A serious word of warning against an incredibly inefficient spline asset

[H222]

I have recently discovered 2 new assets on the Download station that do not pass the pub test in my eyes - they are grass/wheat field splines, measuring 7m x 4m wide per segment. They look ok, probably good enough for background fields, although they do seem to "blend out" due to how they were modelled at around 450m and in the config mention that they disappear at around the 1500m mark (though I can not actually test this as their textures disappear well before then.)
The 450m disappearance does not stop Trainz having to render these meshes though, and their meshes is where the problem lies.

These splines, which do not have any LOD or poly reduction, are 11624 polys per segment. If it were a large building with LODs then this poly count would be ok, no problems. But it is an incredibly narrow, short piece of wheat. And for context - if you were to lay a 1 baseboard field out with these wheat splines (which is surely the point, considering they are wheat fields), they would require 16,856 instances of this spline being rendered - making a total poly count for 1 baseboard coverage of wheat field to come in at 195,934,144 polys. That is One Hundred and Ninety Five Million polys. For comparison sake, JointedRail's newest GEVO models are 300,000 polys, and Zecrail's new intricate VR K Class loco + tender is 550,000 polys total (loco and tender), both of which have very good poly reduction through LOD, and are actually meant to be the focal point of any scene in Trainz.

A One hundred and ninety five million poly wheat field is not something I had on my Bingo Card in 2025 - but it is something that I highly recommend avoiding using in practically any context. Even a very short string of it will be a loco's worth of polys on a route, and the performance cost vs visual fidelity increase is nowhere near worth it in my eyes. If you wish to see how powerful your computer actually is, the KUIDs of these assets on the DLS are: <kuid:439337:119599> & <kuid:439337:119603>

ClutterFX (or TurfFX in 19) does a much better job simulating a wheat field, and with the right parameters are actually visible for longer than these splines - at (comparably) no performance cost.

Assets like these make me question if a rating system or similar would be worth it on the DLS. There are many users who do not use the forums or discord, and many more who will never see this thread but may download this potentially game breaking asset - and unfortunately N3V will likely be blamed for making a laggy game, rather than the asset that, in my eyes, would be better left off the DLS altogether.

Cheers
Jamie

 

[Dinorius_Redundicus]

Why not contact the assets' creator directly and let him or her know how you feel? They may agree to issue an update with more appropriate poly-counts, texture size and a meaningful LOD scheme.

 

[kittycraft]

Why not contact the assets' creator directly and let him or her know how you feel? They may agree to issue an update with more appropriate poly-counts, texture size and a meaningful LOD scheme.

After looking up the assets on the DLS, good luck trying to communicate with that author...

 

[wreeder]

Just another Trainz needs a communist committee to decide who can upload content to the DLS thread. The argument that innocent people might not know the consequences of using high poly assets is spurious at best and intentionally misleading at worse. It is all part of learning to use Trainz. I, for one want the choice to decide what I download and not someone else. @N3VSupport

 

[savllen]

Im still not quite sure how you make a spline so unoptimized. the fact a single baseboard is equal to about 632 JR gevos is insane. I really do worry about assets like this being used on public routes, this game already has some really poor running routes and assets like this will just make it worse. I pray for the people with lower end PC's using stuff like this cuz it wont end up well.

 

[krpkk]

Just another Trainz needs a communist committee to decide who can upload content to the DLS thread. The argument that innocent people might not know the consequences of using high poly assets is spurious at best and intentionally misleading at worse. It is all part of learning to use Trainz. I, for one want the choice to decide what I download and not someone else. @N3VSupport

And now, due to the existence of this thread, your choice is hopefully more informed than it was before. If this was your only takeaway from the info being shared by the OP, then I politely suggest having your head examined

 

[paulper]

The solution to the debate about whether people should or shouldn't upload assets like this could be resolved by a simple additional column in Content Manager listing the polys and whether it has LOD that would then enable users to make a quick and more informed choice over any asset.

 

[Frank_Dean]

The thread starter is right, but I think it's a losing battle. There are many scenery objects, with countless polygons, that can't be seen from several meters away or from the driver's perspective, but the game still has to represent them. Recently, a building with hundreds of thousands of polygons was also uploaded to the DLS, where the wooden facades of the building were represented plank by plank, as well as its interior, where the wooden floors also had each individual plank.
Each author has a different vision for Trainz, and thanks to that, we have hundreds of thousands of objects and trains available. What's essential is that Trainz doesn't allow high-polygon creations without LODs , which would make the game run more smoothly.