After a month of Trainz

[Racn]

Hi Fellow Trainz fans.
I originally purchased Trainz from Steam over a year ago just to have a original Loud Train Horn which was used as a party prank. It worked guests thought a train was on a colision course and was going to crash through our house, (5.1 surround, front speakers are 4 ft tall by 8 inches square, thurndering base).
Anyway then about a month ago I decided to check out the software more thoroughly, soon found out that buying through Steam was not the best thing I could have done but fortunately the new store sale came along and I was able to re buy Trainz at a very reasonable price.
First map I made was a 22 square x 22 square map with 8 working industries and 8 AI trains, and it worked pretty good AI chugged along, but as I added more textures, trees, signs, etc, I began to notice a real degradation in computer performance.
I think it was due to the map being one big square rather then being a longer thinner map line (hope you get what I mean by that).
So yesterday I started another map which I hope to be able to complete and maintain good compy performance, this time I will try a map line which is not square but long and thin.
Also the speed trees could have been a killer for the 1st map, likely had way to many of them.
The learning curve in Trainz hasnt been as tough as I first felt it was going to be, lots of tricks folks have posted in the forums have helped me alot.
Happy Trainzing

 

[JCitron]

Route building is full of compromises. The intial thought is to load up whatever you want on your baseboards because there are so many, many assets (objects) available ranging from sewer grates and fire hydrants all the way up to super bridges and city buildings. As you gain experience route building, you'll find the right mix of objects to make your route realistic enough, yet not overly filled with detail.

There too are other issues that can contribute to this problem. Older assets don't have the LOD levels or optimization that the newer models have. There's nothing wrong with the objects, or any reason to snub at the creator that made them. The objects were created for an older version of Trainz that didn't have this. The texturing too can make a difference. Older textures and again object textures were not as optimized as they are today for the program. Spline objects and grass. These two items can really kill a route. Splines are hoggy on the system resources because of the way they're drawn. Personally I keep the splines down to a minimum, using them for lineside telegraph poles, occasional power lines, a few fences, and road splines. There are ways to fix some of the spline issues, but the newer splines draw better than the older ones anyway.

Grass, well it depends upon how it's made and how much you use. There are spline grass objects, which have the spline problems, and there are grass clump objects. The newer grass clump objects are better than the older ones, but I find that overall they kill the performance no matter what version of grass I use. Perhaps I'm greedy and want a thick pasture along my tracks? I tried the clumps here and there, but they didn't look right, and they really didn't do much for the performance either.

Old flpboard trees are awful on performance. There's nothing wrong with them, per se. It's the way the system handles them through the modern game engines. They don't render well either in the new systems, but I can say that some of the older flipboard trees are really great. I think that the images used for them can be used effectively to have that thin forest found along rivers and tracks, but as I said now they don't render well either. What's happening with flipboards is instead of being drawn by the graphics card, they're assembled first by the CPU and the information is sent to the GPU for display. This causes a stuttering and performance issue. This brings us to Speed Treez.

Some people hate Speed Trees and this will probably cause a flamewar by me saying this. The Speed Trees are actually better performing than the older flipboards! This is due to the way the computer handles the objects. Instead of the CPU getting involved as much, they are rendered up in the GPU nearly 100%. This is a one step process for the rendering, and the GPU is usually faster than a CPU anyway due to the way it's constructed. I'll leave this as it is so not to go into too many technical details. Now I have found that the built-in Speed Treez to cause performance issues due to their wind motion, and maybe their huge size. Perhaps my video card can't keep up with the constant motion while trying to render a moving scene out of the cab window in Driver. So after experimenting with different Speed Trees created by other people, I found that the non-built-in trees to be far better. I recommend looking at those made by Gawpo50 (I hope I got his name right), McGuirel, and Pofig. All of their trees aren't as horsy and don't have that constant gale force motion to them. I think the coloring is better on them as well. But like all the Speed Treez, they are thicker than the old flipboards which means you can actually use less of them on a baseboard. To help with performance again, use discretion when placing Speed Trees. Like anything there can be too much of a good thing. I find that I keep the forest thick along the tracks and where the trees can be seen, and paint the background out of view a dark green color. This makes the forrest appear to continue off into the infinity, but only the trees in the front are needed. If there's a place where the back side may be seen, I will put some trees along that edge to hide the missing forest. Using the Alt+Y key sequence, I'll get down at track level and look around my scenery. If I see the back side of a mountain, I'll fill in the scene with trees and objects so the holes aren't visible.

I like your horn prank. I'll have to try that one myself!

John

 

[Racn]

Thank you John for your info, appreciate it.