12-02-2009, 11:58 PM
TrainNut Wrote:I am CAD literate... very. And, the thought of being able to simulate trains on your layout before building it intrigued me. Even though mine is mostly on it's way, I thought there might be some way of getting my current .dwg into Xtrkcad and playing with it.
So I tried to download it right now just to see what everyone was talking about and ended up getting a bunch of error messages. Guess I'll pass.
Fair enough. It would be kinda hard to troubleshoot anyways based on "downloaded, ended up getting a bunch of (unspecified) error messages (doing something unspecified with an unspecified version of the program on a computer running some unspecified operating system)".
As far as I know, there is no way to import a drawing (even if vector based rather than raster based) into XtrkCad and turn lines and curves etc into track objects. A track plan in XtrkCad is a collection of track objects, not a collection of lines and curves.
That would take quite a bit of programming - about on par with being able to import a photo of a column of numbers into e.g. Excel, and have Excel automatically do optical character recognition, and do stuff like adding up the numbers in the picture.
Obviously can be done, but seems like a waste of programming hours.
But if you feel there is significant demand for such a function, take it to the yahoo group mentioned earlier and see if someone feels like trying to write a .drw to XtrkCad converter for a very CAD literate guy.
Smile,
Stein