Another Road Question

I am starting a route that has a couple of places where
the track runs down the middle of the street.Is there track sections that already have the road included or can I look forward to doing a lot of F3 and F4 jockeying???Thanks in advanceWarren M.

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RE: Another Road Question, Swissie, Nov-06-04, 05:16 AM, (1) RE: Another Road Question, Butch38, Nov-06-04, 10:04 PM, (2) RE: Another Road Question, Swissie, Nov-07-04, 11:28 AM, (3) RE: Another Road Question, Butch38, Nov-07-04, 03:59 PM, (4) RE: Another Road Question, Swissie, Nov-08-04, 03:45 PM, (6) RE: Another Road Question, Butch38, Nov-08-04, 04:14 PM, (7) RE: Another Road Question, CharlieB, Nov-11-04, 03:17 AM, (8) RE: Another Road Question, Butch38, Nov-11-04, 05:51 PM, (9) RE: Another Road Question, dwkarch, Nov-07-04, 04:42 PM, (5) RE: Another Road Question, Butch38, Nov-12-04, 07:30 AM, (10) RE: Another Road Question, dwkarch, Nov-12-04, 08:36 AM, (11) RE: Another Road Question, Butch38, Nov-12-04, 01:34 PM, (12) RE: Another Road Question, dwkarch, Nov-12-04, 01:41 PM, (13) RE: Another Road Question, Butch38, Nov-16-04, 02:11 AM, (14) RE: Another Road Question, dwkarch, Nov-16-04, 08:08 AM, (15) RE: Another Road Question, Butch38, Nov-16-04, 10:20 AM, (16)

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LAST EDITED ON Nov-06-04 AT 05:17 AM (EST)

Hi Warren,officially, there are none. But what you could do is to (ab)use the track pieces with concrete texture (such as a1t10mstrconcrete.s for this purpose. You needed to replace the following for .ace files in your route's textures and textures/snow folders:
concrete1.ace
concrete2.ace
concrete3.ace
concrete4.ace
with a texture which basically is just depicting a slab of pavement without markins (don't forget to reMIP it or it will look blurry under your tracks). That way, your track shapes will not have concrete ties, but show a solid pavement. If you need roads with carspawners near the track, you can put the necessary road pieces to the left and right. Once you have aligned the first one as exactly with the track as possible (use the arrows on your numerical keypad to rotate the first piece accurately), they'll snap in place and align themselves. Just make sure to always use a similar section of road as the section of track you want to parallel, i.e. place a 10m straight highway section angled at 0.3000 next to a 10m straight track angled at 0.3000, etc. This way, your road will stay parallel forever - which is the nature of parallels, as we recall from geometry class . Using the many new additional shapes in the NewRoads.zip package should provide you with a selection of curves and straights large enough to almost always find a matching piece that fits perfectly alongside your tracks. Otherwise, you could also simply custom-create a Terrtex file which has a rudimentary road pavement of the same color painted onto it, ideally along the sides of the .ace file to facilitate matching them together (four different .ace files with a road one 1, 2, 3 or 4 of its 4 sides sides should allow you to "build" almost any urban grid of roads without needing a single .s file for it).I've been playing around with both these ideas lately, I can post some screenshots (probably by Monday only, though, as I'm "on the road" currently).Lukas a.k.a Swissie

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I will wait to get to that point till you can share that which you speak of in your reply..I am currently sitting about 20 feet below street level and haven't started the first track yet and have 5 in the area but are not viewable because of a Canopy over them..You speak of reMIP I don't know what that means??If I do the route the way it is today I only have one
city that it runs down the city street..If I do it the way is was in the 70's and before there are 3 city streets that it used...I will wait.. GRINThanksWarren M.

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Hi Warren,when you create a track texture and turn it into an ace file, you will get an effect of blurrines when looking down the tracks, getting worse with distance in gradual steps. Sometimes you will also get so-called moirré-effects, i.e. parallel lines such as the ties seemingly forming an oval shape ahead instead of staying parallel. All these effects have to do with how the mip levels of the .ace file are set, as this parameter governs "how" the texture is rendered in the distance.Head over to www.3dtrains.com -> downloads -> tools & utilities. You'll find a fool-proof tool there that will optimize mip levels for you, it's called ReMipIt and it will do wonders with blurry track or road textures (as these are usually the ones where the effect becomes immediately apparent).Lukas a.k.a SwissieStand by for the screenies tomorrow, I haven't forgotten it

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Got the ReMipItSetup.zip and have it installed...ThanksWarren M.

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LAST EDITED ON Nov-08-04 AT 03:57 PM (EST)

Hello again, Warrenas promised, here come some screenies..."Road as Concrete track texture"
--------------------------------First off: Of course, I needed xtracks for the trick to work, as the various concrete track sections come as part of that add-on package. They're mostly available in the same sizes (length, radii) as the commonly used default track sections, and were explicitly intended to allow you to have two different kinds of track textures in the same route:- Default track sections like for example a1t10mstr.s call for ACleanTrack1.ace for the railbed (ties, gravel) and ACleanTrack2.ace for the rails & railhead.
- Concrete track sections like for example a1t10mstrconcrete.s call for one of the following concrete1.ace...concrete4.ace for the trackbed and ACleanTrack2.ace for the rails & railhead.The initial idea was to offer you a possibility to for example have wooden ties on some parts of a route, by using "standard" track shapes, and modern concrete ties by using the "concrete" track shapes on other parts of your route.
(original "concrete1.ace" cropped to 256x256)With a short urban trolley route module in my mind, I decided to try to replace the concrete ties in concrete1.ace to concrete4.ace with another default texture, called StoneGrey.ace. This has a "cobblestone-look" and is used for some road viaducts in the English route, so I thought I might as well use that cobblestone look for some sections of trolley track where the cars are supposed to run streetside through an older neighborhood, and a wooden ties texture for those regular sections of track where the cars will have their right of way.After desaturating greystone.ace a bit to get the right tone of grey, I renamed four copies of that .ace file to concrete1.ace...concrete4.ace, and remipped it as mentioned above. Here is what the tracks then look like:The benefit is of course that I save myself a lot of trouble as the cobblestone section of the "road" is actually just the tracks, and thus it is "aligned" perfectly by itself. The only thing I then have to do is to add matching road sections either side if I want a highway with car traffic running parallel to my trolleys.Now if I added some finishing touches, i.e. by adding some traces of age, sand and oil onto the cobblestones, I should get a pretty realistic effect for that urban section of streetside track, and for a more North American look, I could also replace the cobblestones with an asphalt look..."Side Streets as Part of the TerrTex"
-------------------------------------Another problem of trying to build an urban trolley track is that you need a lot of shapes on any tile, starting with all the trolley poles accounting for a substantial part of the scenery, and last but not least all the road sections for side roads, etc. The latter are especially bad as entries for road (and track) sections contain a lot more lines than a simple scenery object, so they quickly push your tile to a critical file size where problems like stuttering and out-of-memory effects start to bug you.So I decided to create a couple of ground textures that had rudimentary roads on them, in order to quickly lay a grid of residential side roads without needing a single .s file for them. The effect on the tile file size is terrific: Whereas I tended to end up with 600KB+ files for urban neighborhoods when using road sections for my side roads, the .w file this screenshot is made on now stands at a final size of 350KB with all the scenery, interactive objects etc. installed. This reduction is both easing up the stuttering phenomenon (a lot fewer shapes to read and load when approching the tile) and helps me avoid the even more dreadful out-of-memory errors (hundreds of errors that shape xyz.s could not be loaded although all its files are present, followed by a crash of the sim).The downturn is that the "painted roads" - which in itself is an old trick - quickly look blurry when you look down at them, so I tend to mainly use them for side roads which the player won't really look at that closely, and spruce them up with a few scenery objects like road signs, fence sections etc. that catch the observer's attention insteadLukas a.k.a Swissie

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That is some really great looking settings; but none of your examples
show the kind of road I would be wanting to run an automobile down when the train isn't present -- dwkarch in his examples is closer to what the roads look like.. But the up side of it all is that with your input and dwkarch I now have more smarts in how and what I can play with to come up with a end result -- I thank you both for this wealth of information --Very much appreciated...Warren M.

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LAST EDITED ON Nov-11-04 AT 03:18 AM (EST)

Edit: spellingHey...neat! I'm adding some turn-of-the- (20th) century interurban trolley lines to my layout, and I was wondering how I would handle the stone streets. Here in Newport, we call that stuff Belgian blocks and there are miles of it still remaining in the older parts of town. The street I live on has Belgian block gutters, even though the rest is asphalt. Thanks for the tip!Charlie B
Old Colony-Newport Branchline
Newport, RI

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>Hi Warren,
>
>officially, there are none. But what you could do is to
>(ab)use the track pieces with concrete texture (such as
>a1t10mstrconcrete.s for this purpose. You needed to replace
>the following for .ace files in your route's textures and
>textures/snow folders:
>concrete1.ace
>concrete2.ace
>concrete3.ace
>concrete4.ace I just found that I don't have these four ACE files anywhere in my installation of the Train Sim -- where do you get them from -- I installed the Xtracksf or r or watherver it is for builders -- but didn't do the Xtracks itself -- was that whee I missed the boat???
Unless I get to a point where I think it might fly and be worth uploading the route I can just leave plain old tracks down the street but wanted to toy with the ACE files and learn about them as well but don't have them....ThanksButch born in 38Warren M.

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Warren,The way I do it is to lay the track (it's a lot easier if you are dealing with a level track) and then add one road piece. This puts the road too low, showing track ballast, so select the road piece, click F3, and use the up and down arrows to put the road piece at the right height (trial and error). (If you already have another road piece close by, your new piece may leave and connect to it instead, so either delete the other one or add long road pieces to it, so the new one will stay it place.) Then any other road pieces can be connected and be at the right height. Below is my rendition of old-time Morrison, Colorado on the Morrison Branch of the DSP&P narrow gauge, route in progress. I use the same procedure for road crossings where a crossing object is not feasible.When precise alignment to parallel in needed, I go into the world file and change the road piece direction (QDirection line) to equal the numbers shown on a track piece with which it is associated.Since it can sometimes be dangerous to add track after roads are added, simply delete the rdb file and the rit file. Then roads have no database and are just static objects until you later select them and/or do a tdb rebuild. I'm constantly deleting those 2 files.

Don
Rollins Pass/Moffat Tunnel Route completed
C&S Platte Canon & Gunnison Districts narrow gauge in progress

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http://www.train-sim.com/dcforum/User_files/418e96841f4a7fb3.jpg

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Hello Don,In doing it your way can I lay all of my track and then come back and do the concrete work or do you find it is best to do the concrete as your laying the track when the track is running down the middle of the street?? These rails are embedded in the street flush with the pavement so that when the train isn't present automobiles can use that section of the road as well without any steering problem..Please advise on the best time to perform this function...Best Regards,Warren M.

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Hi Warren,You can do it either way, as long as you keep deleting the rdb and rit files after adding roads but before adding more track. (The rit file probably doesn't matter since you should not add interactive objects until all track and roads are complete.) If it's convenient for you to add all roads later, that is the easier way to go.

Don
Rollins Pass/Moffat Tunnel Route completed
C&S Platte Canon & Gunnison Districts narrow gauge in progress

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Thank You for the quick response...Think I will go with putting the track down first and
make a note to look for this subject when I get to
putting the roads in place.. Then if I can find the note to remind me I will be doing
great...CRS is running rampant here..CRS=CAN'T REMEMBER STUFFWarren M.

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Warren,Click FILE, then SAVE AS, give it a descriptive name, and store it in your route folder.

Don
Rollins Pass/Moffat Tunnel Route completed
C&S Platte Canon & Gunnison Districts narrow gauge in progress

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Decisions, decisions..Can I do either of the methods if I used DYNAMIC TRACK sections?And is there any problem I might encounter in using multiple Dynamic track sections for about 4 miles???Warren M.

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LAST EDITED ON Nov-16-04 AT 08:14 AM (EST)

>Can I do either of the methods if I used DYNAMIC TRACK
>sections? YES>And is there any problem I might encounter in using multiple
>Dynamic track sections for about 4 miles??? NO

Don
Rollins Pass/Moffat Tunnel Route completed
C&S Platte Canon & Gunnison Districts narrow gauge in progress

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http://www.train-sim.com/dcforum/User_files/4199fd1636c595cb.jpg

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Thanks for the quick response That scene of the scooter going down the street really is something I found myself just sitting here looking at it in it's world and then realized I needed to get back to my world to do something on my route..LOLGreat job on your route...Thanks
Warren M.

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