July 22nd, 2007

I took a break from the "City of Salina" to catch up on a few other things. Our garage sale fridge died, the AC in the wife's car has been on the fritz and the bushes along the side of my house have become trees. The fridge only needed major defrosting, which was a lucky break. It means I only have to replace a thermostat or timer. I was afraid it was the compressor. The thing is so quiet it might as well be off. At least in the old days your were sure the thing was broke by the lack of noise. Unfortunately, the problem with the AC in the car was a compressor. The used replacement I had previously purchased had a serious freon leak. I would test the system with that UV sensitive dye and find no leaks. Finally I checked under the compressor and found a puddle of glowing stuff. I had to break down and spend real money on a reconditioned unit from the local AutoZone (unsolicited plug). Well, now I know why I got all that overtime pay this week. I still have my fingers crossed, though. The other compressor would work for a whole day until the refrigerant leaked out. I'll wait to see if this one keeps going for a week or so before I feel like I accomplished something. I don't want to talk about the bushes...I cut them all to the ground about a year (or two, or three) ago. Lets just say the yard looks like a crazed lumber jack got loose. Happily nobody wandered in there and got lost. I should walk over to that side of the house more often.

All this has nothing to do with MSTS, of cpurse. I did get a chance to look a bit closer at Mosaic, a program by Digital Rails (yet another unsolicited plug). The application allows you to edit each individual texture "patch" used in an MSTS route. I downloaded the demo version a while back, but never really sat down to play. The thing fascinated me because the terrain details from all those DEM files I carefully assembled stood out so clearly on the screen. It gave me a new perspective on what I was trying to accomplish at Johnstown on the Allegheny Eastern.

You can see the track of course, and all the markers, but best of all you can actually see where the Little Conemaugh and Stoney Creek meet to form the Conemaugh. I thought to myself that if the Route Editor in MSTS would have let me see this I would have Johnstown done by now. Rivers played a huge part in the design of real railroads, and it's just as true for virtual ones. Since trail routes tend to parallel (more or less) water courses, I believe they can help a lot in locating the digital replica. The four rail routes through Johnstown are no exception to this. The B&O follows Stoney Creek for part of its route up from Sandpatch. The Pennsy follows the both parts of the Conemaugh from west of Cresson all the way to the Ohio River below Pittsburgh. Johnstown Traction and the Black Lick & Cambria follow whatever rivers, streams or creeks will get them to where they need to be. Probably the only place the JTC doesn't follow water is the small square you see northeast of the Incline maker. This is the few blocks that incorporate "downtown" Johnstown.

The more I looked at this view the more it seemed to me that highlighting all this water would go a long way in locating the trackwork in this area. There is "water" in MSTS, but it's "quirky" to say the least. By playing around with the settings in the Route Editor I've been able to get the water to appear in some places the way it should. Inevitably though, I come to a place where I flood out the surrounding country side or the river disappears for the most part, leaving only "puddles" where a powerful stream should be. I have tried a couple of different approaches. One was to make huge flat plates of water as scenic objects that I could position. This pretty much worked the way the first attempt went, flood or famine.

I have noticed on quite a few routes that some builders worked around this problem by painting the river on the textures. It doesn't always work the way they hope. The "paint" is sometimes at the top of the river bank instead of the bottom. It kinda works, but needs tweaking. Which brings us back to Mosaic and this view of Johnstown. What if I could capture these features in some way and use them to paint the water in?

So I tried just that. I used Mosaic's "Copy View" function. This allowed me to capture the patch where the JTC crosses the Little Conemaugh and paste it into Paint Shop. I used a freehand line to "trace" the river's outline (blue) and through in river banks (brown). The rest of the patch was a billious green. I also traced the right of way with gray. Since I have the demo version of Mosaic I couldn't save the result to the route. Instead I saved the bitmap as a TGA and converted it to an ACE file that I could use in RE's texture tools.

I then placed the texture right where it's supposed to go in the Route Editor. It's so close that the JTC track is almost an exact match to the gray line. From a few meters in the air it looks pretty good. All I need to do now is use better colors or photo textures and it would look a LOT better.

I soon found out this isn't as straight forward as it seems. From low to the ground the view changes quite a bit. It's at this level you get to understand why those painted streams don't always end up where they belong.

You can readily see how the terrain doesn't quite match the texture. I've run into this before when trying to use "transfers" in Route Editor. Since the geospatial data we use has a minimum resolution limit of 10 to 30 meters the banks of the stream bed are not sharply defined. It's approximate, give or take tens of feet. This means that a lot of editing will be required, on a terrain point level. This is another drawback. The vertices of the terrain polys are not always conveniently placed at the brim of a river bank. They are just as likely to be half way up the bank or in the river somewhere. To get it right you would need to edit the geometry and then edit the texture to match the contour. It's a bit like lining up the stripes on the those old Seaboard multicolor paint schemes. Fit the texture to the model, adjust the texture a bit, adjust the stripe a tad. Just keep doing that back and forth until it all looks good enough. It's not as easy as it sounds. It takes a bit of patience, but it's nowhere near as tedious as adjusting literally hundreds of terrain patches.

So what's the point of all this? Well, I think I'm going to save up my lunch money and get me a real copy of that Mosaic program. If I have to edit a jillion textures I might as well make it a little easier. The problem is things like refrigerators and cars keep spending my extra pesos. I'm also in a quandary about whether I should spring for the new upgrade to 3D Canvas so I can use Paul Gausdens TSM object importer thingy or invest in Mosaic. I guess I'll just have to wait for that dual core desktop I was dreaming about...

Well I think that's about it for now...Thanks for listening.