Trainz/Fundamentals

Trains need a place to operate. Since they neither float nor fly, they need terrain. Terrain holds up tracks for trains to run on. Of course, terrain and track are hardly enough on their own to create an interesting place to run trains. We need to locate some interesting features on the terrain. Trainz provides Surveyor to create interesting places to operate trains, and most users will want to create a new railway eventually. This section introduces Surveyor along with concepts and techniques for creating those places to run trains.

Starting Surveyor

The indents indicate successive levels of menu screens:

• Start TRAINZ, enters the launcher menu
  • Select Start, navigates to the Start menu
    • Select Surveyor, this action will begin importing assets from the Content Manager Plus (CMP) will begin initialing data to Trainz Surveyor. This may take a while.

A two purpose list menu will appear revealing route name and indented, Sessions list for each route. Some may show no Driver sessions. Surveyor is used to alter or create routes and sessions. Since each session is only good on the matching route, it's content is paired with and indented under it's associated route. A driver session without a route will not show in this menu, but will be found in the content manager. With no place to set down wheels, these should be deleted as useless.

• Select an existing route then Load or
• Select Create New

So Surveyor is running. Now what?

Terrain

Let's start with a definition. Terrain is the surface of the earth, as shaped by erosion and geologic forces. Think of it as the dirt and rock that covers the planet, scultpted by gravity, water, erosion, earth forces and wind. Anything that isn't part of the surface isn't terrain. Water, roads, trees, buildings, cars, tracks all rest top of terrain thus they are features. We need terrain to put all the really interesting things on and, sometimes in, so we start by making some dirt.

Baseboards

The basic unit of terrain in Trainz is called a baseboard. For reasons known only to the original crew of programmers at Auran/N3V, baseboards are 720 meters on a side. Some have proposed the hypothesis that originally they were scaled proportional to the nautical mile, as seen as an arc length (part of a curve) then scaled to metric, and rounded off, but the programmer made a math error, and later wouldn't admit it.

Baseboards	meters	feet	miles	yards
1	0720 m	2362.20 ft	0.447 mi	787.40
2	1440 m	4724.41 ft	0.895 mi	1574.80
3	2160 m	7086.61 ft	1.342 mi	2362.21
4	2880 m	9448.82 ft	1.790 mi	3149.61
5	3600 m	11811.02 ft	2.237 mi	3937.01

New baseboards are flat land at sea level. File:Baseboard

Each baseboard has a 10 meter grid 72x72 marked out on it. Each intersection of the grid is an elevation point. The 10 meter elevation interval effectively limits the slope of terrain. Exactly vertical cliffs are not possible. Nor are undercut faces. Mathematics necessary to support either are far too complex to perform in real-time. File:10 Meter Grid

Some Essential Surveyor Hints

These hints have a temporary home. They will be incorporated in this section as appropriate.