Weird Railway Glitch

[countplague 5]

I recently installed SC4 on my new rig (running Windows 10). Installed NAM 47. Installed a bunch of different mods, but none pertaining to railway textures as far as I can tell.
The issue at hand is a glitch involving some of the railway intersections and any time multiple tracks are laid next to one another on the diagonal. The RRW texture works perfectly except for in those two areas, where the original Maxis textures seem to pop through in a diamond pattern. Please see pic included for reference.
I have tried installing various reskin mods for railways, but they either don't work with the most recent NAM or the glitch still occurs through the reskin, same as in pic. I have deleted and reinstalled NAM 3 times now. Tried running in both software and hardware mode, as well as different compatibility modes. The glitch keeps occurring no matter what I do. Has anyone else run across something like this, or have any idea what my issue might be or how to fix? I can try to build cities around this specific limitation, but that can create some ugly/unrealistic railways depending on the map and region geography I'm working with.

[CaptCity 4,695]

Hi @countplague

Both of these examples, the multiple diagonal tacks and certain tight switches/branches are not covered by the RRW textures. The RRW system that is now the default NAM rail texture do not support those particular layouts.

[rsc204 21,806]

As mentioned, the RRW is now the default rail system for the NAM and there is no further support for Maxis Rail. Whilst I understand it does require some changes to how you build railways, most of them are for the better if you value realism. Not to mention, a plethora of new content that never previously existed, including draggable viaducts at L1/L2 (E-RRW), support for various radius curves in drag and flex forms, along with new switches and FA-Rail too. You can create much more realistic rail junctions and setups using these new pieces, see the official RRW Documentation for full details.

The double diagonal rails were not supported by RRW for two main reasons, first that they are unrealistically close together (the rails) and second because where shared-tile setups are used, the capacity is halved for each network. In other words, there is absolutely no capacity increase for using a second set of diagonal rails like this, just space diagonal rail a further tile apart. Likewise the switches on the left of your image involve 6 switches in the space of 3 tiles or so, a setup guaranteed to derail even the slowest trains. Not to mention things like a complete 'roundabout' for a train to turn 360 degrees in the space of 16m is just frankly laughably unrealistic.

In all such cases and for the purposes of realism, these are quite intentionally unsupported with RRW. In fact whenever the old rails appear that's a good sign that what you are trying to do isn't supported. I made a video recently showing how to retrofit RRW in existing regions and since then have been working on some code updates to resolve some setups which are part of the RRW spec, but currently not coded to function.

[countplague 5]

13 hours ago, CaptCity said:

Hi @countplague

Both of these examples, the multiple diagonal tacks and certain tight switches/branches are not covered by the RRW textures. The RRW system that is now the default NAM rail texture do not support those particular layouts.

Thanks for clearing that up. Guess there's no easy solution and I'll just have to work around it.

[countplague 5]

13 hours ago, rsc204 said:

As mentioned, the RRW is now the default rail system for the NAM and there is no further support for Maxis Rail. Whilst I understand it does require some changes to how you build railways, most of them are for the better if you value realism. Not to mention, a plethora of new content that never previously existed, including draggable viaducts at L1/L2 (E-RRW), support for various radius curves in drag and flex forms, along with new switches and FA-Rail too. You can create much more realistic rail junctions and setups using these new pieces, see the official RRW Documentation for full details.

The double diagonal rails were not supported by RRW for two main reasons, first that they are unrealistically close together (the rails) and second because where shared-tile setups are used, the capacity is halved for each network. In other words, there is absolutely no capacity increase for using a second set of diagonal rails like this, just space diagonal rail a further tile apart. Likewise the switches on the left of your image involve 6 switches in the space of 3 tiles or so, a setup guaranteed to derail even the slowest trains. Not to mention things like a complete 'roundabout' for a train to turn 360 degrees in the space of 16m is just frankly laughably unrealistic.

In all such cases and for the purposes of realism, these are quite intentionally unsupported with RRW. In fact whenever the old rails appear that's a good sign that what you are trying to do isn't supported. I made a video recently showing how to retrofit RRW in existing regions and since then have been working on some code updates to resolve some setups which are part of the RRW spec, but currently not coded to function.

Thank you for the quick reply and clarification. I do really like all the additional options of the NAM. On my old rig (Windows 7, and perhaps way back with NAM 30 or so) I didn't have these issues. Also, I was only including those weird junctions as examples of the issue at hand. I wouldn't actually use most of those setups (except for the straight stretches of diagonal rails next to each other, which is really the only thing I care about anyway).

The one thing I'll point out is that if you look at google maps (and the included pic grabbed from a random area in Chicago), there are countless real world examples of multiple rail lines being right next to one another (especially in railyards or heavily industrialized areas, which is mainly how I used to use this particular multi-track setup). To have to leave a full tile gap (the equivalent of a third set of double tracks) between the two main sets looks really unrealistic to me. Train tracks rarely waste that much space in real life. Usually, the tracks are built as close as they can safely be set to one another. Again, please see picture which shows 7 rails right next to one another (plus that 8th off to the side, but still not at a distance equivalent to a double set of tracks, or in our case the length of a tile; looks more like a half tile to me).

Either way, it sounds like the setup I want just isn't and won't ever be supported again, so thank you for explaining the technical issues with it. You at least saved me from a few more fruitless hours of searching for a solution that apparently doesn't exist. I guess I'll just have to build my networks around this in the future. Thanks again.