TransDEM Forum

I have the new wire frame installed. Unfortunately with my Polar Bear express route some of the area is covered by Google, and the rest by MS but neither covers completely and they don't seem to be very good. I think I went TGA too which may explain why the route takes so long to load although I only used UTM for key areas like stations and dams etc. It was my understanding that JPEG is smaller but not as detailed?

You mean 5m tiles vs 10m, not 500m?

Both are raster image file formats. JPEG is compressed, but lossy, TGA is uncompressed and lossless. Uncompressed means huge. In TransDEM I have set the JPEG detail quite high, like a digital camera, and you will not notice any loss of detail. Early versions of Trainz cannot read JPEG textures but I think it started to be supported from TS2009 onward.

Trainz ground vertices come as 10 and 5m (the latter introduced in TS2009) and TransDEM UTM tiles come as 1000 and 500m total size. Two different things. (If you use 3D UTM tiles, you can also switch their vertex grid from 10 to 5 m but I would not do that unless you are in extremely rugged terrain and work with 5m or better DEMs. It will not affect the tile textures.)

Ahh yes, of course, the UTM tile size.

Thanks for your help in this.