the Need for 720m tiles?

[Mutton]

Hi Roland

Would it be possible for a future version of Transdem to work with tiles of 720m or even 360m quarter tiles?

Here's my reasoning; I am in the middle of creating quite a large area layout and would ideally like to work in multiple smaller parts that can then be later merged within Trainz. At the moment with using 500m 3D tiles it is impossible to get the tiles aligned to the baseboard edges which results in gaps of no map data and missing tiles when trying to merge two routes together.

I realise that the 1000m tiles where originally chosen to work with an early UTM model and to tie into the WGS mapping system. However I think especially with the Trainz version of Transdem it would be incredibly useful to be able to export 3D tiles aligned to the baseboard grid. This would allow easier, and complete, merging of routes.

Thanks

[geophil]

I'm not absolutely sure but as far as I recall a UTM tile only needs one particular corner point to actually exist on a baseboard. This is the SW point for 1000m tiles and the respective corner for 500m quarter tiles. If that baseboard can be found in the route, then TransDEM creates the tile. Therefore, at least in theory, gaps in UTM tile coverage across route modules can be avoided. But I may be wrong here.

I thought about 720m or 360m tiles once or twice. Technically, it wouldn't be such great challenge (apart from mainly routine work to add more options all through the class hierarchy). However, one of the reasons I went for the 1000m UTM grid in the first place was the advantage of human readable tile names. With 720/360m tiles, UTM coordinates of tile corners will be multiples of 40m, yielding rather cryptic names when applying the current naming scheme.

[Mutton]

Hi

Thanks for the reply. To me I've never had to manually rely on a tile set name so I wouldn't see the names as being particularly cryptic, but perhaps that's just me. I do feel however, that the benefits and extra simplicity having 720m tiles would bring outweigh a more cryptic file name.

Thanks
Martyn