Elvas Tower: Tangent 3.0 Released - Elvas Tower

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#1 User is offline   eolesen 

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Posted 21 January 2021 - 07:46 AM

For those who have used Tangent in the past, it's now been updated to work with TSRE.

http://www.digitalra...04/tangent.html

As with all other products on DigitalRails.com, it's donation-ware (this one, you decide what it's worth to you) with all proceeds going to the Illinois Railway Museum, as they have since 2014.

Tangent is an executable that you can install just about anywhere, and run side by side with your route editor (either MSRE or TSRE).


To use Tangent with TSRE already open:

1) Place and select a track piece (don't save to the TDB) at the starting point of the line you're trying to set, and click "Start". It doesn't matter what direction the track is rotated in.
2) Place and select a second track piece at the end of the line you're trying to set, and click "End".
3) Click Calculate QD, and you'll have two variations -- one pointed forward, one backward
4) If you want to set from the start point, click the copy button besides the top QD
5) In TSRE, select the starting track piece you want to orient (still not in the TDB), and click "Paste Rot"
6) The start piece can now be added to the TDB, and subsequent tracks snapped to it.

I recommend using a single track piece for setting your line, as some multi-track sections have an offset axis based on one of the vectors as opposed to the center of the shape.
Only the rotation of the QD is outputted (values 2 and 4 in the quaternion). Slope (elevation) is not currently outputted.

If for some reason the object and tile values cannot be grabbed from TSRE, you can click the button at the bottom of the form to expose properties that can be tweaked to your setup.


If you are not running TSRE 0.699, modify the name to match what appears in the title bar of the TSRE form. This is how Tangent will find the form.

If Tangent isn't virtually selecting and clicking in the right boxes for position or tile, use the numeric values to adjust the click zones to what matches your setup.

Position and copy values are calculated off the top corner of the main TSRE window, and tile & jump values off the top corner of the Navi window.

The text box in the center will show some of the other values calculated:

DX = distance along X axis in meters
DY = distance along Y axis in meters
DZ = distance along Z axis in meters
DI = straight line distance in meters
HD = heading in degrees
SL = slope in degrees
SD = slope rotation (almost always zero with train sims since track is almost never rotated along the fourth axis)

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