Re-starting a route

[danpmeyer]

Hi All,
I've been lurking for a few months now and of course just jumped right in a started building a route. I did not follow a tutorial for the initial creation of my route, but have since realized there is a procedure or order to the steps. I would like to know from the experienced builders out there what to do to change the base texture from the arid brown stuff to the green grassy stuff and fix some other issues. Do I : a) go in and mess with the bin files, b) not worry about it since it will/should get painted anyway c) start it all over again. I'm leaning toward the start all over, since I have about 10 hours in, took good notes for gradients but didn't extract enough terrain data since my route "runs off the edge of the world". I'm attempting to do the Union RR ins Pittsburgh, since it runs right under (yes, under) my house. Also, as a side note I need to talk to Bob Artim about NERW...can't register forthe forum. Thanks in advance, Daniel

[artimrj]

The textures are in a file called terrain.bin. If you did things correctly it would be in your provider\product folder under ENVIRONMENT. If you didnt then It could be anywhere. Best way to set up a new route is to use RW_Tools. It makes all the folder structures for you.

You also have a PM about my forum. Look up in the left corner here to get to the PMs.

[imnew]

Hey there. You are a brave soul, jumped right into route building eh ? So did I over two years ago, and i still love it I try to log in about two hours each evening building my route.

The Union RR in Pittsburgh, wow !!! Now we are talking serious Spaghetti track

Seems you already know the steps, but..... If you should need a tutorial, I made a step by step tutorial on how to set up your route from scratch, its in the file library here at Railworks America.

Sorry i cannot be of more help regarding your questions. Good luck on your project.

[glenn68]

Union RR, NO WAY! I grew up in those parts and that will be one great route. That is very busy railroad and especially during the 1970's. What time frame are you going to use?
The exciting train of the day is the coke train moving from Clariton to the Edgar Thompson. 4 to 5 EMD SW1500/MP15DC's pulling alot of tonage up a 2 percent grade in run 8 barely making 10 mph. There is a few good videos of this on Youtube.

[artimrj]

Union RR, NO WAY! I grew up in those parts and that will be one great route. That is very busy railroad and especially during the 1970's. What time frame are you going to use?
The exciting train of the day is the coke train moving from Clariton to the Edgar Thompson. 4 to 5 EMD SW1500/MP15DC's pulling alot of tonage up a 2 percent grade in run 8 barely making 10 mph. There is a few good videos of this on Youtube.

Me too, Duquesne, McKeesport and North Versailles born and raised in the Slovak communities. Only problem is there are no steel mill objects that are freeware, have to buy or make some. A lot.

[glenn68]

I agree with Bob, But can you imagine having the Union railroad around the 1970's time frame running the Duquesne, Homestead and Mon Valley works?
Bob, Bethel Park here but in Texas.

[danpmeyer]

All,
Thanks for the interest in my little project. Like I said, the branch that runs to North Bessemer goes under my house, I can see the tunnel exhaust column from my garage door. My time frame is current, but since the terrain is still there even if the tracks have been removed, I guess there could be different versions made. The hardest part right now is the learning curve for RW/TS2012, and the lack of track charts. Thank goodness for Bing maps aerial views. And figuring grades from Google earth is a pain...plus Bob has a point about the lack of steel mill structures/buildings. I'm pretty good with Sketchup, but I haven't tried to convert anything over yet.

So to all the builders out there, how important is it to pick the right texture set-Railsimulator or RailsimulatorUS (I think that's right) to get your initial textures? What do you do if the wrong one gets picked, oh, say, by accident? Also, anybody know where to get a repainted blue SW1500 so I can have a stand in for the URR power?

Thanks
Daniel

[artimrj]

When you look in the terrain.bin the first 2 entries are the defaults. If you do no paintinig at all, they will be that grass and that rock color and the whole terrain will follow it. Now what I did was combine both the uK and US files together to be able to use all of them , plus we made a few for the NERW route, like pavers and wood chips and stuff like that. Keep in mind what is in the terrain.bin is invisbly numbered. There are no numbers in the file for order but RW reads them one at a time and numbers them internally. So it is a good idea to get all of your textures together before you start in on the route. If you decide to add morel ater on, they have to be placed at the bottom of the list otherwise you will get strange effects because one texture replaced another.

If you look at my route's terrain.bin you can see what I did. You could also use mine if you like and just change the pathing for it.

[danpmeyer]

Thanks for all the help so far everyone. Now I have a different problem. I have restarted the route, gotten the ground texture I want and have downloaded DEM/SRTM data, did the conversion (bilxsrtm) and did the import and got my first 19 x 19 tiles. How do I get the rest of the tiles to extract/import? I have data in the .HGT format in the RW/DEM/SRTM directories for the surrounding counties (60 miles) and when in the WE I can go to the corner of the imported 19x19 but can't import any more tiles. I've looked throught several forums and asisde from using ReDem, anybody got a suggestion? I also looked at the Content/Routes/routename/Terrain files and the ones outside the 19x19 don't exisist, but I do have a few blocks of terrain (10x15) like 50 tiles S of my location, probably from a route template I used. Not worried about that part.