How to define *poly heavy*

G

gisa

Routelayer Ordinaire...
Hi All,


In the process of building a route (I'm doing this in '04 but I think this will apply to all versions of trainz), I'm creating the downtown core of a large city. As you can suspect, performance takes a big hit there. I've read several threads on here about ways to maximize performance, both in terms of what I place (many similar objects as opposed to many different ones) and reducing the amount of poly heavy objects I place.

However, my frame rates are still taking a big hit. I know my comp isn't the latest but I'd like to make this route available to others so I want something that is more performance friendly and I haven't finished laying out all that I want to (plus I'm hoping to have several trainz/trams/etc...going at once so I know it's going to play heck with the frame rates...)

In this part, I've tried to eliminate anything that I would consider high poly and I think I will start to use less different objects and simply clone others to help. Still, I've come down to this question:

how to define high poly?

What I mean by this, is for someone running a medium-end machine, what would be considered *high poly*. I'm not sure Trainz Objectz counts poly's properly, but I see high numbers for some things and smaller numbers for others and am wondering what kind of *cut off* I should have in mind. I have one object (Montreal's olympic stadium) which is 3200 poly's according to T.O. and I am thinking that that is too heavy for a building in a downtown core (even if it takes up the space of several buildings). I am wondering from other route builders how they go about placing objects in dense areas and what limits they self-impose on themselves in that regard.

In the end, I want to create a good looking city, but it will be useless if no one can drive in it without having to pause every second for the computer to catch up...

Constructive input is always appreciated!

:wave:

Gisa ^^
 
For starters, you could try looking in Auran's Content Creation Guide. On page 347 of the CCG2006 (a pdf file) there is a great discussion of this topic, and a list of "Max Polycounts" for different types of assets. That way, you will at least know the guidelines Auran suggests for individual models.

If you haven't seen it already, be sure to check it out.
 
Hmm...I've heard this CCG mentioned in other threads, but as I stated, I'm building this route in 04. I looked in my folders for it and on the forums without success, but I did find and download the CCG for 06. I guess the same principles would apply right? If there is a CCG for '04, could someone point me towards the right direction to find it? :D

I will try to avoid assets with more than texture file in that case then John. :)

:wave:

Gisa ^^
 
The earlier edition of the Content Creation Guide that I am aware of is the Ultimate Trainz version from 2003... I don't know if it mentions Poly Count issues.

It seems to me that the discussion and guidelines in the 2006 edition of the CCG that relate to Poly Counts are very applicable to version 2004 as well, but I'm not an expert.
 
I recently did a "downtown" scenery. Rather than describe it in words . . .



I'm on a middle-of-the-road computer myself. I bought it from a friend who told me it has 2GB of Ram in it. I too started taking heavy hits on FPS.

But . . . I noticed very heavy disk accessing. Usually that means "virtual-memory" . . . computer starts to use the HD as memory space. HD access is snails pace compared to RAM access. So I checked . . . I only had 1GB of RAM instead of 2GB. I installed 2 more GB of Ram. My FPS in the above scenery is around 13 FPS AFTER additional RAM install. BUT the HD access light hardly goes on . . . except when moving great distance quickly.

So check your HD access light. If its coming on a lot . . . you might need to add more RAM.
 
edion2 said:


I'm on a middle-of-the-road computer myself. I bought it from a friend who told me it has 2GB of Ram in it. I too started taking heavy hits on FPS...
Click to expand...

I have aboout 760MB. It was above average a couple of years ago, now it's not even in contention for middle-of-the-road.
Splines are a big killer. If you avoid splines completely, you won't have track or roads, so you can't help using them, but you can cut back considerably.
First, check the rails themselves. Some are really hard on framerates. Run a couple more lines in an open space and see what it does to frame rates.
Second is roads. If you aren't going too close to an area, you might consider drawing the roads in with a texture instead of a spline. Intersections are also killers. A road set with and without sidewalks can be used to make your own intersections.
Fences and spline foliage can be used carefully, but if it gets too bad, replace the foliage with fixed trees. And only a very few clumps of grass. They have better lawn mowers in town.
I sympathize with your quest for framerate. I'm badly prone to overdoing scenery myself. Good luck!

:cool: Claude
 
Thank you all for your input!

I had time to read the 06 CCG which did not state any specific refence in terms of poly's and scenic objects (although I couldn't agree more with the stress on choosing items with a lower amount of polys: in my city I have a lot of buildings made by Ish which look great from a distance and are roughly 100-300 a piece).

I would like to make this mini route/module (I'm not even sure what it's going to be as I think it's too big to finish) a dense, but perfomance friendly city. I'm not even sure if it's possible with lower/mid range computers but I've yet to find a route that fulfills this category (and most likely for good reason). I was really disappointed with the harlem route for that reason and even Modula city felt somewhat *plagued* by emptiness :hehe:

I do plan on upgrading my comp sometime during the year but I think I'd like to wait until they smooth out Vista a bit, the cost of a video card goes down and dual core processors come down a bit. The irony is that I'm basically content with all the other games I run (older classics :D ) but trainz is the one that makes me want to upgrade (which is why I put if off probably). By next year, it'll be time anyhow (I read somewhere the average computer user upgrades their computer every 2 years).

Back on topic...I'm using the fantastic lp-track and am trying to cut corners wherever I reasonably can but the problem I think is that a few items which I really don't want to sacrifice are going to have to be sacrificed (I.E. in my case, the olympic stadium).

I suppose any scenic object with animations is also a frame-rate killer...I have several escalators that are running in the station I suspect those aren't worth their weight in polys. :D

:wave:

Gisa ^^
 
I've come across this site which I can't remember offhand which offers cityscape assets that look a little like the buildings in edion2's screenies. these are extremely low poly, based on New York and another city, and are meant to be used in variety to make them look realistic. They even light up very nicely at night! I'll try finding the link and post back soon.

ps. edion2, that's a real cool route you got there, planning to upload? :)
 
My mistake, I did not notice that they had subdivided scenic objects!

That means that the olympic stadium is just a tad too poly heavy at 3000 polys! :O

Looks like I will have to do some editing and rearranging on the weekend. :)

:wave:

Gisa ^^
 
Well, keep in mind that they are just recommendations. The number of objects, textures and the texture sizes also play a part (each additional texture file is said to have the hit of 200 additional polygons in Trainz; hence John's recommendation to use objects with only one texture file). Several high-poly objects may give better performance than many low-poly objects.
What really matters it the total number of polygons, number of textures, and size of textures in a scene. We don't have any guidelines on that, and even that would vary dramatically depending on the user's hardware.
 
nicky9499,

I haven't thought about making my route available, but its a possibility when its completed . . . in a year or so. But portions of it might be ok. My concern is that most people are not willing to live with frame rates that I consider acceptable. My route will require a "higher capacity than average" computer. So it may not be suitable for upload . . . we'll see.

Like gisa, I dislike "emptiness". "As realistic as possible" is what I prefer . . . even at the cost of frame rates. By the time I'm "finished" with my route, I'm hoping that an "average" computer will have the power of "high end" computers of today . . . we all know how quickly computer capability grows from year to year.

In a couple of weeks I'll be adding an 8800 series nVidia card with 768MB video RAM with hope of upping my frame rate to about 18 to 20 FPS. I have many images of my route on Image Shack. I'm new to Image Shack but the I think after you click on the thumbnail, there is link above the image to the rest of my uploaded images of my route. I think you can view all of them. . . If you're interested.

This Christmas or for my next birthday . . . I see a new gaming computer for about a $1000 . . . and I can still use my nVidia card.

Just an opinion, but, I've done many hobbies in the past from photography, RC planes, RC boats, Ho scale trains . . . oh yeah, and women . . . THEY ALL COST A LOT MORE money than Trainz. So far Trainz has proven to be the least expensive. Lot cheaper than playing golf. . . . I just spent $400 on a new "driver" !!

So far, I haven't worry much about "poly counts" . . . I used whatever "looked best". But I do have to agree with "grass" usage . . . they look great but so easy to "over do". I use them in tracking camera locations, but not everywhere. . . at least not until computer power increases.

Most of the building I use was created by dmdrake. His stuff is lo-poly and uses photographic images as texture so they make great realistic fillers of "emptiness". BUT . . . they may not look right in a scenery like the "City & Country" route, which is a built-in route for 2006. I love his stuff for my route. Do a search with keyword "dmdrake" in ID or description on DLS.
 
I too am a fan of mr. drake's work as well, especially his splines. I'm still getting the hang of placing them but I also have to agree with you that some scenes or areas require more detailed objects (I.E. a skyline or a streetcorner frequented by buses/streetcars). I would be more willing to sacrifice a degree of realism for an increase in performance but only to a certain extent. The good news is that computers are getting faster although that just means that things will start to become even more detailed and require even more power. Still, if we were to use 04 or 06, etc...in about 10 years, we'd be smooth sailing! :D

I also considered that one high poly object which is large could in theory be the equivalent of several low poly objects in one area (in my case, the stadium is about 2 city blocks or at least 4-6 large towers). I thought it would be weird to have huge skyscrapers and then a huge gap where the station is (it's a through station) so I went with that. I'll do some tweaking this weekend to see what I can do.

Interesting input nevertheless. :) Thanks guys!

:wave:

Gisa ^^
 
Hello people, I'm back with the link.

http://forums.auran.com/trainz/showthread.php?p=205983

I haven't tried them yet, but they look really nice, and considering they're splines, framerates shouldn't suffer too much as a few splines should create a fairly reasonable town.

I've just perfected my route (The Time Before Maglev) which is basically a representation of what the built-in Maglev route in 06 would have been before it's arrival. All the tracklaying is complete and all neccesary signalling finished. I've yet to test out AI as my computer simply cannot handle the amount of AI trains (as the route now looks more like a screenshot slideshow than a game) so until I get a new mobo and processor...

The number of AI trains can also seriously affect framerates as the comouter has to spend more processing power to calculate where the trains go and what they do, in my case my pc can only support up to a maximum of 10 trains before a noticeable lag in graphics. This is on a P4, 2 gigabytes of ram and a GeForce 6600, so take note people. :)
 
edion2 said:
I recently did a "downtown" scenery. Rather than describe it in words . . .



I'm on a middle-of-the-road computer myself. I bought it from a friend who told me it has 2GB of Ram in it. I too started taking heavy hits on FPS.

But . . . I noticed very heavy disk accessing. Usually that means "virtual-memory" . . . computer starts to use the HD as memory space. HD access is snails pace compared to RAM access. So I checked . . . I only had 1GB of RAM instead of 2GB. I installed 2 more GB of Ram. My FPS in the above scenery is around 13 FPS AFTER additional RAM install. BUT the HD access light hardly goes on . . . except when moving great distance quickly.

So check your HD access light. If its coming on a lot . . . you might need to add more RAM.
Click to expand...

Cool route, planning on uploading it?

Sorry for the misunderstanding Gisa, but I'm always open to all good stuff :)
 
You might be better starting a new thread about this over in the "Content Creation Support" section.

Cheers (Prost)
 
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