Building railways on slope

[oldbear 390]

I do like building railways on my maps ... some trace from a previous life :D.

At the moment I have stopped working on my Sbrodjistan map, in fact I was fed up with the tedious work of laying railways tracks on a hills area ...

But I will try to share my experiments on this topic and perhaps help my fellows map-makers.

In ArmA2 tracks are to be laid on flat surfaces due to model characteristics, the only way to get a slopped rail tracks is to use the "up" or "down" models.

But these models are only straight part.

So on building an ArmA2 rail-tracks on slope will be to have flat curves and sloped straight parts, quite unrealistic from the RL technical point of view but the only way to get it in-game.

Building this, I will 1st draw a road on the terrain using xcelent RoadPainter tool from HomJ in order to have a clear view of the path I am going to use for the tracks, trying to avoid too steep hills and ravines, and having the more gentle natural slope available.

Then I will draw roads section, following this path. The curved road section must have the same shape as the curved rail track section, I am using a mix of 10_75 and 6m parts. The straight roads sections must have nearly the same length of the straight sloped rails used.

Using the smooth road script, I will flattened curved parts with "absolute height" option and slopped straight parts with "slope" option. At the moment I am unable to say what must be the slope value because even if I had try to get a calculated value, each time I had to change the value to fit the terrain reality, let say that the value of the "road" slope must be less than the value of rail track slope, in order to hide "stairs effect" on the ballast.

Here is how it looks on Sbrodjistan :cool:

Uploaded with ImageShack.us

Edited February 2, 2011 by Old Bear

[[aps]gnat 28]

Thanks for sharing Old Bear

Would be great is we could perfect a train-on-the-tracks simulation/script ..... then we'd see a flood of ppl laying track ;)