Beautiful - but as far as I can see it's a sandbox simulator without any content yet. Notice that most of the buildings seem to share the same texture set (something now possible in Trainz, but under-used so far).
Unfortunately, Trainz has far too much REALLY inefficient content available for it. I've found basic scenery items using 50+ materials. There are also buildings out there with 10,000+ polys and no LOD. If a route builder starts using these items in number, then no game engine is going to keep up.
Paul
I noticed the same thing with the objects and textures. Like in Trainz, there were no shadows around the trees, but the truck and the road sign had shadows. Canned shadows I was wondering. The scenery is nice, but I wonder how this would work in a train simulator like we know Trainz where it is a free-for-all environment. How much of what they have is developer-controlled, and how much will be user-developed, where as we know the quality can vary greatly.
There's one thing that bothered me. They at least could have used darker textures under the trees, which would have made them look as though they're part of the landscape instead of floating above. They're not floating, but because there's no shadow, it make them not appear to be in the soil.
Anyway you brought up an interesting point about the polys in models. This reminds me of a job I had quite a few years ago. At the time I was working for a company that created training videos and computer training programs for the plastics industry. At the time we were using MS-DOS and WFW computers on a small network made up of 1 P-90 and a few 486 workstations. These were fast computers in the day, and their main task at night was to render the animation files for the next day so the images could be imported into the video editing software.
Remember this was the day when 3D-Studio 4.0 for MS-DOS was the big thing. It was a relatively easy program to use, and in some ways puts Max to shame, but anyway, the 3d artist would setup the animation queue for rendering when we went home at night. What was interesting is the animation would only have a few hundred images output instead of the complete animation. The program was running 18 hours and barely had anything done!
We couldn't figure out what was going on. The company owner had me checking the network. The 3d artist had me running disk and memory diagnostics to see if there were issues with the hardware. Nothing was wrong; everything checked out beautifully.
Well finally after looking at the physical side of things, we did some model checking. The walls were hidden, then the scene was rendered. Same thing. The molds themselves were hidden. same thing. Finally we got to the machine its self.
It turned out that one of the long-gone 3d artists, a young guy just out of school, had made an animated injection molding machine. The machine was accurately modeled and animated very nicely. As the current 3d modeler went through the machine he found that the little, tiny, very hidden feet were overly built. Instead of having about 30 polygons, it was built with over 250,000 faces. It wasn't one small foot, but about 6 or 8 per machine, and the current artist had instanced the machines so there was a room full of them. Once these feet were optimized down, and the new instance models placed, the scene rendered perfectly overnight!
John
