Optimizing a Route (or ... what makes a slow asset?)

[Milaga]

I am putting the finishing touches on a route and I am noticing that at certain points there is a intense graphical slowdown. In one particular part it is a relatively free of objects but is much slower than other, more heavily cluttered areas. Cutting down rendering distance does nothing to speed this up, which leads me to believe that the problem isn't the number of assets I've placed but rather a few (or one) specific asset that is hogging resources.

How do I find out how resource an intensive a particular asset is?

When I'm in surveyor and I have the statistics displayed on the screen, what do those numbers mean? Can I use this to find the slowest asset?

What types of assets are the most resource intensive? Splines? Track? Animated high-poly objects? Large-sized baseboard textures?

There's no need to tell me to try deleting each asset in turn and see if it helps ... this route has 1500 dependencies!

I'm using Trainz 2009, so help specific to that version is welcome in addition to general route optimization tips. Right now I'm auditing all the assets in the route to weed out the faulty ones. Getting myself out of compatibility mode should help, but there's gotta be more.

Anyone have any tips? Thanks in advance!

 

[Bill69]

Hi Milaga,

In general hi-poly animated objects can slow the graphics down qiute a bit. Other than that, splines such as fences, power wires, telegraph wires etc. can also cause a hit on frame rates. Anything that has errors showing in CMP will also cause a hit on frame rates.

Cheers,
Bill69

 

[Dermmy]

To add to Bill's post, look for an asset common to all the 'slow' areas, that is probably the culprit. If there is nothing in common, post a screenie of the 'slow' areas. Most of the 'horror' assets are known to route builders and it could turn out to be something that appears quite innocuous...

Andy

 

[johnwhelan]

TS2009 has a way to identify the high impact items for route builders.

Look for assets with multiple texture files and curves.

Cheerio John

 

[Milaga]

Well I trimmed off a few hundred assets by replacing or replacing then deleting them. This left the only faulty assets the YARN intersections. Fortunately Maddy25 just put fixes for them into the DLS days ago, so I got myself out of comparability mode.

Now it flies, even through the troubled sections. Unfortunately, everything looks like utter garbage. I'm not sure if it's a driver issue or what. I have to use DirectX since OpenGL has some display issues on this Intel graphics adapter. I'll look elsewhere in the forums for help with that.

Thanks for the tips ... I'll get a few screenshots this evening of the troubled section.

 

[johnwhelan]

Well I trimmed off a few hundred assets by replacing or replacing then deleting them. This left the only faulty assets the YARN intersections. Fortunately Maddy25 just put fixes for them into the DLS days ago, so I got myself out of comparability mode.

Now it flies, even through the troubled sections. Unfortunately, everything looks like utter garbage. I'm not sure if it's a driver issue or what. I have to use DirectX since OpenGL has some display issues on this Intel graphics adapter. I'll look elsewhere in the forums for help with that.

Thanks for the tips ... I'll get a few screenshots this evening of the troubled section.

A repeated asset has a lower impact than a different asset but I imagine you know that anyway.

Cheerio John