Tony_Hilliam
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Your last sentence is a bit vague. Are you saying it will replace the lm.txt method?
You have got a 4-item list describing 4 transition points for 5 LOD levels. That's confusing. Wouldn't it make more sense for the list to define the cutoff distance for the LOD with the same index
The change here is specifically to allow LOD transitions to occur at user-defined distances, overriding the system defaults. This means that your LOD transitions can be customised for edge cases where the system defaults are inappropriate.
chris
From a creator's perspective, that is such excellent and long-awaited news. Trainz 2018 is shaping up to be a major advance. Will there still be some minimum poly-reduction criteria or are they gone for good under this new system?
Mesh-table LOD is not currently a replacement for lm.txt, but this change takes it one step closer to those capabilities. LM.txt is still the correct answer for most animated and moving objects.
The change here is specifically to allow LOD transitions to occur at user-defined distances, overriding the system defaults. This means that your LOD transitions can be customised for edge cases where the system defaults are inappropriate.
chris
I thought that was the intention, but thanks for the clarification. In any case this move will encourage creators to make TB4.6 assets. Looking forward to playing with this when comes along.
Yes - but that's a backwards way to do it. A LOD level without a mesh is an inconsistency, and is not needed at all with a simple change to mesh-table-lod-transition-distances tag. Much better to assume that any LOD level that has been specified has a mesh, and needs to be drawn, but the items in the mesh-table-lod-transition-distances tag match one-to-one with the LOD levels. Much easier than remembering that there is always one less mesh-table-lod-transition-distances list item than there are LOD levels, and that the no-mesh trick is needed to specify a cutoff. In fact, specifying a cutoff should be mandatory - requiring the mesh-table-lod-transition-distances list item count to match the LOD levels is a simple way to do that.Given how mesh-table LOD works, you may have zero or more meshes for each LOD level. If you want the lowest LOD level to have no meshes at all, acting as an early cut-off, that remains entirely valid.
Yes - but that's a backwards way to do it.
However, how would of these effects, etc affect the cpu?
In terms of one's pc heating up! For example on one of my pc;s I have in it an old cpu which dates back to 2011, but a good video card on the motherboard, and computers do get hot sometimes flying some intensive high graphic games!
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I'm good here, but I know the trainz community, and hopefully people read these posts about the next Trainz, and don't get caught off-guard!
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A side question:
Whatever happened to VR and Trainz, since it seemed you've invested great interest about it, Chris?
Probably better to start a separate topic for that one. Short version: I've dabbled with it, it works surprisingly well, but current hardware is expensive and/or limited and we don't think that there's enough community interest in the immediate short term to prioritise the work. We'll continue to track community interest and the state of the hardware, and i'm sure I'll keep dabbling when I have time free (as you can probably guess, I have other things keeping me busy right now..)
chris