Quarry Hunslet Kit - Anyone Interested?

[edh6]

Having got the rather excellent book Quarry Hunslets of North Wales by Cliff Thomas for Christmas, it struck me that it wouldn't be too difficult to make a quarry Hunslet kit for Trainz.
This would involve a mesh library containing a variety of different kinds of boiler, frames, cab etc. which could then be made selectable with superscript or similar (which could also allow a number of different liveries) so that a locomotive in Trainz can be set up to closely match one of the large number of locos built to similar, but not identical designs.
Initially, I think all but about 3 of the Dinorwic Hunslet locos (for anyone interested, the three exceptions are Jerry M, Cackler and Lady Madcap) could be covered by a single (at most 3) locomotive asset, which could also include the the Pen-yr-Orsedd locos (including Britomart)
(I haven't got to the Penrhyn chapters yet, but something similar can probably be achieved)

The questions are:

Would anyone actually be interested?
There is already a Penrhyn Large Quarry type available at ING4Trainz, and Trainboi1 has a generic one on the DLS. Are people happy to continue with these, or is their a call for more prototypical models?

What level of accuracy would be wanted?
If done as a single Dinorwic asset, it would be very easy to generate completely unprototypical combinations of features. Would this be welcomed (allowing more flexibility), or would more individual assets, giving greater limits to the possible combinations be better?

If I do decide to do this it won't be for a while, but if sufficient interest is generated, I will continue the planning phases to work out exactly how many different mesh elements would be required.

edh6

 

[alexl102]

I'm a huge fan of the Hunslet quarry locos. I'd be really interested in this- and the concept could probably be extended to other types of loco too. Sounds like an excellent plan. Not sure about the accuracy though- I don't mind unprototypical combinations but it'd be cool if there was some kind of guide to show how to make some of the prototypes.

 

[paulhobbs]

It would be a nightmare to do this in TS12 or under if you want proper shadows (you'd need an extra shadow file for each combination) and the texture baking would also be very tricky as you'd need an extra skin for each combination if you want baked shadows. In T2 where you might get away with block colours and letting the game engine generate the shadows it might work but then T2 doesn't exist yet. In any case adding extra sub meshes would be very inefficient.

The way to do this would be to create a separate body mesh for each mesh variation and each skin. You could then have one asset to place but you could then select which variation you want to have. Don't do texture swapping, that's also very inefficient.

Paul

 

[edh6]

You raise some good points about shadows, I hadn't considered them before.

Re texture swapping, I see this all the time on other models (including some by you) so I assumed it wouldn't be that bad performance wise.

However all this is rather academic seeing as only one person seems to be interested, therefore I won't bother to proceed, at least not in the foreseeable future.

 

[johnwhelan]

You raise some good points about shadows, I hadn't considered them before.

Re texture swapping, I see this all the time on other models (including some by you) so I assumed it wouldn't be that bad performance wise.

However all this is rather academic seeing as only one person seems to be interested, therefore I won't bother to proceed, at least not in the foreseeable future.

We found out about texture swapping performance impact in the TS2009 forums which are no longer available. More recent assets tend not to use texture swapping. Why not make one loco then create variations of it in Blender or whatever tool you are using?

Cheerio John

 

[clam1952]

Give them time Ed, I suspect there are a few NG enthusiasts who haven't read this thread yet.
Texture swapping as said isn't that resource friendly, I think its been said a couple of times by the N3V Dev's not to use unless absolutely necessary.
Consider perhaps mesh libraries?

A few years back whecsailor put an Alice class mesh up on an external download for people to edit butcher reskin or whatever, only stipulation was not to put on the DLS with kevmt's driver mesh which was included. It was however quite popular, although most of what was produced were just reskins of the original. The download has long since gone.
As an aside I think Steve from ING4Trainz was intending to do some of the Penryhn Quarry stuff.

 

[paulhobbs]

Re texture swapping, I see this all the time on other models (including some by you) so I assumed it wouldn't be that bad performance wise.

That's what I thought at the time due to lack of info from N3V on the best and most efficient way to build models (things are a bit better these days). The problem with texture swapping is that it always catches the game engine by surprise when the asset comes into view - it has to retrieve the texture (I believe from disk as it is not cached in RAM) and this causes a momentary stutter.

My latest loco, the SECR H Class (on the DLS) doesn't use any texture swapping.

Paul

 

[andi06]

The issues with texture-replacement are due to limitations in Jet. Chris is on record in one of the T2 threads that this is not likely to be an issue with the new engine.

Whether additional submeshes are more or less efficient than multiple whole body meshes is going to depend on the nature of the variations. If you have potentially 500 bodies but only two variations of chimney for instance it would be a no-brainer to handle the chimney as a submesh if it weren't for shadows. We don't really know how T2 will deal with shadows yet so the jury has to be out until we do.

 

[Dean_Forest]

I'm all for the idea, but perhaps it is worth waiting until there is more detail about T2, as this is where the most potential is.

 

[edh6]

It seems to me that waiting for T2 (or at least more information on what will be possible/efficient etc.) is the best thing to do at the moment. Once we have the necessary details, I can reassess my ideas and decide on the best solution. Until then though, I have plenty of other potential projects to keep me busy!