Can the terrain height be adjusted in the bin file?

Can the terrain height be adjusted in the bin file?

Postby Rockdoc2174 » Mon Dec 18, 2017 3:19 pm

There are a number of tiles in Derby on The Friargate Line where the terrain height is considerably higher than it should be because the DEM data is recording roof height not ground level so is up to around 6m out. I've tried to adjust the height in the editor with less than stellar results so wondered whether anyone has been able to change the height in the tile directly.

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Re: Can the terrain height be adjusted in the bin file?

Postby AndiS » Mon Dec 18, 2017 3:51 pm

I vaguely remember having pulled it into Blender, for exactly this route. The way back should work ok, too, though I have not done that.
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Re: Can the terrain height be adjusted in the bin file?

Postby Rockdoc2174 » Mon Dec 18, 2017 7:18 pm

I'd forgotten about that. I haven't thought about this for ages but now Brian is working on Friargate it needs to move back up the list a bit. It's far from urgent but it means that the route can start from Derby and go as far as Kimberley, which would be 11 miles or so. Ilkeston station is a mess because we cannot get a proper handle on it but I could make it look like a station, even if it wasn't accurate, to get things nearer some sort of release.

But getting those levels closer to reality will be important. There is a lot of track still to go in for the Midland main line from Derby towards Ambergate. North of the Friargate Line bridge it's just four tracks but south of that it gets much more complicated. There are industrial sidings parallel to the GNR and a plethora of lines that served St Mary's Goods Station as well as the lines into Derby Midland Station. We don't want to have to fiddle with that lot once it's been put in.

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Re: Can the terrain height be adjusted in the bin file?

Postby Rockdoc2174 » Tue Dec 19, 2017 1:02 pm

I've had a quick look at the Ordnance Survey benchmarks for parts of Chester Green and the terrain heights that the DEM data has created. Just one example: where Mansfield Street meets City Road the OS benchmark is 154ft or 46.9m. The in-game terrain height is 52.7m so it's a whopping 5.8m/19ft too high. I'm sure lowering the whole thing by the same amount would cause issues of its own but, as it stands, the railway embankment disappears before reaching the River Derwent, when it should be on one almost all the way to North Parade on the other side of the river. You can see how high it should be from this photo I took several years ago. In-game, the track is virtually at ground level.

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Handyside bridge over the River Derwent in Chester Green, Derby.
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Re: Can the terrain height be adjusted in the bin file?

Postby sumitsingh » Thu Dec 21, 2017 12:10 am

hgt file can have a ±30m difference.
You can use more precise data from other source.
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Re: Can the terrain height be adjusted in the bin file?

Postby Rockdoc2174 » Thu Dec 21, 2017 10:25 am

sumitsingh wrote:hgt file can have a ±30m difference.
You can use more precise data from other source.

I'm sure you can but the next questions are

  1. where from?
  2. when in the process?
The route has about nine miles that are something like 90% complete so it isn't something I would want to drop and start again.

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Re: Can the terrain height be adjusted in the bin file?

Postby AndiS » Thu Dec 21, 2017 1:13 pm

The 90% bit is what makes it difficult.

Basically, there are these options:

1) A terrain grid with 50 m step width. You can download it as raster file at 50 m resolution or as vector data showing the contour lines.
In the first case, you end up with a lot of .asc files. These can be opened in any editor. The data format is dead simple. The header says where the tile goes and how big it is and then you have the data points, in their text representation. Top-left to bottom right, with top being north, of course.

Contour lines are in GML format which is also easy to process but you don't need that for our purpose anyway.

https://www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/openda ... tml#TERR50


2) LIDAR data at 1 m resolution. It comes as DTM which stands for Terrain and DSM which stands for surface. The first is what you want. It comes in the same .asc format but you select a tile first on the website and download just that. Again, you find a set of .asc files in the ZIP.

https://data.gov.uk/dataset/lidar-composite-dtm-1m1


Both options share one problem: They use the (or some?) national grid and not UTM. That means that translating that to in-game coordinates is homework to be done. I have not looked into this deep enough. What you find on the web looks quite mathematical and I am not into installing tons of software packs just to find out whether they work or not.


Ordnancesurvey.co.uk also have OS Open Map - Local which comes as vector data in GSM (or ESRI Shape, if you prefer that). It shows roads, present-day railway lines, shorelines etc.. Buildings are shown as simplified contours, just a rectangle for a row of houses.

This latter source gives you the option to develop a new route to original UK coordinates. You can go from the UK grid directly to game coordinates. Of course, the Google Earth overlay in route editor becomes useless then. But I might speak to fast, with some fiddling, one might find ways to set up the route origin in such a way that it fits your home grown imports.


Bottom line: Yes, there is much hot stuff out there on the net, but no, nobody has yet hacked any ready-to-use tools for earthly train simulators.
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