Article: Trainz Dev Diary - Height-Mapped Ground Textures and Geometry (sneak peek)

[clam1952]

That's due to the grid being stretched, the textures effectively are mapped to a square, distort the square and it distorts the texture, that's given me an idea that perhaps you could create a texture that looked correct when stretched, might look a bit odd when not stretched though?
The problem is less on a 5m grid, if the grid was say 1m which is not likely to happen, it probably wouldn't be that much of an issue.

 

[WindWalkr]

And indeed on vertical slopes. One of the massive shortcomings with the Jet engine or "new" (ahem) engine derived from Jet is that it doesn't render textures on vertical or near vertical slopes at all well. Even the finest most up to date high-res texture just looks stretched out.

Yep, this is definitely a limitation with our top-down texture projection. You can work around it to a reasonable extent, and hand-placed meshes are probably the best solution in extreme cases, but it is something that we do want to improve in the future.

It's not something that the current improvements are targeted at, although there might be small benefits just in terms of increases in apparent texture resolution, etc.

Out of interest, E2 is most definitely created from whole cloth and is not derived from Jet. I know that's not really either here nor there from a user perspective, but quite a few of us on the team spent an awful lot of time making it happen.

cheers,

chris

 

[DavidPistelak]

Nice, except that it has tremendous demands on graphics and memory!