Railworks....not what i expected
- Thread starter mutanay77
- Start date
norfolksouthern37
what's a normal map?
priceless!
your two threads should be stickied.
your two threads should be stickied.
neither did railworks, msts and rail simulator, i think trainz is a fun a simple simulator...but with a lot of problems tooWhere have I heard that before? Oh yeah, every girlfriend I've ever had...
in the transfering of railworks to trainz lol, i made this nice K3LA horn
http://trainzproroutes.com/downloads/index.php?act=view&id=2055
http://trainzproroutes.com/downloads/index.php?act=view&id=2055
Yes, I came to Trainz while using MSTS. I made a few activities for the latter and grew frustrated with the process. Not that it was so difficult, but repeating the same steps time after time became rather laborious. The sessions in Trainz can reach the same level if you are building a session for release to the general user, but the process is easier.
My experience was "WOW!"
Got rail simulator in October 2007 shortly after it came out, better graphics than MSTS and at the same time runs smoother, has an easier, more versatile, and more stable route editor that wasn't hard to figure out. Scenario editor was a different story, a clumsy Rube Goldberg contraption, and you could only do free roam scenarios since the subroutines for AI traffic creation didn't ship with the game - that was promised for a couple months later. When that arrived I downloaded, installed, and said "Put this back, it ain't DONE yet!"
http://www.trainsim.com/vbts/showthread.php?268384-Artificial-Ignorance
AI trains got confused and went into "creeping mode" at half a mile per hour if the player threw one of the switches on its path - even if it wasn't scheduled to actually start running that path for two hours, you change the switch and change it back again, the AI has a meltdown.
Okay, so here's "Upgrade" (patch) mark 1, they "fixed" it - by locking every single switch on the entire AI path against player changes. Even that didn't work, with the player unable to change the switches the AI found other reasons to get confused and go into creeping mode.
Upgrade mark 2, then Railworks (could be considered a payware patch for railsim), assorted patches for railworks, a new timetable editor in the scenario editor, rather than ripping the guts out and starting over they kept "enhancing" it to try to cure some of the AI instability, last time I checked the switches are still locked against player changes and setting up any kind of crossing paths are like trying to build a house of cards in a hurricane.
I'm not a fanboy one way or the other, I call 'em as I see 'em - Trainz TS2010 recently handed me a huge disappointment.
Downtown with the visibility set to 1000, 35FPS.
Downtown with the visibility set to 1000, framerates cut in HALF?! What's the difference? Three freight yards - in the first session the L train is the only one on the route, the second session there are 10 freight trains in each yard, about 20 cars in each train, so 30 additional trains with about 600 freight cars.
Both MSTS and railsim/railworks got a pretty big framerate hit when approaching a big yard full of freight cars, as soon as you approached within 2000 meters or so of the yard you got stuttering and a drop in FPS. That's to be expected, lot more stuff to process.
But in this case, the visibility is set to 1000 meters, and the nearest yard is TWELVE MILES AWAY! Apparently TS2010 loads and continually processes every single car on the entire route regardless of how far away it is - that's SERIOUSLY sloppy programming. :n:
Got rail simulator in October 2007 shortly after it came out, better graphics than MSTS and at the same time runs smoother, has an easier, more versatile, and more stable route editor that wasn't hard to figure out. Scenario editor was a different story, a clumsy Rube Goldberg contraption, and you could only do free roam scenarios since the subroutines for AI traffic creation didn't ship with the game - that was promised for a couple months later. When that arrived I downloaded, installed, and said "Put this back, it ain't DONE yet!"
http://www.trainsim.com/vbts/showthread.php?268384-Artificial-Ignorance
AI trains got confused and went into "creeping mode" at half a mile per hour if the player threw one of the switches on its path - even if it wasn't scheduled to actually start running that path for two hours, you change the switch and change it back again, the AI has a meltdown.
Okay, so here's "Upgrade" (patch) mark 1, they "fixed" it - by locking every single switch on the entire AI path against player changes. Even that didn't work, with the player unable to change the switches the AI found other reasons to get confused and go into creeping mode.
Upgrade mark 2, then Railworks (could be considered a payware patch for railsim), assorted patches for railworks, a new timetable editor in the scenario editor, rather than ripping the guts out and starting over they kept "enhancing" it to try to cure some of the AI instability, last time I checked the switches are still locked against player changes and setting up any kind of crossing paths are like trying to build a house of cards in a hurricane.
I'm not a fanboy one way or the other, I call 'em as I see 'em - Trainz TS2010 recently handed me a huge disappointment.
Downtown with the visibility set to 1000, 35FPS.
Downtown with the visibility set to 1000, framerates cut in HALF?! What's the difference? Three freight yards - in the first session the L train is the only one on the route, the second session there are 10 freight trains in each yard, about 20 cars in each train, so 30 additional trains with about 600 freight cars.
Both MSTS and railsim/railworks got a pretty big framerate hit when approaching a big yard full of freight cars, as soon as you approached within 2000 meters or so of the yard you got stuttering and a drop in FPS. That's to be expected, lot more stuff to process.
But in this case, the visibility is set to 1000 meters, and the nearest yard is TWELVE MILES AWAY! Apparently TS2010 loads and continually processes every single car on the entire route regardless of how far away it is - that's SERIOUSLY sloppy programming. :n:
I'm not so sure that that is really so sloppy. Since any train could come within viewing distance at any time, it stands to reason that the game needs to keep track of where they all are and what they are doing, even if they are 19.312 km (twelve miles) away. It's not like the static scenery which only has to be rendered when it is within range.
Same here, just like that! :wave:
Ishie
ps. ED, if you don't mind and have 1 sec please PM your favority colors, etc ...
Well I am sure you are going to write develop and market one that kicks trainz to the curb right?
Since you know all about coding and programming it should be a cinch...
I know enough about it to know you don't have the system uselessly executing instructions that are not needed here and now at the expense of instructions that are needed here and now. I'm not a musician either, but I know good music when I hear it, I know bad music when I hear it.
"Since any train could come within viewing distance at any time, it stands to reason that the game needs to keep track of where they all are and what they are doing"
Not when they're just sitting in a yard with no AI instructions, the player train is facing away from them and sitting still, and the system doesn't have enough resources left over to efficiently render what's actually in range of the camera viewpoint. Again, railworks and MSTS don't have this problem. Railworks couldn't handle the kind of AI traffic I need, but it doesn't choke on a measly 600 train cars just sitting in yards when they're nowhere near the camera viewpoint.
To even capture the flavor of the kind of route I'm building I need at least a dozen 20 car AI freight trains. a dozen six car L trains, and half a dozen six car commuters all running at the same time, with at least 1000 loose consist cars sitting in yards and industry spurs around the route. If Trainz can't process all that efficiently then it's exactly what the detractors have been calling it all along, a model railway simulator. Inefficient use of system resources = sloppy programming.
"Since any train could come within viewing distance at any time, it stands to reason that the game needs to keep track of where they all are and what they are doing"
Not when they're just sitting in a yard with no AI instructions, the player train is facing away from them and sitting still, and the system doesn't have enough resources left over to efficiently render what's actually in range of the camera viewpoint. Again, railworks and MSTS don't have this problem. Railworks couldn't handle the kind of AI traffic I need, but it doesn't choke on a measly 600 train cars just sitting in yards when they're nowhere near the camera viewpoint.
To even capture the flavor of the kind of route I'm building I need at least a dozen 20 car AI freight trains. a dozen six car L trains, and half a dozen six car commuters all running at the same time, with at least 1000 loose consist cars sitting in yards and industry spurs around the route. If Trainz can't process all that efficiently then it's exactly what the detractors have been calling it all along, a model railway simulator. Inefficient use of system resources = sloppy programming.
No instructions now but what if one of the AI engines has to couple with and move a whole lot of those loose cars somewhere else. Trainz has to know where they all are. Now I don't know how the code was written but if a car in not powered and the hand brake is set, then it could be assumed to not move until an engine couples with it. So Trainz would just need to maintain a table of the locations of each and every car, their coupler locations and probably some other characteristics.
I've made maps with over a dozen AI trains all moving around and Trainz didn't choke. Considering all the other realtime calculations it has to do, it's pretty amazing that a simple PC can do it at all. At some point you WILL overwhelm the your computer system. Add in all those loose cars and you say sloppy! I think you may have exceeded your hardware's capacity.
Perhaps a small Cray
Well, let's see if I can put my perspective into perspective.
Back in the 80s there were plenty of flight simulators, but no train simulators. So I attempted to make my own train simulator. First one was in BASIC code, which was all I knew how to do, went over like a lead balloon with getting the animation and smoke looking good, adding the control interface, then adding sound disabled the controls and fixing the controls screwed up the animation.
Second attempt was with an 80286 running at 16mhz with 640k of RAM - MSDOS with Windows 3.1, I bought Visual Basic for Windows and created a whole bunch of bitmap images - the new train simulator flipped through all the BMP files and loaded them one after another to create the illusion of movement. Sloppy. Pretty awful program, gave up on it.
About five years later I had an 80486, 66mhz, 4 megs of RAM, and stumbled across a floppy disk that had that old VB trainsim on it. Loaded it up to see what it looked like, ran smooth as silk.
Does that mean my sloppy coding is now efficient? Same old cartoon "flipbook" style display, only difference is the 486 running four times as fast with six times the RAM overpowered the inefficient method of displaying the animation.
Same thing here, just because you can overpower sloppy code with bigger faster horsepower machines doesn't mean it's a good idea to say "anything goes" and crank out inefficient bloatware.
Back in the 80s there were plenty of flight simulators, but no train simulators. So I attempted to make my own train simulator. First one was in BASIC code, which was all I knew how to do, went over like a lead balloon with getting the animation and smoke looking good, adding the control interface, then adding sound disabled the controls and fixing the controls screwed up the animation.
Second attempt was with an 80286 running at 16mhz with 640k of RAM - MSDOS with Windows 3.1, I bought Visual Basic for Windows and created a whole bunch of bitmap images - the new train simulator flipped through all the BMP files and loaded them one after another to create the illusion of movement. Sloppy. Pretty awful program, gave up on it.
About five years later I had an 80486, 66mhz, 4 megs of RAM, and stumbled across a floppy disk that had that old VB trainsim on it. Loaded it up to see what it looked like, ran smooth as silk.
Does that mean my sloppy coding is now efficient? Same old cartoon "flipbook" style display, only difference is the 486 running four times as fast with six times the RAM overpowered the inefficient method of displaying the animation.
Same thing here, just because you can overpower sloppy code with bigger faster horsepower machines doesn't mean it's a good idea to say "anything goes" and crank out inefficient bloatware.
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I was going to say something similar. I think too that program needs to track the location of all rolling stock, particularly if it is industry enabled. There are pieces of code associated with each and every animated object, locomotive, crossing, and industry enabled freight and passenger cars.
So if you think about it, the program is constantly polling these objects so the threads can be handled and processed if needed. Take a look at the jetlog.txt file. You'll see the references in there to the different objects.
Having a faster processor with better thread handling done in the program as well as in the operating system does help substantially. The faster processor can push the information along through the queues better than a single processor queue could before. Now add in a faster bus speeds and more faster memory, and the results are better.
With more than one core running, there is less of a backlog as the CPU doesn't get bogged down by the constant thread hits. TS12 seems to handle this barrage of threads a lot better than the earlier versions. I've noticed that the AI are more responsive, and get less goofy than they did in previous versions. I'm sure this has a lot to do with better code, but I'm sure the multithreading in the processor does help quite a bit.
I'm not sure how many cores the program uses now, but I do know my CPU no longer sits at 100% all the time with this program like it did with TRS2004 and TRS2006.
John
Well ya know there is always your favorite RailWorks...
It just seems to me you are really unhappy. I have yet to see a post from you with anything positive to say about Auran/N3V or TS12, not a single one.
If you are really that unhappy why continue? I think maybe you need to give creating another transim a try and when you fail and come back maybe you will appreciate the trainz dev team and franchise just a bit more than you do now.
If it has faults sweeping the faults under the prayer books and pretending they don't exist is Pollyanna nonsense.
I can't make this more clear - it is loading and processing data that it does not need YET at the expense of data that it needs to load and process NOW. Any kind of simulator, flight, train, submarine, has various things it eventually might need to load and process, with subroutines designed to track what needs to be tracked in the background with minimal resources. There is always a "sphere of influence" around the player's current position that takes priority over other things that are further away. If this isn't designed into Trainz, then the design is flawed.
I can't make this more clear - it is loading and processing data that it does not need YET at the expense of data that it needs to load and process NOW. Any kind of simulator, flight, train, submarine, has various things it eventually might need to load and process, with subroutines designed to track what needs to be tracked in the background with minimal resources. There is always a "sphere of influence" around the player's current position that takes priority over other things that are further away. If this isn't designed into Trainz, then the design is flawed.
Just click your heels 3 times and repeat after me, “There's No Game Like Trainz”, “There's No Game Like Trainz”, “There's No Game Like Trainz”, lol.
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I have the perception that most Trainzers here know what they like and know video simulators. Everyone is free to choose whether it be two or one. That having been said, ain't freedom great? Happy 4th to all those in the States, and a happy day for all others wherever you live.
Cheers
AJ
Cheers
AJ