that is tediously slow for the amount of area I need to cover. I was hoping for some slick shortcut. Trainz is like the Harley-Davidson of software. It's a dinosaur in many respects. Slow, crude, laborious and unsophisticated. Ideally, I like a tool that just lays water everywhere over the whole route. My route is about 90% water.

This is what I did to add lots of ocean to a route:

Create a 4x4 (or 6x6 or whatever) baseboard route with nothing but water. Be sure the terrain is all set to elevation -x meters and the water height is all 0.0 meters. Rename the route layer to something different than the default. Save the route as OCEAN and exit surveyor. Now load the route you are working on and then do a MERGE ROUTE. select OCEAN, position as desired, and do the merge. After the merge, you will need to merge the OCEAN route layer name into the real route layer name. Repeat as needed.

Is it tedious? Yes. But it works to get a lot of water.

schweitzerdude said:

This is what I did to add lots of ocean to a route:

Create a 4x4 (or 6x6 or whatever) baseboard route with nothing but water. Be sure the terrain is all set to elevation -x meters and the water height is all 0.0 meters. Rename the route layer to something different than the default. Save the route as OCEAN and exit surveyor. Now load the route you are working on and then do a MERGE ROUTE. select OCEAN, position as desired, and do the merge. After the merge, you will need to merge the OCEAN route layer name into the real route layer name. Repeat as needed.

Is it tedious? Yes. But it works to get a lot of water.

Click to expand...

No. I think it's just easier to sweep the Add Water tool at maximum radius over the route like a high-speed Hover Windtunnel to "vaccum up" all that dry ocean bottom ground! God sure worked much faster to flood the earth in Noah's time. Does 2019 or 2022 have an advanced water adder? Another tedious thing is the Topo Plateau tool. Raising a 115 square mile island 51 meters above ocean floor level is not much fun either. 5,000+ baseboards is a lot of Trainz real estate to cover. This will probably be my final new Trainz Surveryor project before I die of old age maybe.

Once you have a good-sized area covered with water, can't you copy and paste? I read of people doing it to trees and stuff all the time.

Forester1 said:

Once you have a good-sized area covered with water, can't you copy and paste? I read of people doing it to trees and stuff all the time.

Click to expand...

Yes you can. But go back to the OP's original statement: "The Copy/Paste tool is super slow and may hang up forever if you try to stamp too large a chunk of real estate over the boards at once". Too small of a copy/paste area and you are doing this all day. Too large, and its often CTRL/ALT/DELETE time, terminating a hung up Trainz and thus requiring a startup of Trainz.

Also, Surveyor 2.0 I'm sure is a good solution, except for the fact that the OP is running TANE, so no help there.

Oops. My bad. Thanks for pointing out the obvious to me!

Copy paste tool has never been a problem, it's the user's lack of patience.
Even in the horribly unoptimized hot mess that's TS12 49922, copy paste works. You just need to wait and not click a single thing.
Go grab yourself a drink or rest your eyes and look out the window for a moment. It's not even that long.
I used to copy entire baseboards when bringing up the base elevation for a route, and it didn't take more than a minute.