Just playing around with the train track texture.  I never liked either the original file, or the remake that I've used for quite some time.  The colors were wrong, and the tracks were grossly out of scale with their surroundings.

Here is a screenshot of my revised texture in use; and a Google Earth shot of roughly the same location.  Both just south of Harrisburg, PA.

Ron

 

 

 

Definite improvement.

Rail + road are the last frontier for FS9, never mind the cities' textures.

Even in GE Pro, the roads don't convince, and they sometimes veer crazily over contours that they should go around.

Great work.  I also don't like the rail roads in FS9.  I've deactivated them in UT so I only get default FS9 rail roads.  Much easier on the eyes because UT adds a lot of them and usually distracts me from the good looking ground textures.

Thanks guys.  This certainly isn't an award winner, but is an improvement over what I was seeing before.  Down low it's a pixelated mess - like most other things - but above 2500 ft it isn't so bad.

The sad part is I had to "dumb down" the texture file; which is 512x512 and I had some pretty nice detail in it.  But the rendering engine turned that into a blob; so I had to simplfy it to render somewhat clearly.

Looks much better than default. I agree, the FS version is bad. I also redid mine long ago. If you care to you might try my method, that didn't cause the pixel blob. I used PSP to 'eyedrop' the colors of individual pixels in the image, and did a color change to modify to attempt something more real looking. However as you observed they (the railroads) still look awful up close. Oh well.

 

Thanks for sharing this and please keep us advised on your progress. It does serve to remind us that we can improve FS9, even if at little steps at a time.

 

Regards,

Mel