CT14's Railroad Lots and BAT

[CT14 2,486]

Welcome to the development thread for CT14 lots and BAT.

Reference/Notes

Transit Textures

JBSimio Smalltown USA Textures

IRM Textures

Prop Family Index

Range: 0x5F85E900 thru to 0x5F85E9FF

BSC Prop Family Index assignment record: https://www.sc4devotion.com/forums/index.php?topic=2490.msg500261#msg500261

Details of prop family IDs used:

Spoiler

0x5F85E904: Troy Gasholder Building

0x5F85E905: FAB I-M Diagonal R

0x5F85E912: FAB I-M Diagonal L

0x5F85E913: N&W HL Hoppers Ortho

0x5F85E914: N&W HL Hoppers Diag

0x5F85E915: N&W HL Hoppers FA2-26.6

0x5F85E916: N&W HL Hoppers FA2-63.4

0x5F85E917: N&W HL Hoppers FA3-18.4

0x5F85E918: N&W HL Hoppers FA3-71.6

0x5F85E928: Jestarr Boilerhouses Ortho

0x5F85E941: 19th Century Small Shops (Large)

0x5F85E942: 19th Century Small Shops (Medium)

0x5F85E943: 19th Century Small Shops (Small)

0x5F85E947: 1x1 Wild West (8m)

0x5F85E948: 1x1 Wild West (16m)

0x5F85E949: 1x1 Wild West (Corner)

0x5F85E94B: Fisher Dock

0x5F85E94C: Fisher Roof Vents

0x5F85E94D: Fisher Grunge

0x5F85E94F: Fisher Window (Upper Story)

0x5F85E95A: Fisher Window (First Story)

0x5F85E95C: Fisher Window (Vents)

0x5F85E95D: Fisher Roofjunk

0x5F85E95B: SM2 Dirty Concrete Wall Ortho

0x5F85E96D: Grunge Props

0x5F85E96E: Graffiti 8m

0x5F85E96F: Graffiti 16m Offset

0x5F85E970: Silver King Aerial Tram 48m

0x5F85E971: FAB FA3 D1

0x5F85E972: FAB FA3 D2 (reserved)

0x5F85E973: FAB FA3 D3 (reserved)

0x5F85E974: 1x2 W2W Victorian Warehouse Ortho

0x5F85E975: 1x2 W2W Victorian Warehouse 45

0x5F85E976: Billboard Reefers

0x5F85E977: W2W Johnson Building (3 story)

0x5F85E978: W2W Johnson Building (2 story)

0x5F85E980: Fisher 10 Detroit Ortho

0x5F85E981: Fisher 10 Detroit 1x1 Corner

0x5F85E982: Fisher 10 Detroit 2x2 Corner

Releases (newest first)

Original BATs

W2W Johnson Building

 

Fractional Angle Ugly Shed Towers

Alpaca Scientific Instrument Corporation

CT14 Prop Pack Vol 2

Silver King Coalition Mines Terminal

Fisher Body Plant Modular Factory

CT14 Prop Pack Vol 1

19th Century Small Shops

Lyons Elevator

FAB Diagonal Industrials

 

Troy Gasholder Building

Llama Terminal Company

 

Relots, Warehouse Imports and Assorted Follies

CT14 Industrial Grunge Fillers

 

tadasu Ishihara Building - Diagonal

Old Time Power Plants - jestarr Boilerhouses

In-N-Out Lowrider Show

Lowrider Props

SABER LA River

North American Freight Sidings

---

North American Freight Sidings original first post:

Spoiler

 

Inspired by the lack of existing lots representing protypical North American freight railroad sidings, I've created a system of lots that can be used to create eye-candy rail sidings. They are transit-enabled for appearance. I have been encouraged to share my progress in a dedicated thread by helpful feedback in the Show Us Your Railroads general thread, especially from SimCoug, T-Wrecks, raynev1. And the whole thing wouldn't exist without the Jestarr props.

Features:

• 18 ploppable lots for different railcar types on double track rail
• Transit enabled connections to make the lots fit in seamlessly anywhere
• Three prop families to provide a variety from Jestarr's boxcars, intermodal and general merchandise freight ("Junkers")
• RRW compatibility

Known issues:

• Transparent texture bug as described here https://community.simtropolis.com/forums/topic/42425-transparent-texture-issue/
• The lots need custom icons created and added, through Reader as described here: http://www.wiki.sc4devotion.com/index.php?title=Tutorial:Inserting_a_custom_menu_icon_with_the_Ilive_Reader

Future development ideas:

• Single Track Rail lots don't match exactly when using textures extracted from the RAM .dat, and I probably need permission to use them separately in any case. So, STR sidings may be a separate release at some point.
• Four-track lots would be prototypical for large yard trackage, but don't exist in RRW. Custom textures might allow some eye-candy four-track lots in future, this would resemble an updated subset of NCD.

Dependencies:

• BSCMegaProps JES Vol01 (v1.0) - https://www.sc4devotion.com/csxlex/lex_filedesc.php?lotGET=342
• For RRW, you need the NAM with RRW enabled.

Download:

Please report bugs here. Thanks!

 

 

[Fantozzi 4,068]

Great!

If they are of any help you can use the texture-variants contained in this package.

[CT14 2,486]

Thanks fantozzi, I wasn't aware of your project yet but it looks like we have a similar idea. I'll download your textures and let you know. I appreciate the link very much!

Edit: I checked out the textures. They are very nice and give me a lot of ideas for how to achieve the 4 track tiles. Group seven, textures 30-34, are a good example of the sort of yard ladder I want to be able to build, but with four times the density of storage tracks compared to group seven, and a lower angle on the lead track. For those following along, I pulled the relevant image out of fantozzi's readme.

  Edited November 15, 2015 by CT14  

[CT14 2,486]

I've fixed the road access requirement by editing jobs provided to 0, at the Demand Created exemplar in Reader.

For power requirement, merely setting Power Consumed exemplar "Value" column to 0 was not enough to remove the no power zot from transit enabled lots. I had to set another column, "Rep" to its reported default of 0 for the Power Consumed exemplar.

I also went through and set Item Order exemplars to move the Intermodal, Freight and Engine tiles next to each other in the Rail menu.

And last but not least used PIM-X to remove the base textures and get to transparent base. On vanilla installations this will result in a strange match with the dirt base texture outside the puzzle piece, even with no nearby zoning. The pieces are modded as Railyard (no station), no wealth. The transit enabled pieces seem to affect wealthification differently than the non TE pieces but I haven't figured out quite how yet.

Here are a couple more development shots showing the current state of things in vanilla and RRW.

Added multi-line LTEXT descriptions with LEProp and uploaded an initial prerelease (attached to OP). Found transparency bugs that didn't show in initial testing and removed upload until I can work out a solution - likely using dirt base textures that match the vanilla dirtification.

Sort of a tough question. Per this thread https://community.simtropolis.com/forums/topic/42425-transparent-texture-issue/ the bug, triggered by underground view for all lots which have overlay textures but no base textures, can be worked around easily by switching to zone data view and back to regular view. This does work for me. I'm going to keep the package available while i decide what's best.

  Edited November 16, 2015 by CT14  

[CT14 2,486]

The first package, based on Jestarr's props, was released on the STEX last Monday.

I've been looking into additional prop packs and their use for more lots like this.

There's the PEG CDK3 SP Rail Fleet, which is somewhat similar in scope to the Jestarr collection and has lots of nice livery visible.

There is also a treasure trove of road-specific railcar and engine props on the Gizmo archive - including eight road-specific packs based on real prototypes. It's been almost ten years since they were released.

My thought is to take all these prop packs, and use them as dependencies for region-specific lots. There are props for CSX/NYC/Conrail/Tropicana/Bay Line in the East, BNSF/BN/SP&S/Canadian Pacific/NP/SP in the West, KCS/Rio Grande/Santa Fe/SOO in the Midwest... CN, UP and RRX everywhere...

Also, mfw

[T Wrecks 10,210]

LOL @ the pic. Don't I know that feeling all too well...

If you're going for different regions, the SFBT has made some nice European stuff, too - here, for example. However, looks like you have plenty of work with the US stuff already.

The quality of Gizmo's stuff is really surprising considering the age of those objects!

[CT14 2,486]

T Wrecks: Thanks for the feedback. I don't know enough about European prototypes to model them effectively, but I appreciate the suggestion!

Some of the Gizmo and Peg props are based on historical prototypes which were a little smaller than the last 40-50 years of railcars. Likewise, some are a little bit larger scale than RRW (ore hopper cars come to mind, too wide).

I'm hoping scale isn't too much of an issue with the modern cars between the different prop sets. Re-scaling props sounds like work, and usually also would need to involve the original authors.

Speaking of IP etc, after re-reading the prop family creation tutorial at http://www.wiki.sc4devotion.com/index.php?title=Tutorial:Creating_Prop_Families, I noticed it refers to copying prop exemplars as if the assets were being copied wholesale to a new DAT file. I wanted to understand if this was actually happening under the hood, and realized I hadn't tested it. So I tested my released package without the "BSC Mega Props - JES Vol01.dat" dependency file, and confirmed that the process described in that tutorial does not copy assets over. The dependency is definitely a dependency.

Now that I've confirmed that, I'll do a few test lots before building prop families (if I can't get lots to scale properly, won't be using those props...)

[CT14 2,486]

Here be dragons... scale issues galore. There is enough coherence to mix prop sets together into lots, but not perhaps into families to the extent I had hoped.

The PEG autoracks need a couple pixel nudge on their right overhang but are going to work just fine with the smaller scale cars. Autoracks are gigantic in real life anyway.

I found a bug in the release - the two left overhang pieces don't actually match each other's overhang. This is visible center screen where the red boxcar is overlapping the orange Hyundai container's car. I'm going to adjust the mixed freight piece's overhanging props to match the intermodal, and wait to see if I find any more bugs before updating the STEX download.

  Edited November 28, 2015 by CT14  

[CT14 2,486]

I've posted a new version, v1.0.1, that fixes the left overhang bug. The readme also got more information about the lots.

[CT14 2,486]

Simmer2 released two texture packs which include Swordmaster and Indiana Joe's RRW textures. This is great because it means we can do some proper quad track rail yards!

Links to the textures:
https://www.sc4devotion.com/csxlex/lex_filedesc.php?lotGET=3329

https://www.sc4devotion.com/csxlex/lex_filedesc.php?lotGET=3310

And here is my quick sketch of a yard lead... still finding the right textures, it's quite a large set.

[Simmer2 23,828]

Hi CT14.

Indeed it is quite the collection I put together thanks to the NAM team for creating RRW.

Looking at the lower picture, there is a proper piece in the texture packs which will fit perfectly.

 

Simmer2

 

 

 

[Swordmaster 50]

Nice work! I'm planning a railyard set within the foreseeable future, though seeing your and Simmer2's lots, I'm becoming ever more convinced to have three tracks per tile as the standard.

 

Cheers

Willy

[CT14 2,486]

Thanks for the feedback, all! I'm still puzzling through how to build a set that allows freeform yard building without using dozens of tiles. My goal is to do it in about a dozen pieces - yard mouths, leads/runarounds, themed yard body areas. The number of pieces is a concern because I know most people aren't using DAMN - I have my own ideas about how to make DAMN more accessible, but that's another story. I may also look at using a tab ring for the pieces.

Simmer2 - I'll keep looking for that tile - thanks for confirming it's there!

As far as prototypes - I'm sure it varies by region, but a lot of large railyards around here match the four track per tile layout where space is a concern. By contrast, industrial spurs/sidings are more likely to be spaced out to two or three tracks per tile to allow access by workers.

[CT14 2,486]

Looks like the yard body is the part that needs four tracks. Something like this can be done with just a few plops:

[rsc204 21,857]

On ‎23‎/‎01‎/‎2016 at 7:45 PM, CT14 said:

I may also look at using a tab ring for the pieces.

That's really not a feasible solution. Such pieces require code supported in the NAM to work. If there were a simple solution to use them to better-organise downloads, you could be sure it would have been utilised by now.

[CT14 2,486]

Thanks rsc204, that's good to know that tab rings are not low hanging fruit! I will focus on minimizing number of plop pieces and maximizing modularity.

[CT14 2,486]

Although work continues on the QTR set here and there, I've been bitten by the BAT bug. Here's a WIP grain elevator started yesterday.

Criticism welcome - texturing may be an issue at some point. The "faded white paint" on the workhouse, the matte gray for concrete, none of it is really perfect. But does it even matter, at game scale?

No BAT4Max / lotting tests yet - until the building model is done.

Question: Speaking of game scale, is it necessary to scale the whole model 133% vertically when complete, to compensate for ortho view in game?

[Bombardiere 591]

4 hours ago, CT14 said:

Question: Speaking of game scale, is it necessary to scale the whole model 133% vertically when complete, to compensate for ortho view in game?

Yes. Otherwise your model will look odd in the game. Like squashed. Depending of the model this maybe  more or less obvious, but usually there is a feeling that something is not quite right. When I begun, I wanted to be creative and tried other scalings, but I think 133 % is the best.

Are the grey main area textured? If so those are very flat and needs to be liven up with effects. I think that the textures are an important part of the final model and would show in the game scale. May even more so as the game's scale is from birdview's distance. The nature is not flat tones, so the BAT should not be either.

 

But this looks an interesting building and one I could use it.

[rsc204 21,857]

8 hours ago, CT14 said:

Question: Speaking of game scale, is it necessary to scale the whole model 133% vertically when complete, to compensate for ortho view in game?

Yes and No IMO. If you know the model is for SC4, why not scale it correctly during the design phase? Modifying these things later can actually make life harder as textures get stretched and other problems can occur. 133% is not an absolute figure though, but it usually works out about right. Generally speaking, it's best to limit any use of the scale tool in your modelling application. So if you start of at 133%, you can always tweak it if later you want to adjust it slightly.

 

[CT14 2,486]

Thank you all for the advice on scaling. It sounds like the thing to do is to scale the model up when the design is complete, then apply textures.

[Bombardiere 591]

10 hours ago, rsc204 said:

Yes and No IMO. If you know the model is for SC4, why not scale it correctly during the design phase? Modifying these things later can actually make life harder as textures get stretched and other problems can occur.

 

Allright, there is no right or wrong, but I actually personally disagree with this. Two reasons.

 

First, I personally like to model the building as 100% because if I model it 133% from start, my eyes are screaming that there is something wrong with the BAT. For me it is easier to look at the shapes and sizes if those are in real life proportions.  So that I can make overall judgement on the model I am working with.

 

And the textures. Well this is again an opinion. Yes, fitting the texture first and then to do 133 % upward scaling does stretch the texture. But then again final SC4 render will squash those. So in opinion making the textures in 100 % will make those look roughly the same than in the final SC4 BAT.  But I am not an 3D expert, so I would love to hear other opinions.

[MushyMushy 3,618]

@Bombardiere - I agree, my way of doing it is the same: to completely finish the whole model and texture, and after that scale it up. I simply find it easier to work with everything when it's scaled normally. I have noticed, though, that the 133% thing looks weird/stretched on certain models (mostly props), like people, cars, and other assorted small things. I don't scale those up.

[CT14 2,486]

Progress with textures and roofjunk: gutters, vents, seams. Silos are now a decent match for prototypical weathering, but the head house needs new bitmap.

[CT14 2,486]

Added interior to workhouse with conveyor, concrete slab floor for bridge to head house, cloned workhouse and bins to other side of head house. This side has a less weathered roof. Both sides have ductwork at the intersection of workhouse roof and head house. Vents on head house roof are complete. Roof edge textures now need to be lighter.

Next steps: ductwork, finish workhouse roofjunk, the other half of the head house windows, head house interior, train shed.

[T Wrecks 10,210]

The model is shaping up nicely for sure! Have you made a test export yet to check how the textures will come out in game? Especially if you're using gmax, they can be bleached out considerably and deviate from what you see in the viewport, so it might make sense to check the overall appearance before you start the fine-tuning.

[CT14 2,486]

@T Wrecks

Overall darkness of textures seems fine. Bin and headhouse roof edges need lighter texure. Head house body needs new bitmap.

I'm absorbing this tutorial on nightlighting and glass, while researching night lights on elevators:

 

[matias93 7,535]

I have my reserves for the concrete texture, it looks like a huge piece of poured concrete with those big stripes. The technique is not impossible in RL, but it would imply a huge technical effort and most surely would leave marks on the concrete. Normally, curved shapes are moulded with wood, so one would expect to see little vertical stripes where the planks joined.

In the photo, a poured concrete pillar, with concave curves. Note how the horizontal sedimentary stripes are cut by the vertical moulding stripes.

[DavidDHetzel 1,816]

Hey @CT14, this could be a good resource for you.

 

http://www.railpictures.net/album/3426/

[CT14 2,486]

@DavidDHetzel Yes, that is a good one!

@matias93 Beautiful explanation. From reading memoirs of a builder ("Our Grandfather's Grain Elevators" website somewhere) it seems that these bin structures were built with 12 or 24 ft forms depending on the builder, poured vertically. This elevator has been repaired numerous times in the intervening eras, so off-the-shelf textures don't quite match. The shape of the bins also makes applying textures from photos of the real life structure tricky.

The model is of the Enid Terminal Elevator Company "Southwest/Feuquay" Elevator, built 1926 in Enid, Oklahoma. Here's the bird's eye view of Southwest:

https://goo.gl/maps/sEDKgsrEA552

The feature "Measure Distance" in the right-click menu in Google Maps gives scale and spacing.

And here are the photographs on hand. Including the near-identical Goodpasture elevator, also in Enid, and presumably part of the 1926-1927 elevator building "boom". Assuming Goodpasture wasn't a phase of this elevator's existence, and not a separate entity.

Unknown, probably Enid Terminal Elevator:

Southwest (Pillsbury in background):

Goodpasture:

Southwest from the other side

All these elevators were built at once by the same builders on near-identical designs, making a useful reference.

Edit 7/29 to clarify some (mis)identifications of elevators. Enid Terminal Company was wrongly identified with the Southwest elevator.

[DavidDHetzel 1,816]

@CT14 you take those photos?