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If I may,
The granularity you have mapped out in your include files in the Santa Fe GP39-2 mentioned above is quite specific. If anything, VERY specific.
If this new shape viewer can accommodate the nesting of "n" levels of .inc, well, great. I am not sure if even 50% of present or future models will ever have/need this level of granularity. I would hate to have a shape viewer that could have a bug that would cause a loss or corruption of flat .eng file to accommodate this level of granularity.
At point do we say, the new shape viewer is good enough, and bullet proof for what it is intended to do, which is to display the model and perhaps certain elements of a flat .eng file. Adding more and more levels of abstraction for the sake of "clarity" might not have the intended results.
If all of this can be accomplished within this new shape viewer, then I will will be the first to admit my shortsighted concerns with this. Likewise, the ability to create more and more layers of abstraction/granularity seems like a secondary project. The ability to go from a .eng flat file to abstraction/granularity would be very nice to have as some kind of an editor. How many are going to use this feature though? Because of incompatibilities between MSTS/OR .eng files and also various releases of OR I find myself often doing the reverse, that is going from abstraction/granularity to a flat file! Dumb I guess.
Just my thoughts,
SteveComment
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I agree to a point and will say it's do-able and should fit into what is already present, It's a matter of parsing the information and displaying it in theory. The idea should be to push things forward and if it's there then maybe it will encourage more people to use these settings. That's probably being naïve, but if it's not there then people won't use it for sure. What's being added is built upon what's already there. Worst case scenario is you load your model and I didn't think about something and that part doesn't load, but It will not crash anything. That will not happen though as any bugs if any will be sorted in due time. At first look it's not complicated as I'm only loading lights, so there's a lot there that I'm not even reading unless there's something I'm not thinking of off hand. 🤔
Wireframe is finally "finished" and animations are getting close to finished with turnouts, pantographs, mirrors, doors, steam locomotives, pivots are all working. Just working on finishing up wiper animations.
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Hi,
Great to see wireframe mode up and running here!
In Gausden's Shape Viewer you can also highlight individual parts (through the hierarchy pop up). This is great for clarity when you are trying to track down a part to fix textures, etc.
Will your Shape Viewer be capable of highlighting in wireframe mode?
Gausden's Shape Viewer "decided" to use a highlight method that outlined the general color of a given wireframe area based on the color of the texture used to cover the polygon. Sorry, that was a mouthful. In short, if the textured part is green, then the wireframe outline of that polygon would also be green.
Thanks for the great and astounding speed this is proceeding at!
SteveComment
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Yes.
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As far as wireframe mode color sampling from texture it's a bit tricky because of the lighting of Helix3D causing bright washing out colors, or at least that's been the case so far. I may have to revisit that one. I will be adding x-ray and wireframe overlay for now that should suffice for now. Also selection of model hierarchy without hierarchy window needing to be open will be implemented.Comment
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As a matter of personal preference, will the user have control over the color of the wireframe and the highlighted wireframe color?
I ask this because of some visual impairments that some might have, including myself. White on black is very harsh for me. In some versions of Blender, the stock wireframe color is black on a rather dark gray background, which is too much the "other way"!
Thanks,
Steve
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Well it's spring and besides the need to touch grass, I have to cut grass as well, so work has slowed a bit. Animation is actually complete for now as I spoke way too soon before testing many Indian and American steam locomotives and found a few issues. I have a whole folder full of various diesels, steam and various general animations that have been exhaustively tested and I'm finally at a place where I can move on from them. I also got around to implementing visual pivot points as that helped with animations, so there's that. That being said, I will be focusing on some smaller implementations next as I have spent more hours than I care to say on animations that include.
* Highlighting untextured
* Highlight parts of model that don't have assigned LOD's. Assign them LOD's?
* Reverse hierarchy. Which is basically click on part of object to see its name in hierarchy window instead of clicking through hierarchy to find object.
Near Future:
* Advanced include (.inc) file reading as discussed here.
Any ideas, or discussion is welcome! There are many other ideas on the table but were winding down to a working releasable version very soon!Comment
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This feature suggestion might be useful: aligning the position of an entire model to fit another. You select one shape as the target shape, then another as the shape to be adjusted to a specified point of the target shape. A good usage case is with Danny Beck's CSX GP38-2 locomotive models - one of them (2621) is positioned higher than the other (2568), which is at track level. In this scenario, you would select 2568 as the target shape and 2621 as the shape to be adjusted, aligning it to the bottom-most edge of the target shape (the edges of the wheels). Once the process is carried out, both models should now have the same position relative to track level. This feature could also be expanded to allow the user to specify the axis as necessary, or centering it on the origin via separately selectable options. Modifications could be made to the ENG/WAG and SD files as appropriate. By including this sort of feature, it would eliminate the guesswork that occurs when doing the same process with the tools that are currently available. What would you think?Comment
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Yeah, spring is here, and that summer heat will be following it soon. I hope that your application makes it out the door before our attention away from computer screens is forced on us!
In my case, I worry about making my computer workspace with desktops too HOT. I love large screens and cannot do any sim work on a laptop. When it is too hot I have to step away from sim work for months and months trying to save my hardware from thermal abuse, not to mention my old AC unit for this house. With LLMs gobbling up all the new hard drives/SSDs for years to come abusing them with heat is not a good idea, as they cannot be replaced...at any cost it seems!
I hope all of your hard work is backed up. I hope some version of your shape viewer will make its appearance soon. Will this project be open source?
Many thanks,
Steve
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Can you make sure it understands the Freightanim -- FLIP() option? None of the existing shapeviewers do.
What it looks like when FLIP() isn't interpreted. Works fine in the SIM.
image.pngLast edited by pwillard; 03-31-2026, 12:07.http://www.railsimstuff.com
Just Blender now, 3DCrafter only when I have to.
Formerly The Keystone Works (All Permissions Granted)
Things I work on: https://github.com/pwillard
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Sorry for the delayed response, Steve. I back up all my work and files in general several times over including externally and the cloud. The program will be open source as well. I was just thinking at my pace now it will be May maybe even June before something is released. I'm thinking of a closed beta, so I'll give a heads up for those interested.
I used TV screens for as long as I can remember and haven't been below 39" in almost 15 years. Monitors that size are very affordable used and supposed to be better for the eyes.
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Yes and thank you for the suggestion of models to use for testing. It seems when it comes to the time to test things my mind goes blank. I wonder though if you wanted to adjust a shape to another shapes Y axis, you should simply adjust the model using the coordinates box in the bottom right of my program by selecting correct model and finding it's Y height and then copying that to the target model and save? This reminds me a snapping which isn't needed if matching a models axis, but still it's simple enough to implement and would probably come in handy in ways I'd never think to use it.
Long winded way of saying, yes. If you see an update that is in that direction and I didn't implement what you had in mind let me know! Thanks.Comment
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Updates as we draw nearer to a release, or beta who knows.
* Ability to read complex include files (.inc) using ATSF GP39-2 3640 as the test case.
* Display all shapes loaded in the scene as well they can be loaded and unloaded from the scene.
* Display of Bounding Box from SD and (Calc) to Shape Viewer standard.
* Display of pivot points.
* X-Ray View
* Wireframe Overlay
* Show Bounding Information
* Highlight Untextured
* Animation of Turnouts, Switch stands, Locomotives, Wipers, Mirrors, Pantographs, Steam Locomotives, Wheels, Doors, Scenery etc.
* Reverse Hierarchy (Click on part of the model to highlight its hierarchy node. Helpful for animations. Ask me how I know.
from calc.jpg
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