You must have Route Riter installed somewhere on your system
to use this tutorial
The right side user window in Route Riter is not used in this tutorial
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Open Route Riter by clicking its program icon in your start menu
From here on its step by step instruction
Please read everything carefully as it is important!!
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Step 1- Select the drive that contains your MSTS program files
Step 2 - By default, Route Riter starts in your Train Simulator/Routes folder
Change it by double clicking on the Train Simulator folder
and changing to the Trainset folder by double clicking on trainset folder.
This will open the Trainset folder below in tree format showing all
of your trainset folder names.

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Step 3 - As you can see from the pic below that inside the trainset folder
I have double clicked on the AMTP3dome and all of its contents are displayed in the contents view window
Single click the AMTP3dome.s to highlight it
Step 4 - Click on the MSTS File Utilities Tab to show all the available functions for this part of Route Riter

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Step 5 - Since you have selected the AMTP3dome.s, you can now click the Un-Compress S tab
This will open a MS-DOS type window and you'll see
a program called ffeunicode actually
Un-Compresssing the binary shape file into english text format
Close the ffeunicode program by clicking the X in top
right hand corner when it looks like it not doing anything anymore and finished un-compressing your shape file
Step 6 - After editing your Ace file entries in the shape file to match your car or loco, click the Compress S tab to convert the english text shape file back to binary code again seeing ffeunicode program pop up in the background and Compress the file back to the way it was before you Un-Compressed it
Again close the ffeunicode box by clicking the X in top right hand corner when it looks like its finished and not doing anything

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Route Riter can Un-Compress a shape file pretty fast
but it takes it a bit to Re-Compress them as its cruching the code like Winzip does to compress files to reduce file size.
I have experienced computer crashes trying to Un-Compress 3DTrains F7 Freeware A and B locos. It must be a huge shape file as Route Riter chokes on it trying to Un-Compress those large shape files. they are the only ones I haven't been able to Un-Compress so far.
Also as a side note--The Default MS/Kuju SD40-2 shape file will not Compress in Route Riter. All the MS/Kuju shape files I have seen are in Un-Compressed format. I don't know why it won't compress. maybe it was designed that way for reasons unknown to me.
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I hope this tutorial helps you learn the process for working with shape files.
Its pretty easy once you learn the process.
Have Fun!!!
 

Jim England - 10/30/03
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