Idea for a track laying aid

As I am working with Xtracks and building custom track work, an idea occurred to me and I am passing it on to the programmers in the group. I find that frequently I need to fill a gap in a section of yard track. I have to use trial and error to determine the combination of track pieces to fill the gap. I was thinking it would be handy to have some kind of utility that would analyze the two ends of the gap and determine what available track pieces are needed or if a dynamic section is needed.All you programming gurus think about this and see if you think it is possible to do.Cal Rasmussen
Beaverton, ORColumbia Gorge Route (The Dalles Yard done, proceeding to lay track Westward approaching an East/West region boundary. Keep your fingers crossed!)

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RE: Idea for a track laying aid., lcken, Oct-08-02, 05:06 PM, (1) RE: Idea for a track laying aid., patm41, Oct-08-02, 07:49 PM, (2) RE: Idea for a track laying aid., Hack, Oct-08-02, 10:32 PM, (3) RE: Idea for a track laying aid., griffinmt, Oct-08-02, 11:40 PM, (4) RE: Idea for a track laying aid., mivone, Oct-09-02, 00:37 AM, (5) RE: Idea for a track laying aid., griffinmt, Oct-09-02, 00:56 AM, (6) RE: Idea for a track laying aid., griffinmt, Oct-09-02, 01:12 AM, (7) RE: Idea for a track laying aid., bobs, Oct-09-02, 12:33 PM, (9) RE: Idea for a track laying aid., mivone, Oct-09-02, 10:08 PM, (11) RE: Idea for a track laying aid., bobs, Oct-10-02, 02:23 PM, (17) RE: Idea for a track laying aid., griffinmt, Oct-10-02, 04:40 PM, (18) RE: Idea for a track laying aid., Cbertram, Oct-09-02, 04:16 AM, (8) RE: Idea for a track laying aid., highball5, Oct-09-02, 01:28 PM, (10) RE: Idea for a track laying aid., lenglel, Oct-10-02, 00:23 AM, (12) RE: Idea for a track laying aid., SouthernCpl, Oct-10-02, 00:29 AM, (13) RE: Idea for a track laying aid., torpal, Oct-10-02, 03:26 AM, (14) RE: Idea for a track laying aid., griffinmt, Oct-10-02, 11:46 AM, (15) RE: Idea for a track laying aid., LawrenceKellie, Oct-11-02, 03:32 PM, (23) Part one, griffinmt, Oct-11-02, 04:20 PM, (24) RE: Part one, LawrenceKellie, Oct-11-02, 04:29 PM, (25) RE: Part Two, griffinmt, Oct-11-02, 10:11 PM, (27) RE: Idea for a track laying aid., griffinmt, Oct-10-02, 01:55 PM, (16) RE: Idea for a track laying aid., midimaio, Oct-11-02, 10:52 AM, (19) RE: Idea for a track laying aid., calr, Oct-11-02, 11:26 AM, (20) RE: Idea for a track laying aid., torpal, Oct-11-02, 11:30 AM, (21) RE: Idea for a track laying aid., griffinmt, Oct-11-02, 03:20 PM, (22) RE: Idea for a track laying aid., davidbeach, Oct-11-02, 08:20 PM, (26) RE: Idea for a track laying aid., torpal, Oct-19-02, 04:50 AM, (28)

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Excellent idea Cal, but I'll bet the response will be that they call that Dynamic Track. How about a piece of software that looks at the gap and produces a piece of track that inserts and doesn't produce any blue poles?

Ken Powers

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better yet a program where you can place a start and stop point and have the track layed ... yea i know whishful thinking
Patm41

Maglev Route Designer
Casino Express

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How about some sort of static object that displays a series of tick-marks so that you can determine the track(s) needed for insertion?Cheers!
Marc - 3DTrains
http://www.3dtrains.comPro Series F-Units

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Haven't tried this yet, and knowing what we know so far about the peculiarities of how KUJU and company did things, it may not work.
But....
With the track area in plain view in RE, and one of the two track pieces 'selected', you should be able to launch an app that does some 'screen scaping' to get the tracks location info and what tile.Then while it waits, you can select the other track piece and repeat the exercise. This will give you the two .W file track pieces at least.Not sure how you would determine (for each piece) which is the free end and which is open, but if you can, and coupled with the Qdirection info, it should be possible. I would think this is awkward to be accurate across tiles, and it would be a centerline straight distance (a chord ) if dealing with curved track.I will give it a go in the next few days perhaps.Martyn T. Griffin
griffinmt@mindspring.com

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Martyn: If you know a way to get an app to tell you the Position and QDirection of an object, without you having to find and open its world tile file, I would be very interested! Because then we can write an efficient tool to rotate objects precisely (I am publishing an Excel spreadsheet called Object Rotator with the next version of my Guide, but it requires opening and changing world tile files, which makes it somewhat cumbersome).To join tracks across a gap, a lot depends on the situation.If the tracks are lined up (so a straight track section will connect them), I would simply stretch a dynamic track section across the gap to measure it. If the length of the gap is a multiple of 10 meters, you can replace the dynamic section with appropriate simple track sections; otherwise leave the dynamic track section in place.If the tracks are parallel but not lined up (so you need an S-shaped curve to connect them), then you will need two curved dynamic track sections: that can be calculated geometrically without much trouble. However, dynamic tracks only accept radii and curve angles with 3 digits after the decimal place, severely restricting the possibilities: this means that a perfect joint is impossible in MSTS (except in rare special situations), and you need to find the least imperfect joint.If the tracks to be connected are not parallel, things get more complex. And if the tracks have different slopes, it gets very complicated. And if the tracks to be connected are too close together, you need to allow loops or tell the user by how much to cut back the tracks to be joined so a simple curve of given radius will fit. So, to design a tool that will handle all cases is a big job, in my opinion!
Michael Vone
Step by Step Guide to Route Building for MSTS - http://trainsimulatorworld.com/catalog/b470.htm
Albula Line Route
Rocky Islands Route
Cliff Hanger Route
http://avsim.com/hangar/utils/mvchallenges/

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Michael,Attatched is a display of a tab delimeted list of child controls in the Object window. Done with a two line Winbatch program.allwins = WinItemChild("Object")
message("Object Window",allwins)
Martyn T. Griffin
griffinmt@mindspring.com

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http://www.train-sim.com/dcforum/User_files/3da3b70a56032035.jpg

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But now I see what you mean, none of the information in any of the windows tells anything about the piece of track other than where one end is located inside 'some' tile. And that could be a different tile than the Camera window indicates.And until a save is done, none of it is in the tile file anyway (although you can programatically force the save).Martyn T. Griffin
griffinmt@mindspring.com

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Michael, I'm not so sure about the three decimal place restriction. If you look at the global\tsection.dat you will find radius values and lengths that are more precise than 3 decimal places. True, the GUI only lets you work with three, but I believe the underlying software will work with any floating point number.There are several other instances where the GUI's precision is less than what the sim can handle too.Bob Siederer
Co-author of Marias Pass 3.0

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What I know is that when I tried to specify a turn angle for dynamic track with higher than 3-digit precision in the world tile file (which accepts much higher precision), the result was the same as if I had entered a 3-digit precision. I would love to be proven wrong on this!Michael Vone
Step by Step Guide to Route Building for MSTS - http://trainsimulatorworld.com/catalog/b470.htm
Albula Line Route
Rocky Islands Route
Cliff Hanger Route
http://avsim.com/hangar/utils/mvchallenges/

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Ah, could be. The obvious question would be why allow more precision in the world file if you aren't going to use it, but I know better than to ask logical questions of Kuju's software. Bob Siederer
Co-author of Marias Pass 3.0

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A big part of this is the way they store the numbers. For all the floating point, they are stored in single precision floating point (4 bytes) and carry 23 bits (plus 1 inferred) of accuraccy for the mantissa. Once you start to wander past about 5-6 decimal digits, it becomes a bit meaningless. So, for numbers in the +1 to -1 range, you quite often see them shown as about 5-6 digits, ignoring leading zeros. But the tile locations are typically carrying 3 digits left of the decimal, so more than 3 to the right would get lost when converted to tokens (what it looks like in memory).
Martyn T. Griffin
griffinmt@mindspring.com

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Hello all,When writing my sdts2mkr tool I also had the idea to have a function to split the vectors into track-pieces (for the whole thing in my case).I've found a "Diplomarbeit"(what you have write to get your diploma if you don't answer to one of those emails ) for the mathematic things a while ago (writen specialy about railways!). It is in german, but i'll post the link if i find it again.I thought of creating a table of the tracks needed, or printing out a layoutplan like for modell railroads, since I dont understand the .w files fully to write them directly. Does anyone have a full docu for the TrackObj features?As a first step, it would be nice to have a program calculating the dynamic tracks for you.Michael

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I recall a post in one of the other train-sim sites many months ago
(I think it was a UK forum?) where a poster claimed that somehow he had
managed to use a drag-n-drop technique on a piece of msts dynamic track.
Placed the track, then dragged the open end to meet the other side of the gap.
He said it was accidently discovered due to a sticky mouse button and wasn't
sure exactly how it happened, but it worked. That post stirred up a ton of
excitement but the thread died when a few flame wars errupted, and a couple
folks claiming they had found the secret but weren't about to tell. I've since tried
about every key/mouse combination on dynamic track, and suspect that concept
can be filed with Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, and the IRS is here to help you.

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Now that made me laugh out loud.

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Did any of yal ever use the Atlas layout design program for model trains? A dinosaur, yes but they had an excellent and EASY way of doing their flex(dynamic track) using a pair of points that youy adjusted along an axis to get the curve you wanted/needed. Woldn't that be nice to "bend" the dynamic track into place? To exactly conform to your terrain?
Pokey=The Finishing School for N&W's top brass.

EIN
"Running Dirty there, tail end. Clean that stack up. You know mangement don't like that crap."
http://www.trainweb.org/railmation/ronsgifs.html

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Why not also try to build a measure vehicle that can drive on the tracks and measure the length of the routes or the different components of a route? Maybe it already exist but I haven't heard about it.
It could be very useful to such people as me who always forgets to write down how many track sections I add and how long they are.
/Regards
Torgny (Tony) from Sweden

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I wrote such a tools and ran it against the six default routes and Seaview2.I posted the summary a month or so ago on this forum. It also provided a summary of all the track pieces used and how many of them.It was not the fasted program to run, as it needed to process the .w files, tdb and tsection for each route, decompressing as it went.Martyn T. Griffin
griffinmt@mindspring.com

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I, too, would be interested in a copy of this program.Lawrence

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For those that want it, here is the first part. It reads the global TSECTION.DAT file (assuming it is exactly as it comes from David!) and computes all the track lengths for each shape and its sections. It then dumps this to a tab-seperated-value file for later processing. For some of you, this may be all you want. For best viewing, load it into excel.Oops, bigger than 100k, so will have to tidy it up and drop it into the library.So wait a few days to find it EnumTSV1.zip will be the name.Martyn T. Griffin
griffinmt@mindspring.com

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Thank you. Looking forward to it. It will be fun to see what the actual trackage is on the layout where lineal mileage is about 430 miles. Lawrence

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Just uploaded a version of the program that calculates a routes total track mileage. It also includes the previous utility to calculate individual track section sizes.Try it out and verify the results on small routes if possible. Let me know if I have missed something.It was uploaded as MSTSMile.zipMartyn T. Griffin
griffinmt@mindspring.com

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LAST EDITED ON Oct-10-02 AT 02:00 PM (EDT)

For example, this is from the Europe1 route
Total Trackage: 239.94666679 km 149.09566034 miles
Track Pieces: 1417
Count Meters
a1t10mstrt.s 265 2650
a1t50mstrt.s 81 4050
a2t50mstrt.s 56 5600
a1tendpnt10drgt.s 36 1085.2251408
a1tpnt10drgt.s 60 4208.708568
a1tbuffer.s 60 433.986
a1tpnt10dlft.s 52 3647.5474256
a2t250r5d.s 94 4101.5237986
a2t1500r10dtun.s 1 523.598783
a2t10mstrt.s 90 1800
a2t1500r20d.s 8 8377.58048
a2t100mstrt.s 190 38000
a3t10mstrt.s 12 360
a3t50mstrt.s 3 450
a2t1000r10d.s 10 3490.65855
a2t250mstrt.s 49 24500
a2t2000r5d.s 16 5585.05368
a2t500mstrt.s 51 51000
a2t1000r5dtun.s 1 174.532927
a2t1000r20d.s 29 20245.819619
a2t500r10d.s 22 3839.724394
a2t10mstrttun.s 2 40
a2t100mstrttun.s 5 1000
a2t500r20d.s 31 10821.041505
a1t100mstrt.s 8 800
a2t1500r5d.s 7 1832.595737
a2t2000r10d.s 6 4188.790266
a1t50mstrtwtr.s 2 100
a1t100mstrtwtr.s 10 1000
a2t500r5d.s 28 2443.4609864
a2t250mstrttun.s 6 3000
a2t2000r20d.s 5 6981.3171
a2t2000r10dtun.s 2 1396.263422
a2t2000r5dtun.s 1 349.065855
a2t500mstrttun.s 7 7000
a2t500r5dtun.s 2 174.5329276
a2t1000r5d.s 22 3839.724394
a1t500r20d.s 8 1396.263416
a1tendpnt10dlft.s 28 844.0639984
a1t500r10d.s 10 872.664638
a1t250mstrt.s 2 500
a1tendpnt5dlft.s 2 150.1450174
a1tpnt10drgtmnl.s 5 350.725714
a1tpnt10dlftmnl.s 1 70.1451428
a4t1000r10d.s 1 698.131711
a4t500r5d.s 4 698.131708
a2t500r20dtun.s 1 349.065855
a2t1500r10d.s 1 523.598783
a4t500r10d.s 1 349.065855
a2t500r10dtun.s 2 349.065854
a2t250r10d.s 8 698.1317104
a3t500r10d.s 1 261.799391
a2t250r20d.s 8 1396.263416
a4t10mstrt.s 1 40
a1t1000r5d.s 2 174.5329276
a4t250mstrt.s 1 1000
Martyn T. Griffin
griffinmt@mindspring.com

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Have you posted this program? i would love to run it on trhe PRR Middle Division. Mike
http://www.trainstuff.com

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I would also like to have a copy of it.Also, Martyn, have you done any analysis of the inner workings of dynamic track? I am thinking particularly in reference to making it curve right.Cal Rasmussen
Beaverton, ORColumbia Gorge Route (The Dalles Yard done, proceeding to lay track Westward approaching an East/West region boundary. Keep your fingers crossed!)

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Hey, of course I also want a copy of that program.
But what I exactly meant by my question was if there is a vehicle (or similar i.e. a program) that can "ride" your own route and tell you the distances between point A and B; B and C etcetera, but also the complete route. Your program seems to do a lot more than I expected.
/Best wishes
"Tony" from Stockholm, Sweden.

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Cal,

"I am thinking particularly in reference to making it curve right."

So, you think perhaps it curves WRONG???I haven't spent much time with this, and don't expect there is anything that can be done. The logic is embedded into MSTS and not externalized anywhere. If someone has more info, let me know.I really want to use the same process to make 'dynamic road' for cars!!!After sticking in some DR (on an isolated spot in a disposable route!), try modifying the DynTrack entry in the W file and the associated entry in the local tsection.dat file to specify positive angles. then 'try' to rebuild the tdb and see what RE shows.Martyn T. Griffin
griffinmt@mindspring.com

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Right as opposed to left, not necessarily right as opposed to wrong.David Beach.Palouse & LewistonRoute Building 1% Completed
Route Mapping 10% Completed

Standardized \global\tsection.dat file now at build00010.

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Thank you Martin!For uploading your nice tools to measure the routes.
It has already been a great help for me.And I'm still convinced that you will develop your tool to also measure every single distance that I want in any different route. Won't you?/Regrads from Sweden
Torgny

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