Atomic Systems

A while ago I posted about how my terrain was disappearing on my west/east route and that if you change your start tile to th eeast of your route, you get all of your terrain.

Here's the topic http://forums.uktrainsim.com/viewtopic. ... 40&t=78864

Now I have another strange effect when travelling from west to east (surprise surprise) in that I am getting strange pyramids appearing, yet if I travel the other way, I don't.

I'm willing to bet that this is on the tile junction as in the topic a previously posted.

Have a look at my blog photos for some really impressive pictures. I bet the Egyptians would be jealous of those beauties!
http://devizescastle5050.spaces.live.co ... lideshow=0

Anyway, I have used the terrain editor (F9) to try to smooth these things out and it doesn't seem to work when travelling west->east which is a shame because it is at one of the dramatic parts of my route, a 1 in 52 incline on a steep embankment! This would be enough for me to abandon this route as this is central to the whole thing really. On my blog, there's a pic of the real thing in its current sorry state. If you look at pic 3 on th ephotoset th elink above takes you to, you can see the start of the embankment in the background.

If anyone has any ideas I'd be most appreciateive. My current plan is to lay a UKFS 4 way track along the 'joint' and put either a small embankment or trench along it to see what that does.

Hi, I had a similar thing on my BD route, It was caused by the tile values, floor and ceiling, on adjacent tiles being too big a difference. Check the floor level on one with its neighbour, not sure how much difference is allowed, think a bit of trail and error is needed to put it right.

Don

Don,
Thanks for the pointer but I'm afraid I don't know how to do what you suggest.

Can you give me instructions?

It does look like the effect that Don described, and if so, the spikes will be at the edge / junction of 2 or more tiles (more than likely, 4)
In RE, navigate to a spike, and press F7
Take a look where the tile bounaries are (blue lines). If the spike is indeed close to a boundary then select a square within one of the tiles by left clicking. The outline will turn red, Right click and select "set tile floor and scale" and make a note of the upper and lower limits.
Repeat the process on the other close tiles.
You'll probably find that the values on one of the tiles are vastly different from the adjacent ones.
Edit the vales of this to resemble (similar values) to the others and save.
That should sort it.
(Remember to back your route up first, though)
T

Thanks Terry, you described it better than I did.

Don

I'll do that tomorrow thanks very much for the help

Out of interest, did the process work?

The process has some interesting effects.

As I understand it, a Geometry Route Extractor tile (blue bordered in Route Editor when F7'd) is split down into 16x16 smaller 'black' bordered tiles.

I found that the pyramids all occurred on the junction of 'Blue' tiles where there was a significant distance between the max heights of the 'black' tiles either side of the blue line, at junctions (i.e. a blue cross) as suggested but also down the length of the side where the difference was.

If you reduce the max height of the higher side you get a warning about terrain clipping and as the ceiling comes down, the tops of any features get flattened out.

To avoid this, you can raise a lower tile but I found that by selecting one tile and raising its max height, other random (in that I can't find a reason why) black tiles not along the border but within the larger blue tile raise themselves as well forming square flat topped hills.

What I have also found is that if you use F9 and draw a box around a pyramid and press the numeric keypad down arrow once and only once, the pyramid goes, but raising the land that is in its place becomes difficult.

In the end, I have been selecting a region with F9, right clicking and then picking "Set Height" and manually setting the height of the terrain. Pressing 'D' keeps the red selection box the same size and the you can drag it round to raise/lower terrain as you require. 'F' the flattens things out a bit and takes away the rough edges. Finally, selecting track and 'Y'ing track to create the cuttings/embankments as required.

Sadly, you should save after every single terrain edit as this mode of editing is extremely unstable (thanks Micro$oft!). The trap I keep falling into is that every time the cursor (which is an O with a '.' under it in terrain altering mode) touches the edge of the editor's window MSTS crashes. . dead as a dodo, all you terrain editing lost forever!. . well since your last save anyway.

I'm sure there are more elegant ways of doing this. . at least I hope so!

Hope this helps

My route building trials and tribulations can be seen at http://devizescastle5050.spaces.live.com/

Thanks for that, I've found a few on my own route and to be honest thought I'd leave then until later. Like wise, the only time so far (!) my route has been unstable has been when I've tried to edit this area.

Many thanks again,

Clay.

Also it crashes freqently if you run the editor in 32 bit mode, best use 16bit

Don

Bigant wrote:Also it crashes freqently if you run the editor in 32 bit mode, best use 16bit

Don

Really?, thanks for that. I've been plodding around in re for a couple years now pretty much getting no where fast, and despite reading up as much as I can (the Vone book, Steam4Me tutorials etc) there are times when I still feel a complete novice .

The best thing to do IMHO, is to start again but using a decent data set.

The US Geological Survey (USGS) uses shuttle missions to do a radar topographical survey (SRTM) and has much cleaner "seamless" data.

The instructions on how to do this are kindly posted by "leveritt" in another thread which can be found here http://forums.uktrainsim.com/viewtopic. ... 07#p969353

I have done this and I have no pyramids at all anywhere and full and complete terrain.

In order to do it, I simply re-extracted my route and then followed the "Adding tiles to your route" tutorial http://forums.uktrainsim.com/viewtopic. ... 40&t=54521 but using my USGS data downloaded from their site rather than the DEM data mentioned in the instructions. The USGS data doesn't need to be converted as Demex will accept TIF files.

In the end, I had to select all of the track I had put down (which was my entire route unfortunately) to recreate embankments and cuttings. I also had to move some track as it was clearly in the wrong place, I attribute that to the skew, but the end result is well worth it. I'm very happy with it and my main feature looks great. . at least it will be when it's finished!

As "leveritt" says, the problem with some of the 'sticky' articles is that the world has moved on since they were written and a lot of the answers are 15 pages into the topic. From now on, I read from them from the back forwards.

There are pictures of the old terrain http://devizescastle5050.spaces.live.co ... !227.entry and from the new terrain http://devizescastle5050.spaces.live.co ... !231.entry on my blog. If you follow these two links, click on the picture to get a better view. On the original terrain you can see both the joint between the two DEM terrain tiles and how that lines up with the blue edges of the RGE tiles and also the skew caused by MSTS where there is no terrain at all.
All of my pyramids occurred on the vertical edge where the RGE tiles are on the edge of the terrain tile and rather annoyingly coincided with one of the key features of my route.

Hope this is of use.

Thanks for the summary, generally I think the dem data I have is okay helped maybe by the fact it's a fictious route. Also having checked out your excellent blog, "my" triangles are very much smaller and could be down maybe to my rather crude terrain sculpturing!. Certainly if I have problems in this regard I'll follow your advice, but hopefully I can get away with what I've got (a few screenshots of my route are on the Narrow Gauge forum, within the 'NG Platform Request' thread).

All the best,

Clay.