Rocky Mountain Simulations

TS2017 ROUTE BUILDING #11 - Building Roads More in TS2017 ROUTE BUILDING #12 - Placing Procedural Objects Back to Tutorials Home Page

TS2017 ROUTE BUILDING #10 - Manipulating Track In this tutorial, I will attempt to address the various aspects of track manipulation. You will learn how to change track gradient, split a track piece, join one track to another, weld track, etc. CHANGING TRACK GRADIENT Let us go to the World Editor now; opened up to your route. You may have laid several track pieces by now and it is probably becoming apparent that you'll need to make some adjustments for the general contour of the route terrain. This is accomplished by the use of the Elevation Tool. To activate the Elevation Tool, click on the Gradient icon in the Main Toolbox. It looks like the ramp we saw in the track characteristics panel. Click on it and you will see yellow, upward pointing arrows appear on your track at the break points. When you hover your cursor very near the track another yellow arrow will appear on the track indicating your cursor position. You can click anywhere on the track to set another brea...

TS2017 ROUTE BUILDING #9 - Laying Track Preparation Check At this stage of  your project you ought to have created your Developer folders within Railworks. You have created a route with your chosen name either by way of the Railworks Route Editor, or RW Tools. Also you have determined the Track Rules that would be most applicable to your route. You know your network speed limits and locations of speed changes. And most importantly, you have a Google Maps overlay so you know where you are going. Let's Start Building! Now it's time to lay your first piece of track. Start by selecting the track piece you wish to place in your route by highlighting it in the list of available track pieces in the World Editor panels. The first thing you'll notice is a panel that opens up on the right side of your Editor. This panel is where speed limits and other track characteristics are defined for only the piece of track about to be laid. This panel has absolutely no effect on a piece o...

TS2017 ROUTE BUILDING #8 - Placement of Objects Finally, we can get to placing some objects into the route with the World Editor. Personally, I elected to add elements to my route in the following order: Track Roads Bridges Water Structures and Buildings  Landscaping (manual manipulation of the 'diamond points' that are often created when track and roads are laid and the terrain is 'snapped-to' the track or road) Foliage Clutter Sounds PLACING OBJECTS IN THE WORLD EDITOR There are four main types of objects (or items) that you will be placing into your route. Track, Road, and Scenery items are self-explanatory. The fourth one is called a Loft item. Loft items are typically bridges and other elevated objects. It is a simple process to select and insert objects (ie. anything you would see in the sim) into your route, using the World Editor. It's a point and click process that makes placement of objects quite easy. There are object manipulation tools t...

TS2017 ROUTE BUILDING #7 - World Editor Orientation/Preparing Your World "Are you kidding me? More preparation? When can I start laying track?" Preparation is the key to a good route, much like the foundation is key to supporting a good house. If the foundation gives way, so will the house. So let us take a little while to familiarize yourself with the Railworks World Editor and some of its features that you will absolutely need to know. Many sub-features exist as well for more complicated, creative work by those who are enormously familiar with the World Editor. I will not delve into that in these tuts. Take a look at the World Editor Control Panels on the left-hand side of the editor. There are three individual panels stacked one upon the other. The little push-pin in the upper right-hand corner of these panels allows the panel to be pinned to the Editor window, or slide off to the side when not in use. Find which way works best for you. You're the author, after ...

TS2017 ROUTE BUILDING #6 - Getting Started (The Golf Course) ROUTE MARKERS Unless you wish to "walk" your way throughout the route you are building, you're going to need some route markers for navigating your way around the World Editor. Route markers are nothing more than a geographical locator within the Route Editor to travel from one place in the route to another. It saves you a lot of time in going from A to B. In the case of my own route I created a series of markers (known as landmarks in Google Earth) of key locations within the route. Once the landmarks were created I exported the file as a .kml file to the RouteMarkers folder located in my Product folder, awaiting conversion for use in Railworks. RW Tools comes back into service again for converting the .kml file to a set of two files that Railworks can use. To convert the .kml file to Railworks, proceed as follows: Open RW Tools and select the tab, Route Building Tools and hover your cursor over Ma...

Route Building #5 - The Railworks World Editor From this point onward, it is highly recommended that you build your route in a windowed mode of Railworks. Full screen mode hides the 'close window' button in the upper right-hand corner of the window. Clicking this button is the only way I know of to close the program without saving. SUMMARY of Previous Tutorials By this point in the process: You ought to have completed the previous tutorials and have devised a plan for Where, When, What, and How.  You will need to have your start point coordinates written down for when you first create your route template. These coordinates use the Lat/Long format (eg. 55.83625  -115.3392) You will have chosen the Provider and Product names for your route, being careful to avoid names that may already be in use. A lot of authors will use their forum handle as their Provider folder name in order to avoid naming conflicts with others. The Product folder name is the unique name of the rou...

Route Building #4 - Supplementary Programs "It's a lousy carpenter who blames his tools." The Railworks Route editor is the only tool that can be used to create a route for Railworks. However, the use of some auxiliary programs is often necessary to prepare the files for use in the Route Editor and/or, to check and verify that all the files required for a route to operate are present, and in their correct locations. GRAPHICS It is common for a route builder to be armed with a graphics program capable of handling a multitude of image file extensions. I use Paint.net as it is capable of handling all the image file extensions that we will come upon in the creation of a route. And best of all, Paint.net is FREE! You can obtain Paint.net by visiting their website . You may also wish to make a PayPal donation to their continued development of their program, as did I. 3D For people who are involved in the modelling and texturing of assets, a good 3d shape program is r...

TS 2017 ROUTE BUILDING #3 - Railworks File Information Let's begin this tutorial with one simple fact that some people just cannot seem to grasp: "Computers can't think! They just run programs." Some folks would swear that their computer has gremlins. It just will not do what they want it to do. The one thing that they fail to consider is that computers are "absolute," which means that they cannot figure out what you want of them. They do what they are told, and nothing else! And so, if something isn't working, it's not likely the computer. It would be the file. Railworks uses a number of files with file extensions unique to the simulation. This is well and good to prevent folks from reverse engineering their product, or from using the files in another application. It does, however, present a challenge to developers because of the enormous amount of file conversions that have to be made to models and textures in order to make them appear i...

TS2017 Tutorials Home Page, A Guide for Beginners The following tutorials are offered to you as an enhancement to the many resources available on the Internet relating to DTG's Train Simulator 2017. By no means are these tutorials exhaustive, nor do they cover every aspect or feature of the topic. They were produced in an effort to provide the beginner with easy, step-by-step guidance. Further information can almost always be obtained by posting a question on the forums mentioned on our blog page, Route Building #1 - Introduction and Planning. AUTODESK 3ds Max Video Tutorials, by Glenn Ives My buddy, Glenn, in the UK also does not claim to be an expert in this field. He produced a couple of video tutorials for me when I was first getting involved with shapes and textures. I found them helpful and so, with Glenn's permission, I am making them available to you: 3ds Max Video Tutorial #1 - Basic Shape Creation and Exportation to Railworks  90.2Mb   15:01 3ds Max V...

TS 2017 ROUTE BUILDING #2 - Railworks Folder Hierarchy Most often, the Railworks installation directory is located in C:\Program Files\Steam\Steam Apps\Common\Railworks. Yours may differ somewhat, depending on your computer configuration. Within the Railworks root folder (also called a parent folder) you will find a number of other folders. The only ones we need concern ourselves with are the Assets, Content, Dem, and Source folders. ASSETS Within the Assets folder you will find the folders of all the Providers to your installation. Inside the Provider folders are the Products supplied by that Provider. Within the Products folder are all the files and folders pertaining to the assets of that particular product. A inside of a typical Product folder might look something like this: Audio Environment PreLoad RailNetwork RailVehicles RouteMarkers Scenery Stations TemplateRoutes TimeOfDay Weather You will also find in there, a file called Blueprints.pak. ...

TS 2017 ROUTE BUILDING #1 - Introduction and Planning It has been said, "We do not plan to fail... we fail to plan." With that in mind, let me say that considerable foresight and planning is required if one wishes to build a quality, workable route. There is one more thing. You'll need a speedy computer with lots of RAM to construct a route, unless you don't mind waiting a long time for some processes to take place. In my exuberance at the beginning, I dove right in to building a route only to find out later that I had made some big mistakes with respect to naming conventions and folder hierarchy within TS2017. Needless to say, those errors required that I go back to the beginning and start all over again. I had searched the internet high and low seeking tutorials or information on route building. I found several video tuts on YouTube but they were difficult for me to follow because the presenter moved so fast that it was hard to keep up, and he used terminolog...