When I was asked to go and look at Microsoft's Train Simulator, the very words filled me with a kind of quiet dread. I did a test with the Crawford Hill route (USA) because it is short (60km or so) and the default textures were bleh.I've never been able to muster much enthusiasm about trains, but 1 have sympathy for those who do.

Pro: Every thing seen in the GE images will be seen on the routeД¬on: Every thing seen in the GE images will be seen on the route Be prepared for lots and lots and lots of image editing to remove unwanted objects. This creates a skew at the boundary of each texture. For best results, set the program to use 16 textures per tile, so each texture will be applied to 16 sub tiles. But the older they are, the less resolution they will haveД«e prepared to do a lot of image editing to get the rail bed and roads straightened. You can reduce this by using the Historical Images slider in GE to show photos that were taken at an earlier date. They have to be very high resolution to look reasonable.Дon't bother if some of the GE images that will cover your route are in cloud shadow, taken on a different date, or taken at a different time of day. which can be obtained from various old version sites.Дon't bother doing it if the GE images are blurry below about 50m altitude. You have to use Google Earth 6.1 or older. It is a program that co-ordinates your route to the actual location in Google Earth and automatically creates and applies the textures. Search for the program 'Solution For Real Terrain' by Andres Blaho. And I also hope I got the mathematics correct. I hope you won't be disappointed with the quality of terrtex you get from Google Maps, but I have found, even for transfers, the quality is very poor, colour balance is all over the place and of course, vertical objects, buildings, trees, etc are all flat.ДЄnyway, good luck, I hope it gives you some clues and I hope it works for you. Now once you have the distance/scale on the captured graphic, you can then divide up the area into 128 x 128 m squares, use that grid as your guide to slice squares out to whatever file size you want for the terrtex patches. It will be visible on the screen capture, so place it somewhere not in the area you want, or you'll have to photoshop it out when you want to use it.

For terrtex files use a distance of 128 metres or a multiple of that to define the scale. If you use a diagonal line, it won't be as easy to use later in the graphics program. If you draw a horizontal or vertical line with the tool, it indicates how long it is as you drag it out. For this, I use the distance measuring tool available on the application (right click?). The only problem you have now is ascertaining the scale of the Google Map image you are capturing. Remember that each of the terrtex patches always equals only 128 metres in the simulator, regardless of ace file size. For 256 x 256, each pixel is equal to half a metre and so on:ДЎ024 x 1024, scale is 1 pixel = 0.125 metre

Simply put for 128 x 128, each pixel is equal to 1 metre. So if you're going to make terrtex ace files, what ever the file size, 128, 256, 512 or 1024 pixels square, relate the pixel size to the distance in metres. In the route building guide (pdf) by Michael Vone (downloadable from steam4me I think) he explains the tile/terrtex relationship and specifies that each tile is 2.048 km square and so each of the terrtex 'patches' are 128 m square. The tutorial you linked to describes a method of scale calculation which I found somewhat complicated and frankly, I think it is wrong, but whatever. However, it doesn't matter whether you make transfers or terrtex, the problem is the same. I use the maps for creating transfers to set out accurate placement of scenery, roads, buildings, etc as discussed in the steam4me tutorial you linked to. Maybe it's there somewhere but I haven't seen it.ДЄnyway, I think the problem is one of scale. How high is that? I'm sorry, I have no idea, because in my browser Google Maps doesn't indicate altitude or height above the ground. Your question - 'How far from the ground in Google Earth do I need to be in METERS so that it EQUALS to 512x5x1024?'

Msts route building software