How I remove items lost to infinity
One annoying feature of TSRE is it's ability to place objects at near negative infinity because of some error on the creator's part. I find that this often happens to me, if I am not real close to the last piece of track, to which I want to attach another. And the annoying thing is that the object is not only placed at a very negative "Y" value, it may also be placed in a distant world file as well. On most systems now, this is not going to affect performance in running a route but the potential is there, especially with older equipment. So here is what I do, and this is what I just finished on the N. Montana line. I brought the route up in Track Viewer which is a add-on built into ORTS. Then I zoomed in until I could see at least 1 world file either side of a path. And then I traced that route and noted any orphan items. For example, world file, -12507/14738 (not correct format, but numbers are correct) contained two items, while 3 other world files had 1 item each and two had items that I recognised as multi-track pieces that I probably used to sculpt terrain under a trestle and so would probably be visible in TSRE and they were, so no adjustment needed for those 2. For the mentioned world file, I opened it in Context editor and scanned through it. Two items had large negative "Y" values, so noting that most of the good items had a "Y" value around 900, I changed the value on those two to 950 which should make the piece be 50 meters above the nominal terrain level. Then I opened the route in TSRE and jumped to that world file. Then I chose to hide the terrain shape and took a look around. Quickly the offenders were spotted floating above the terrain and were deleted. Then save route and close the editor.
WARNING! BACK UP YOUR ROUTE FIRST IN CASE YOU EDIT THE WRONG ITEM!
Some additional hints and things that I do. First, when you edit the world file and fine an item with a big negative "Y" value, in the position coordinates, i.e."x y z" Then I found it useful to jot down the values of x & z. Then when you go into TSRE to delete the edited item this makes it easier to locate the item "most of the time" if you jump in TSRE to the world file and the coordinates within the world file. In this jump, "Y" makes no difference. I also found that before editing the world file, it was useful to go to that file in TSRE and determine the height of the terrain. Use this sorta average value plus 50-100 meters when you key in the new "Y" value. In this way, the bad item will float above most terrain. When doing a search for items, I hide the terrain shape and also turnout the compass. I use the Track Viewer tool in ORTS a lot to locate those tiles with "orphan speckles" and also to recheck afterward to be sure I got rid of all I could. I have found that almost all of the orphans can be removed by locating them with the xz values. I did encounter one that showed up iin a world file image but was not in the world file itself or at least it did not have a negative "Y" value. I found it anyway and it turns out that the orphan was at a normal vertical level but still an orphan, so delete. Attached is an image from the text editor and note that of the two items shown, one has a large negative "Y" and the other around 370. So I would believe that the latter is okay, and then change the large negative value to something greater than 370, I used 400. ERROR-loc.png ERROR-loc.png
Jerry Sullivan
WARNING! BACK UP YOUR ROUTE FIRST IN CASE YOU EDIT THE WRONG ITEM!
Some additional hints and things that I do. First, when you edit the world file and fine an item with a big negative "Y" value, in the position coordinates, i.e."x y z" Then I found it useful to jot down the values of x & z. Then when you go into TSRE to delete the edited item this makes it easier to locate the item "most of the time" if you jump in TSRE to the world file and the coordinates within the world file. In this jump, "Y" makes no difference. I also found that before editing the world file, it was useful to go to that file in TSRE and determine the height of the terrain. Use this sorta average value plus 50-100 meters when you key in the new "Y" value. In this way, the bad item will float above most terrain. When doing a search for items, I hide the terrain shape and also turnout the compass. I use the Track Viewer tool in ORTS a lot to locate those tiles with "orphan speckles" and also to recheck afterward to be sure I got rid of all I could. I have found that almost all of the orphans can be removed by locating them with the xz values. I did encounter one that showed up iin a world file image but was not in the world file itself or at least it did not have a negative "Y" value. I found it anyway and it turns out that the orphan was at a normal vertical level but still an orphan, so delete. Attached is an image from the text editor and note that of the two items shown, one has a large negative "Y" and the other around 370. So I would believe that the latter is okay, and then change the large negative value to something greater than 370, I used 400. ERROR-loc.png ERROR-loc.png
Jerry Sullivan
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