Old forum track test not good for me

[StorkNest]

On the old foums there was a post about how someone took a single blank baseboard and, one at a time, would place lengths of track on it to see the affect on FPS through FRAPs. Since then, I changed to Game Recorder (uses less memory among other advantages) and changed the Anti-Aliasing and Anisotropic Filtering settings from "Let the program choose" to specific manually chosen performance settings.

Recently I tried the track test again and noted absolutly no difference between FPS no matter what track I used. I don't know if it is from using Game Recorder, changing video settings or both. Only other things I saw changed are any white text became a little harder to read and sometimes when I exit TRS2004 while using Game Recorder, when I get back to Windows, TRS2004.exe still runs in the background eating up huge amounts of memory.

Figured I would post this for anyone who knew about it.

 

[SuperFudd]

I could be that your Trainz is set up to limit the maximum amount of FPS. This is a good thing normally but it would make your test meaningless.
Before you ask, I don't know remember it is done, off the top of my head. I think it can be done 2 ways. One way is done in trainzoptions. text. The other in the settings. One will overide the other. I forget which.

 

[rweber95]

That was my test that I posted prior to the big forum crash. All it showed was that for my computer setup, some track meshes had hi poly counts and that I could detect the difference using FRAPS and the set up you described. Apparently, your new settings can handle hi poly counts much better than before. Lucky you. Have you noticed any improvements on slow maps such as Ironbound Industrial,<kuid2:106916:102086:1>, which for me is a KILLER?

Bob

 

[StorkNest]

II is still slow for just loading here too. However, I have noticed some things that will affect this and am looking to change them. In II, one thing is the large number of individual buildings that have to be loaded. I get similar slowdowns on the immediate southern portion of P&N Part 1 around Greenwood. If you do a test, you'll find an area that loads 10 of the same item will load faster than one that loads 10 different items. So if you want II to work, you have to find a way to change buildings.

Another is what the items are. For example, I had some slow speeds loading some routes like Eagle River Railway, Loblolly Cove Railroad and II. I found I had some of dmdrake's "Perfect" trees that these routes used but never noticed their description had a warning that they were high-poly for higher end comps. So I looked for the best replacements I could. Both Eagle River and Loblolly Cove now load much faster with the Perfect trees replaced. Ironbound is still slow but like I said, that's due to all the buildings. There might be high-poly or high-end buildings in there, I haven't looked at them yet.

I still have the list of what Perfect trees I replaced with others, there's 5 on Ironbound. Not all are exact matches in size or tree shape but I'll live with that for faster loads and I did keep them in similar types. And you can see these were used on CC&LE too.

Perfect_Alder-wint(10m) 33404:503751:2
subbed Red_Alder_leaf-off_15m 33404:502588:3
Cattaraugus Creek & Lake Erie
Ironbound Industrial

Perfect_American-Elm-wint-27(15m) 33404:504210:2
subbed American_Elm-27_leaf-off_20m 33404:500478:2
Cattaraugus Creek & Lake Erie
Ironbound Industrial

Perfect_American-Elm-wint-28(15m) 33404:504211:2
subbed American_Elm-28_leaf-off_25m 33404:500479:2
Cattaraugus Creek & Lake Erie
Ironbound Industrial

Perfect_English-Elm-wint(10m) 33404:503769:2
subbed English_elm_2_10m 33404:500109:2
Cattaraugus Creek & Lake Erie
Ironbound Industrial

Perfect_Wych-Elm-wint(10m) 33404:504183:2
subbed American_Elm-30_leaf-off_20m 33404:500481:2
Cattaraugus Creek & Lake Erie
Ironbound Industrial

 

[rweber95]

I can live with slow loading of a route but really hate it when the frame rate drops below 10. How do you find the poly counts of meshes?

Bob

 

[StorkNest]

Some are listed, such as the Perfect trees, some are not. Best way would be to contact the creator. Also some items simply say "high poly count" or "low poly count." As an example, some of the NZ Houses included in TRS2004 are default but I downloaded all the ones on DLS listed as "low poly" and always replace any in a route with the low poly ones. There are also average versions, like the default ones and high poly versions.

It is not just poly count, ther's also amount of textures to load. Take some locos for example, if it only needs to load 1-3 textures it will show up quite quickly when placed but more than that on low comps will slow load time. There's a few C36-7s on DLS but I can't run them because they have several textures each, even the bogeys are highly-textured. They are good engines, they just load slow and take up processor time so I don't run them.