Building Curves for openBVE

Hello All,

I have been out of the BVE Developing scene for some years now! Back in around 2008 I was part way through developing a BVE 2 Tramlink Route. Sadly, work, life and other commitments got in the way and I haven't really touched it.

However, I have recently got back into building the route, and have decided to abandon development for BVE 2 and BVE 4 and focus instead on building for openBVE.

However, although I am familiar with all the old curve building programs that existed, and have used them a lot, I was wondering if there were any easier ways of building curves these days?

Curves with a larger radius don't often present much of an issue, but within my route some of the curves are very tight (the sharpest curve is a 30 radius curve!) which makes them a lot harder to build.

Any advice that's able to bring me up to speed with today's route building tools would be very much appreciated!

Have you tried this?

http://www.bvecornwall.co.uk/wordpress/trackgen/

Thanks Graymac. I'll have a look into it!

I had a look at trackgen, but as I was downloading it and nosing around in the openBVE folder, I found the Object Bender Tool that was already in there, and it's absolutely brilliant!

It's able to generate perfectly smooth curves even with radii of 30 which has been one of the biggest issues I've had when trying to create this route!

Thank you for the reply though! It's nice to know the BVE community still exists and is as helpful as I remember!

Just in case you need Rüdiger Hülsmann's Switch 1.5 program to make switches, etc, you can find it here. It was available from http://www.ruedes-bve-seite.de, which unfortunately has been offline for a while, so my link uses the Wayback Machine.

http://web.archive.org/web/20071113062408/http://www.ruedes-bve-seite.de

This might only be necessary if you used it earlier for your switches and you need new ones that look similar. As Graymac already noted, TrackGen is a more modern alternative.

Since it's very old, Switch will not work on Windows 10, you need Win 7 or XP for it (virtual machine, maybe).

Thank you for that!

I will probably rebuild the switches at some point, as I don’t remember which program I used to create them before. I’ll try TrackGen if that does switches as well.

I’d like to find a tool to create the switches for the grooved rail sections of track in particular. As the texture for the road surface sits at rail height, and between the switching rails, it’s a lot harder to build switches that look good in the road, than it is for standard switches where there are ballast and sleepers which can just sit under the rails!

Has anybody got any suggestions as to how I could go about building these?

Take a normal switch out of the same program as the others and edit the object manually to remove all the unnecessary parts, then add the six new street plane faces (left of the switch, right of the switch, between the points, inside left track, inside right track, between the tracks). I think that'd be the easiest way, though I'm only guessing. Maybe someone does know a trick or an established method.
You could do it with a single face, but then you'd need a special texture for it and the grooves would be just plainly painted.

switch wont work on windows 7. jack

Quork wrote:Take a normal switch out of the same program as the others and edit the object manually to remove all the unnecessary parts, then add the six new street plane faces (left of the switch, right of the switch, between the points, inside left track, inside right track, between the tracks). I think that'd be the easiest way, though I'm only guessing. Maybe someone does know a trick or an established method.
You could do it with a single face, but then you'd need a special texture for it and the grooves would be just plainly painted.

Thanks Quork.

This was my thinking on how I would probably need to build them, I was just hoping for an easier way! Ah well, never mind!

I will be trying to build the grooved switches this weekend.

jckhinks wrote:switch wont work on windows 7. jack

I guess it doesn't work on 64 bit Windows 7, but it definitely does work on 32 bit Win 7. I have a 32 bit Win 7 install in a virtual machine to make switches, etc.

will have to see what my old machine is and try it thanks.jack