Considering that baseboards will eventually be populated, further increasing save time, I have begun an aggressive trimming of my map. There is no way I would ever finish the entire route as it stands anyway. I'm nearly 53 years old now, and would have to live for another 100 years to have a chance of completing it<g>.
I'm going through the route, making decisions on what I want/need to keep and what will go.
I favor industry over track mileage, so a 10 mile run of track with only a few industry will lose out to a congested area like Paterson NJ with it's industrial track (don't even know if that one is still in service).
I have become a bit over zealous in building this route, and I can blame it all on Transdem and Google Earth.
I had a lot of fun marking my route in GE and converting it in Transdem, I just wanted to go further and further from my original plan, which was Northern NJ to Selkirk NY.
As it stands, the run on the CSX Riverline from NJ to Selikrk is about 3 hours, 128 miles. There aren't many industry along that route though, so I needed to extend southward into Bayonne on the National Docs Secondary, and west into Newark and Paterson to get industry.
Somehow, New Jersey Transit got into the mix, and I have included Hoboken station, the light rail, and many of NJT's lines going west from Hoboken.
I've also included the NEC from where it comes across the Hudson to somewhere south of Newark Airport.
I don't have any idea of what kind of performance I will get if I attempt to run trains on all of these routes at once, but I have a suspicion that it will be very choppy.
That's why I've got to at least limit the number of baseboards, and chop the route a bit, so I don't have so many objectz on the route.
I started with 2 baseboards each side of the track, but am trimming it to between 1 and 2, depending on the area. Doesn't make sense to go two baseboards from trackside up in Campbell Hall, where you're in the middle of nowhere!
I suppose I could consider an upgrade of my video system. When I built my system, the BFG GEForce 6800 was the cutting edge, but now Nvidia is up to 8000 series I think, so I'm sure I could help TRS by upgrading.
The system already has 3G of DDR-2 RAM, so all I could do is add another 1G, but I would have to scrap two 1G modules to do so, and I'm not going to do that.
So, it looks like the only way to maintain a 'runable' Trainz route is to keep it to a reasonable size, and watch the objectz density.
Oh, there is one more thing. I could overclock both my video and CPU.
With the Asus P5AD2E Premium mobo and the BFG video card, I have the option to overclock.
The BFG came overclocked right out of the box, and I think I have AI overclocking turned on for the Asus board. I didn't want to play around with these things, since there is the possibility of burning something out, or at least creating an unstable system.
That said, I may take a trip over to the over-clocking forum and see what I can find out.
Lastly, I have to say that Trainz has been the only computer 'game' I play regularly for years, and considering the cost of TRS2006, and the anticipated cost of TS2009, it remains the most fun for my buck.
I don't think of Trainz as a game, but more like a way of life. When I'm building a route, especially this prototype route, it isn't a game at all. It's as though I'm building a prototype railroad. That's one reason I tend to over-populate scenery objectz. I want it to look as close to the real thing as possible.
Maybe my next step would be to get into GMAX, and start creating some of my own content from buildings, etc along the route. I don't see much in the way of objectz from New Jersey on DLS, so I'm sure it would be appreciated.
FW
.
, surely a track would use more than a fence, and a Motorway/Freeway would use more than a road, but I think I'm correct in saying that a spline of Terraced Houses would use less than several single houses.
.