[Weter]

May I ask you?
Is there any opportunity to fix missing *_y.raw file (opentails.log tells, some of them are missing).
I see problems with water surface on the route:
I ran Odessa route for testing locomotive setups and making screenshots, and discovered, that water surface have disappeared.
The water objects is a key element of the west line scenery, so such situation is very painful for me.
Looking my log-file I've seen notes about missing *_Y.raw file.

[jonas]

*_e.raw and *_n.raw files are dispensable in the route directory TILES and will be recreated by MSTS at startup if they are missing.
Unfortunately I don't know what to do if a *_y.raw file is missing.

[Weter]

Furthermore: they both *_e and *_n are definitely useless for ORTS, so I wipe them always. Each *_e is 256kB, *_n is 64, so for large routes, they steals a lot of disk space.

[joe_star]

 jonas, on 08 November 2021 - 02:55 PM, said:

*_e.raw and *_n.raw files are dispensable in the route directory TILES and will be recreated by MSTS at startup if they are missing.
Unfortunately I don't know what to do if a *_y.raw file is missing.

The y.raw file IS the actual heightmap of the tile in question,in the form of a grayscale image where dark areas represent low height and white represent high height. The scaling of the black to white is driven by the tile height scaling factors in the .t file.

I do not know if a y.raw file can be recreated from the e.raw & n.raw files, but once you lose all 3 you have effectively lost the tile. The .t file does not contain the actual tile height map info

[Weter]

Thank you.
If so, I see the way in form of reinstalling the route (if installer contains *_e&*_n .raw's) and then to re-save that tiles in question, hoping, that it would help?
Or better: first see, if that tiles are actually needed in the route (they could be not populated tiles somewhere in peripheria)...

[R H Steele]

First, I'm not a route creator....however, I've been running all routes in OR without any e and n raw files in the Tiles folder, no problems. OR does not use these files, and I thought that these files represent the "buffer" files created by MSTS when you run a route....delete them and MSTS will create them again when the route is run.
Also the routes without these files open in TSRE. I can place and move objects within the route, save and run the route in OR, the modifications are present, so the missing e&n raw files appear not to have any effect in that specific case.

Like you said Weter, when I deleted them from all routes ( about 3 years ago ) I gained a good chunk of space on the hard drive!

[Niknak]

That's very useful info and will save me quite a lot of space so many thanks guys. Although it does appear that some freeware route builders and almost all of the payware route builders have already omitted the e and n files. ( except for MLT's Kicking Horse Pass ).

[Weter]

Hello, my colleagues.
I need to make two clarifications now:
1. I suppose, I owe to say "thanks" to Dave, who have corrected my "mistake" in very tactical and constructive way. Well done, sir :hi: my hat is off for your wisdom.
2. I see, it's need to repeat about a reason, which forced me to start speaking about tile files:
As we have autonomous thread now, and I see some interest about this question, I would try to say more verbose now. I've corrected the thread's title.

I ran Odessa route for testing locomotive setups and making screenshots, and discovered, that water surface have disappeared.
The water objects is a key element of the west line scenery, so such situation is very painful for me.
Looking my log-file I've seen notes about missing *_Y.raw file.

So, however you prefer to discuss *_e&*_n *.raw's (which i always delete, following steam4me tutorial's advice, as well, as *.bk and *.thm files, that eat-up much space of my HDD as well) my trouble was about *_Y.raw, that missing.

[Weter]

@ joe_star, thank you for explanation about *_Y.raw -files purpose. Well, I didn't see any height problems with route's terrain yet.
@ Gerry. You are right: MSTS itself calls the process of making that files "generating terrain buffers"

Or maybe, the problem is in different handling of environment by ORTS?
To be honest, reading my log-file I expected to see some notes about *.env-files issues, but not a tile-files...

[Genma Saotome]

I saved over 10gb by deleting some of these files.