Hi All, I use decals created from old Ordnance Survey maps in my routebuilding, and I have noticed that these decals need to be rotated a little to align with objects in the Google Maps satellite imagery. This means that there must be a discrepency between the decal's "north", and the "north" that TSC uses. I was wondering if there's a way to manually calculate true north in TSC, given a known location on the UTM coordinate system, which is what I understand the game engine uses to correct the Google Map Decals. The old RWDecal tool had something to that effect, but of course, that has fallen out of use. All the best, MrGronx
As the world in TSC is a flat projection, north is always parallel and infinitely far away, as Euklidian parallels never meet. All tiles are NESW aligned. So use the tile raster to align your objects/decals (there might be key combo for "snap rotation to 45° steps " but I'm not a route builder). Doesn't the flyout give you the option to manually enter translation/rotation parameters? So like on a Mercator or Equirectangular Projection, north is a point stretched to an imaginary line (which itself cannot be mapped as it's of infinite length). This works as maps only depict a local area - merging huge maps in N/S direction would cause problems where you'd eventually fail to recreate true distances and angles at the same time, and E/W distances would grow the further north you go. This problem was apparent in games that used the whole world map (Silent Hunter), where the map and distances were massively distorted in the northern or southern parts. And a trip from Scapa Flow to New York would be almost three times (just guessing) as long as in reality, because spaces between longitudes are represented in this flat world as of equal distance (which is unrealistic but has the advantage of being able to use cartesian coordinates without any distortion. TL;DR North is zero, tiles are parallel to NS/EW. So much for the theroretical blabber, maybe a route builder drops in.
On RWDecal, there was a way of calculating a due north fix which was outlined in a spreadsheeet, but as RWDecal has died along with the specific version of google earth that it needed, that's no longer an option. It was apparently some sort of trigonometry issue (which is beyond me)