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Bob shoutheth from the mountain-top! LOLBut seriously, folks...The REAL Kudos goes to Maple Leaf Tracks for making the high-viz signals openly available! Also a big thanks to Jim "The Sniper" Ward for taking the time to edit the proper figures for all of the umpteen different signal types I use. So, it's not MY work but the collaboration of Sniper and MLT that deserves the credit, folks.BTW: Anyone in Chicago interested in meeting up out at IRM Saturday? I'll be traveling with Mona and the kids around Chicagoland over my last long weekend before school REALLY begins! Look for the folicle-ly challenged guy with the big train-watchin' grin wearing some sort of school band-oriented shirt/hat followed by 3 bored people wandering around the grounds! (I'm a near dead-ringer for Kelsey Grammer, FYI...)Hope to see some of the Chicagoland Simmers! -- JBD
Sigview itself can be used on just about any route, from what I understand. There's some sort of weird transparency issue that Jim Ward apparently knows something about, but whether it's a solved thing or not I don't know. The trick to using Sigview on other routes is, from what I understand, properly configuring various shape files once you get the ace file from Sigview installed.Let me dig around and see if I can find the thread where Mr. Ward told me how to fix Sandpatch; its general instructions are probably what you're looking for.Check out http://www.train-sim.com/dcforum/DCForumID6/12290.html for starters. Me, I'm looking for radius values so I can install Sigview on the M&M.
____________________________________________________________________ Norfolk & Western’s Radford Division, Pulaski District: Who needs the Marias Pass?
Not solved so far. The wierd transparency issue is actually in the forest regions, when you stack multiple overlapping forest regions you get that funky effect:Here the two lighter colored trees are behind the darker one, but they show thru the darker one. Placing any object between the forest regions and the track makes the alpha channels in the forest regions behave;In this case a bushclump object, even tho it's real short and you can see all the trees clearly over the top of it, fixes the ghost tree effect. Even telephone poles alongside the track work.Not so for the siglight.ace, the problem is the texture was remipped by hand, it's the multiple mipmapping levels in the ace file itself that creates the long distance visibility, simply by making the texture bigger and bigger the further away it is. The alpha channel (what makes parts of textures transparent) stays the same size, and since it's normally invisible that's not a problem. Possibly it can be fixed, I don't know enough about mipmapping (texturing adjusted for distance) to even play with it. Meantime the only cure is to block out forest regions completely with non forest region objects;http://www.train-sim.com/dcforum/DCForumID3/24176.html#29I experimented with solid treeblocks, finally came to the conclusion that it would take too long to block out all the forest regions I have from 800 some odd signals. So I'm leaving this out of PO&N 9, maybe I'll work on it for PO&N 10 unless somebody fixes the transparency problem. It's not actually a problem with the siglight.ace itself, it just aggravates an existing MSTS bug with the forest regions. Use treeclumps instead of forest regions is the only solution I can see.
OK, John....Not sure what time we'll be there for certain. Probably go there first, then FRVTM in Elgin in afternoon.... Gonna try to get a cabride for future step-son.... If you're a ham, I'll be monitoring 146.55 simplex out there...otherwise look for the blue polo shirt...JBD
Here the two lighter colored trees are behind the darker one, but they show thru the darker one. Placing any object between the forest regions and the track makes the alpha channels in the forest regions behave;
In this case a bushclump object, even tho it's real short and you can see all the trees clearly over the top of it, fixes the ghost tree effect. Even telephone poles alongside the track work.Not so for the siglight.ace, the problem is the texture was remipped by hand, it's the multiple mipmapping levels in the ace file itself that creates the long distance visibility, simply by making the texture bigger and bigger the further away it is. The alpha channel (what makes parts of textures transparent) stays the same size, and since it's normally invisible that's not a problem. Possibly it can be fixed, I don't know enough about mipmapping (texturing adjusted for distance) to even play with it. Meantime the only cure is to block out forest regions completely with non forest region objects;