TransDEM Forum

I’m having a problem with the UTM tiles on a route that I’ve just created. The surface of the tiles show up all garbled like a jig saw puzzle on a card table ready to be put together.

I’ve redone the route several times to no avail, although I do have other TransDEM generated routes in TS2010 where the UTM tiles look fine. I also uninstalled and reinstalled TransDEM 2.1 thinking that this could be the problem.

Yesterday, I upgraded to a new video card, (Nvidia GTX 570) and I’m wondering if the new card may be the cause of my problem.

Regards, Joe

Check the tile textures. You'll find the UTM tile objects to be imported into Trainz in the "scenery" subfolder of the "editing" folder. For each UTM tile there will be an image file, either TGA or jpg, depending on the export option selected. Do these look okay? (Rotation for 500m tiles is by design.)

I checked several of the UTM tiles. They look good, and they are TGA images.

Joe

Does the texture of an individual UTM tile look good in Trainz Surveyor, too? The jigsaw puzzle you are referring to: is that an individual tile or the set of tiles as a whole? Individual textures okay, but wrong location or wrong orientation? If the whole set looks shuffled then it might be a KUID problem.

One way to clean up:

1. In Trainz Surveyor delete the garbled UTM tiles from the route. Save.
2. In Trainz Content Manager delete the UTM tiles from the local data base (sort by date or by name. Name gives UTM coordinates).
   
3. Clear the TRS2010 "editing" folder. Delete the route originally exported by TransDEM. Remove UTM tiles from the "scenery" folder.
   
4. In Trainz Content Manager open the route for editing (re-export). It should re-appear in the "editing" folder and it should be the only entry besides the "scenery" folder.
   
5. In TransDEM load the geo data for your route and export the UTM tiles anew.
   
6. In Trainz Content Manager, import the UTM tiles.
   
7. In Trainz Content Manager, commit the route (re-import).
   
8. Check the result in Trainz Surveyor.

I checked the tiles. They are all garbled. I then followed your instructions 1 thru 8, and I’m still having the same problem.

Strange. Can you create a new small route from the same geo data in TransDEM, just a few baseboards? And then add a small number of UTM tiles to it, three or four will do. Set the UTM tile export option to "Override, new KUID". Import into Trainz. Does this route show the same problem? If yes, please pack the TransDEM generated route and the UTM tiles into a zip file and send it to me via an email attachment service like yousendit.com.

Geophil,

I found the cause of the problem, but I don,t know how to rectify it. I mentioned previously that I had installed a new video card (Nvidia GTX 570), so I decided to replace the new card with my old one(Nvidia 9800 GT), and retry exporting UTM tiles.

I exported several tiles to the western end of the route, and they showed up fine in TS2010. I then reinstalled the new video card, and exported several tiles to the eastern end of the route, and they came out garbled.

Without getting out of Trainz, I scrolled over to the western end of the route and those tiles were still OK.

So, the problem is not in TransDEM, but in the new card, and it only occurs when the tiles are being exported to TS2010.

It's probably an adjustment in the Nvidia Control Panel, but I have no idea where to even start. If you have any ideas what to adjust, I would surely appreciate it.

Joe

TransDEM uses textures in two ways: to paint the terrain and to paint UTM tiles. For the terrain, the textures are standard Trainz ground texture objects. For UTM tiles they are standard Trainz mesh textures. Both are subject to the mercy of the Trainz graphics engine.

There seems to be a new option in TS2010 Content Manager: "Hardware texture compression". I noticed with my (older) nVidia card that ground textures occasionally appear as a black hole with this option enabled. I have not encountered any other peculiarities myself but other users did.

Disabling "Hardware Accelerated Texture Compression" in CM3 settings did the trick. My UTM tiles look like USGS maps again.

Thanks Roland