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besides tinkering with the .sit file, is there anyway to move a bin just ever so slightly? like so.



i want to close the gap between the bins.

A) very carefully with the mouse

B) you can get very precice with tracked3 but as soon as you open it up in traxx everything will reset :o(

C) You can close the gaps by editing the model in binedit while it sits on the track

C is what I ended up doing to get everything to align perfectly on ocir.

a keyboard command would sure be handy to have in traxx, like we have for rotating, and altitude. I personaly don't like the mouse interface except when moving a lang distance.

ughhh...well for the type of track im doing, i think it would be easier for me to mess with the sit file... lol.

thx mal.

I know what you mean, believe me I do.

I takes a lot of patience at first but if you position youself directly overhead the model, high enough to have at least half of the model within view, then hit the home key to square the camera with the terrain you have a good shot at nailing the position with the mouse. Once you get the camera angle just right, click on the model to bring up the wireframe and without moving a thing and holding the left mouse button down make a mental note of a corner of the model where the wireframe aligns with the models texture, now move the model, it'll jump somewhere centering itself with the pick up point, simply move it back to where it was (mental note) plus one click up, down, left, or right... then release the mouse and check it.

It may sound like a pain in the butt, and it is, but it's not as time consuming as editing the sit file once you get the hang of it.

Good luck with the track.

I'd suggest combining Mal's "a" and "c" recommendations.

Models moved along the horizontal x/y axis in Traxx will always snap to an invisible grid every half foot, meaning there are 64 possible positions for a model within a single grid square (which is 32 feet by 32 feet).

Obviously these half foot increments are not ideal in many situations (pun).

However, if you size your models so that they always have dimensions that are in <i>precise</i> half foot increments they would combine with the half foot increments used in Traxx and come together perfectly when you drag them with the mouse. In other words, two boxes (cubes) that were 16.3 feet on a side would never snap together perfectly side by side in Traxx, a small gap (.2') would always remain (or they would overlap), but if the cubes were 16.5 feet each, they would set side by side perfectly thanks to the snap to grid function. However, there may still be a problem even with that, which is detailed further below.

TrackEd3 would not necessarily make positioning such models any easier, since that kind of lateral placement cannot be done with pure number inputs, and there is no snapping to a grid (I think).

Direct editing of the numbers in the sit file is one way to go for perfection, since you can almost take the values as far to the right of the decimal as you want, but then of course further direct work in Traxx would be out of the question.


Going off-topic now, though there is a word of caution for you in it.....

While the half foot increment thing might be a solution for you there is still a problem with it, which reminds me of something that I'd thought about suggesting as a possible binedit enhancement (assuming it wouldn't cause trouble I couldn't forsee), but abandoned. The thing is that while models might be sized to half foot increments in Binedit with the resize tool, it doesn't mean the vertices themselves are AT exact half foot incremental values, because the size values given are actually rounded values. Example: I have a cube here that measures 4x4 feet, you'd think it was perfect, but it's not, the vertices should all be plotted at plus or minus 512 (editor units) on all axes for it to be perfect, but in fact the vertex values range from 504 to 513 in my example, which means the cube faces are ever so slightly skewed.

One foot equal 256 editor units in binedit, the half foot increments in Traxx are thus 128 editor units each.

The cuboid roof sections of my expo loading dock were placed using a direct sit edit of the values, but even after doing that I saw gaps between them and so discovered they were not precise cuboids, but were off in exactly the way the cubes I just described were. What I did was open the model in binedit and set each vertice at the proper precise coordinates, once done the gaps were gone (which light had previously filtered through). Now that these models were precise, and happened to be exact to the foot, I could easily have used Traxx to place them perfectly with it's snap to grid function, rather than worry about sit editing.

i'm suprised no one suggest it but i'd use tracked2
learn to move models with tracked2
it uses keys which are much easier to control than the mouse
u can get right over head and move it with keys and if you hold alt it will move extra slow.
umm i dont have the controls memorixed for tracked2 but just try pressing every key
the f keys change your view and hitting e maykes it so u can change the eye manually. umm i believe 123456 do some stuff too and so does space and enter
umm hit j to jump to a needed location on the map
i think m shows a map athat will show u ough trextures and map locations - useful to use with j
umm but yea i suggest tracked2 for refining model placement
also u dont need to repod to test
ok yea my ¢2

i know its the wrong forum, but to stay on topic... how do u move from bin to bin in tracked2? i found out how to rotate and delete, but i cant find "skip to next"

I don't have it installed right now but isn't it the square bracket [ ] keys?

I notice it's not on the key lists, at least not that I could find.

http://cownap.com/~mtmg/tracked2/keys1.html
http://cownap.com/~mtmg/tracked2/keys7.html

ty phin i think u just saved my brain

Since you have it working you can help us out. Does using shift plus the brackets reverse the direction or make it jump ten at a time or does it have no effect at all? Once I have that, I'll add it to the list of keys. Thanks.

i tried..
- shift+[ / ]
- ctrl+ [ / ]
- alt+ [ / ]

nothing had any effect.
just acted like regular [/] keys.
[ - next bin
] - back one bin

Thankie kindly. And I put all the menu popups at the bottom of the tips page for convenience.

http://cownap.com/~mtmg/tracked2/trackedl9.shtml