Point of origin - considerations?

[rkk01]

Is the choice of a point of origin totally arbitrary, or are there factors that I need to consider to make sure I don't limit the potential for my proposed route?

I am working on the basis that the origin is specified purely to fix a point of reference for the coordinate system(s) - i.e. that it needs to be an easily recognised point on the track network, so that accurate real world coords can be enterred into the Railworks world???

My choice - unless anyone here suggests otherwise, would be the buffers stops for the end of my proposed branch line bay platform.

From what I can work out, all of my immediately proposed tracks (and possible future options) will all propogate away from this point. The branch line curves away northwards through a yard / d epot onto the branch line(s) proper, whilst a crossover junction access the adjacent main line, that again extends away to the east and west...

Or does the origin need to be a point at the furtherest edge of my proposed network???

Thanks in anticipation!

ETA - no idea what happened with this post!!? Browser at my end...? Thanks mods for deleting the double post - i used the back / refresh buttons to try and recover the lost text, and that resulted in a double thread posting

[AndiS]

Like you said, it is pretty arbitrary.

There is a decrease in the precision of mapping the planet surface to the flat game world, but I forgot how many centimetre it would be 100 miles from the route origin. For the first 50 miles, it will be hard for the most informed mathematics geek to point out a deviation that you can notice in the game. And if you only take one tool only for the mapping of world coordinates to game coordinates (which is what 99% of route builders do), then you will go happy with the deviation and never notice it.

But it is not a good idea to put the route origin in France for a route in Scotland. The length of your route may well be distorted by many metres then.

[rkk01]

Well, I seem to have generated 2 sets of origin coords....

My first port of call was the NASA ASTER GDEM look up screen. This gave me: 51.52425, -3.39210

When I tried to search for this in Bing & Google I pinned a location 68m to the NW...

Bing, Google and a commercial GIS package consistentley give me 51.52374, -3.39157

I don't want a discrepency between overlay decals and DEM terrain - so I guess the latter is likely to be more consistent. Tried to check what OS use on their website, but that appears to be very dumbed down - place name / postcode

[AndiS]

How did you get these coordinates, in either case? For Bing & Google I guess you zoomed in on the buffer stops and clicked there. And for Aster?

[bdy26]

I'd use figures from Google Earth as that is what RWDecal uses. The origin is entirely arbitrary and won't affect the DEM which will be in the correct place regardless of the origin.

B

[rkk01]

How did you get these coordinates, in either case? For Bing & Google I guess you zoomed in on the buffer stops and clicked there. And for Aster?

51.52374, -3.39157

This came from a commercial GIS package. I validated the figures by entering them in Bing and google searches and they brought me back to where I expected.

The "ASTER GDEM" coords came from the NASA Reverb site http://reverb.echo.nasa.gov/reverb/. If you zoom in on the area to define the data selection bounding box you get a 3 dec place coord readout for the cursor (provided the bounding box is slightly offset away from the area of interest). It is then a matter of scaling off the lower order dec places...

won't affect the DEM which will be in the correct place regardless of the origin.

Well, that's my main concern... If the Aster data is based on the NASA coords it will be 60 or so metres out from the placement coords for everything else

[rkk01]

OK - so my other posted thread isn't being recognised / displayed ??

"Where DO I begin?"

The requested topic does not exist.

But having trouble getting started here. HAve read tutorials / RSC manuals - but can't find anything useful to me on how to set up a new route

Have used the "create new route" option inthe world editor - but can't get that to work because it defaults to all of the values / setings from the route selected for the ground textures...

Can't even see how to reset the origin for my route

[rivimey]

Hi

The route origin is stores in RouteProperties.xml in the Route folder... at the beginning it's quite safe to change the numbers there.... once you start editing for real, consider them fixed in stone.

I would suggest not getting too concerned about the exact coords you use. Perhaps even round to the nearest degree... 51,-3 would do just as well. The route origin is a way for the game to work out where the 1KM square tiles that the game uses are in the world. In almost all cases I can think of, the route builder doesn't need to know any more than that.

I would suggest you stick with one source of map data, and I would also suggest that was RVVDecal, as it is far too convenient a way to work out where things go. I have noticed that different ways of getting data into the game result in different "places". I would also suggest not taking too hard a line: there will be errors of many sorts, and "best effort" is as good as most people will ever get.

Finally, I would advocate Not using the game's built-in New Game functionality: as you have already found, it copies an existing route's setup to get you going, and in doing so fixes various things that you don't even know about yet and which are hard to change later. Instead, I would advocate reading around, poking into the guts of existing routes, downloading and reading the (good but out of date) RW Developer manual from the RSC site, looking at the RW Wiki, and posts here. Specifically, find out about:

- track setup and track rules
- scenery/terrain blueprints and how terrain is represented
- sky domes and the sky blueprints.

RW Tools is a very useful tool to poke around and, I believe, can also be used to create a new route. It is also possible, though rather painful, using the Blueprint Editor.

Hope this is helpful,
Ruth

[rkk01]

Thanks - have been playing around with the blueprint editor, following some reading through of the RW manuals, and having the utilities tool open at the same time.

I can see why 2 monitoris is useful!

Anyhow - have my first decal placed now, so it feels like I have at least made a start!