Got the ship dropped down to the right level, so its lower edge is just on sea level most of the time. There's a story here. In the editor, the game tells you that oceans are always at zero altitude. It turns out that this is not quite correct. There can be a slight variation in level, which is presumably just a small rounding error. As near as I can figure it, it probably goes up and down by about 0.1 of a unit. This means the tricky track covering has to be given a little extra height to stop the ocean variations borking things. Typical RT3.
Anyway, I have it sorted for height and for width so it covers the track well whenever the track is straight. There's still a slight glitch around kinks/corners, where the skinning overlay doesn't seem to get cropped accurately. This gives the covering around corners a slightly ragged look. It may be possible to get a full solution for that later, but I think it's acceptable now.
Another glitch is that when you zoom up to a high altitude the game seems to accentuate the track so that you don't lose sight of it. I suspect this is done by increasing the track dimensions as you zoom out, but since all coding relating to track vertices is hidden in the game engine (it's about the only thing that doesn't have an accessible .3dp file) the only workaround for this would be to also increase the size of the track covering for lower LOD's. I haven't done that yet. At the moment it's just one basic LOD, but I'll try a fews things later and see what I can come up with.
Textures are still not quite perfect, but can be improved some more. One thing to note here is that the water reflections have never worked on my box (no idea why not) so I've skinned it to match what my box displays. If you have water reflections on your box (lucky you) then you'd be wanting a different skin for the track covering. Someone who has water reflections will probably have to do that, because they'll be able to see what's going on live.
See pic.
