MSTS Water

[hecrowell]

SInce I did not find any other part of the forum to post this, I put it here and the moderator can move it to its proper location.

I am in the process of building a route and have experimented with the RGE and RE functions and believe I have the basics of these two utilities. Also, Route Riter and DEMEX are understandable and I have had success with these utilities. FInally, TSModeler I found to be quite simple to use - perhaps due to my previous experience with a Microsoft Flight Simulator modeling tool known as FSDS (Flight Sim Design Studio) very similar to TS Modeler, used to produce aircraft as well as static objects.

But - when it comes to making water areas (lakes, rivers, bays , etc) I am at a complete loss here. Is there a tutorial anywhere (other than the Route Building Tutorial) that details in laymans terms how to make water areas? I believe in simple terms, it involves placing markers to define the shape of the water area - obtained from Google Earth as a .kml - (one way to do it) - then with Route Riter, converting the .kml to .mkr so they will show up in RE. Next, in RE, it looks like the land tiles within the water area are lowered/shaped and then changed to diaplay water. There is where my trouble begins - or maybe it has begun before this and I don't kow it. I have had no success at all in making my water look good in appearance or boundry shape whatsoever
Can anybody help me out?

Thanks

[stem]

This is truly a question that only Paul would be able to answer as far as I know. I'll see if I can get him to reply to this thread.

[Paul Charland]

Hi All,

I did answer Harold's question off list a few days ago but thought I'd post the reply here just in case someone was interested....

Hi Harold,

My route would be from Coldbrook to Windsor and that is what I created from the first day. Now, if I wanted to stop at let's say Wolfville, I can remove the extra tiles that are not in use, or if I wanted to extend the route at a later point I can add more DEMs and add the extra tiles in RGE at any time. The only real time this becomes an issue is when you are finishing a route to upload and distribute, that's when you use a function in Route-Riter to compact a route, that will remove any file that isn't necessary line extra world tiles that have nothing on them.

Question 2 was explained yesterday.

The color of water... I've never used the MS water color on any route. In your Route folder, (as in the route you are creating), open the ENVFILES folder, then the Textures folder within. There are three layers to MS water, they are:

waterbot
watermid
watertop

They are ace files that provide the color for the water, the watertop is semi-transparent and also provides the wave texture. These are the ones to replace or change to whatever color you wish.

Paul