Best Practices for Efficient Layout Design in Trainz Surveyor

M

mmmittchel

New member
Hey everyone,

I’ve been working on a new layout in Trainz Surveyor,, and I am curious about how you all approach efficient design. What are your best tips for creating realistic and functional track layouts without overloading the system: ?? I’ve noticed that adding too much detail can sometimes cause performance issues,, but I also want to make sure my routes look and feel authentic.

Do you focus more on specific elements like track alignment or scenery: ?? How do you balance aesthetics with performance: ?? Any advice on using certain assets or techniques to optimize frame rates while still maintaining a detailed environment: ?? I also read this thead https://forums.auran.com/threads/tips-and-tricks-surveyorrpa.6105/ but looking for some more adivce.

Looking forward to hearing your strategies and learning from your experiences..! :)

Thanks,
[Mitchel John]
 
Depending on how you plan on view / using the eventual layout. If from in the cab or other rolling stock, then you don't have to have much detailed scenery in the a distance, you'll not be seeing it very well. Also don't overload the close in stuff either. When you're driving by at any speed, you'll barely notice many details as they zip by the window. It's the middle ground stuff that needs attention, enough to make it interesting but not too much that it overloads the capacity of your GPU to render it all.
If on the other hand you plan on watching from an overhead view then the scenery needs to extend further from the track but with less detail since you wont see it from any reasonable height.
Either way, try to avoid objects with too many details made by polys or overlarge textures. A few here and there if they are really special but not everywhere or you'll slow things down to a slide show.
 
If you intend to fill large areas such as a forest, use the same trees or clusters of trees. Mixing up too many trees, forces Trainz to have to load up different libraries. Using the same tree or same cluster different trees will help with this. This is the same for buildings. If you are building a large city, put a few interesting buildings up front but fill the back with low-poly buildings and pretty much the same ones.

The reason for doing this is the program will load up the meshes and mesh-libraries into memory. If you use the same objects, these meshes are loaded up once. If you use lots of different trees, then the program needs to stop and load up different tree meshes and textures, causing more lag. This isn't as pronounced today with newer hardware but if you have a weaker CPU or GPU, it can cause stutters.

What I do is I copy and paste the same trees I've combined into groups so that oaks and pines, for example, will make up a forest. For housing developments, I'll put some different trees to spruce up the area to make it look better.

Avoid lots of spline grass. These are memory hogs and don't load well when there's a lot of them. The new procedural grass from TurfFx is better, but like grass splines I will place them down only in from the tracks, maybe 50 meters at the most. The reason is as Martin mentioned, we would never see grass that deep into a field anyway when we're moving by at 63 mph/100 kph.

When I'm building, I look at lots of photos and more recently cab ride and lineside videos to get a gist of where things are placed. For commuter routes and well-maintained freight routes, there's not a lot of trackside tall weeds and grass. We tend to overdo the grass and weeds. In my area for instance, the weeds are back pretty far from the tracks much like it is when we place our textures down and not as close as many people place the grass and weeds.
 
Good advice John. So far, I have cloned 100 of 120 rmm trees to replace pofig trees on the Midwest Grain route, and it is taking much longer than it used to, to load up whenever I want to see what it is looking like. The ironic thing is that there are quite a number of the same types of trees, so not so very many different species of trees and shrubs, but all individual assets. And as I look at the pofig trees to see what they are, all the trees of a species tend to look exactly alike in the context of viewing it in explorer, so are they all that much different? It is going to look very nice, but I will have to wait to see what performance is like.
 
I create a baseboard or two and use it as an artist's palette with flora, fauna, buildings, bridges & roads, etc. and check the poly count of the assets using open preview asset in CM before placing them as scenery. I also detail the places that create a scene first, e.g., small town, bridge crossing, industrial area, etc. Then fill in between the scenes. It keeps my interest in detailing.
 
Start off relatively small but with expansion in mind. Having 100 miles of scenery to build can become quite boring and will test the enthusiasm but starting with a 5-10 mile junction, terminal, or interchange etc. getting it working and building the scenery will create an active railway and provide the incentive to create more. Use portals at the end of each leg of the route to turn back traffic. When the time comes to expand, insert the next 10-20 mile of track prior to the portal(s) on one or more legs of the route and repeat the process. My long term route was stated during the days of TS12, migrated through T:ANE, TRS19 into TRS22 and is still growing while smaller projects have been merged and one actually inserted into part of of a branch line. I quite like building in valleys, as the hill on either side restrict the view and reduce the need for scenery in depth while the twists and turns between the hills provides the anticipation of what's round the next curve while driving. Peter
 
Don't forget merges. I took Coal Country and with 3 merges I had a nice size route with very adequate scenery. The most dramatic addition (merge) was Esopus from Approach Medium. It places you in 1930 with excellent scenery. I then based my entire route on that element's era in terms of cars and structures. It also introduced me to cobblestones which I remember from my childhood. The city element of the Esopus addon is outstanding.

N3V later destroyed the route with deletions of the elements in that route.
 
Forester1 said:
Good advice John. So far, I have cloned 100 of 120 rmm trees to replace pofig trees on the Midwest Grain route, and it is taking much longer than it used to, to load up whenever I want to see what it is looking like. The ironic thing is that there are quite a number of the same types of trees, so not so very many different species of trees and shrubs, but all individual assets. And as I look at the pofig trees to see what they are, all the trees of a species tend to look exactly alike in the context of viewing it in explorer, so are they all that much different? It is going to look very nice, but I will have to wait to see what performance is like.
Click to expand...
Try lowering the tree detail slider in the video settings in Trainz. Go to the 3-bar menu for this. I also match the post-processing to what's in the performance settings. I have found with experience that the Speed Trees are system hogs no matter how fast my video card is and this helps a lot.

A lot of the same kinds of trees were used in Midwest Grain. I used a lot of oaks and maples, and generic bushes that had a similar shape.
 
Thanks for the tip. Yeah a lot of the same, but pofig did have some trees that I did not see available in speedtrees. No buckeye or buckthorne that I saw, no sweetgum, not much red oak. No tamarisk. And pofig had some bushes that were not findable. One was very wispy looking and I just turned it to willow. Nothing even close.
 
Forester1 said:
Thanks for the tip. Yeah a lot of the same, but pofig did have some trees that I did not see available in speedtrees. No buckeye or buckthorne that I saw, no sweetgum, not much red oak. No tamarisk. And pofig had some bushes that were not findable. One was very wispy looking and I just turned it to willow. Nothing even close.
Click to expand...
I ran into that too. RMM's trees are a little more defined while Pofig's are a bit generic. He did make some new Speed Trees that made their way into the new versions of Trainz. These of course can't be replaced prior to importing but you can always go back and do some replacing later.

RMM again comes to the rescue. He has some hawthorns (riabina, or Rabina), and 3dzug has made sweet gums.

I've done the same with trees. I'll find something that has a similar shape and look even though they're not quite the same.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top