Umm...A powerstrip..??
okay, that might help
okay, I'm getting conflicting views here. The weird thing is my videocard runs Avery-Drexel fine, but send it into Modula City or any other massively populated area and the thing starts sharding like it's having a spastic fit. Now I'm beginning to wonder if i should reconsider the game being the culprit again. Anyway, I'll go with what's been given to me for now. thank you for all your help.
still confused, but slightly enlightened
Sawyer
With a conventional game the artist or content creator works to use a maximum number of polys per scene which takes into account the performance on a target machine be it console or PC.
Trainz doesn't work that way. It has a collection of assets which you put together. Good layout designers put their layouts together so for performance they use the same asset repeated, and they use assets that don't demand too much machine resources. They also use them to maximum effect.
Content creators with low end machines will normally create efficient assets, those with liquid cooled quads running 12 gigs of memory and dual graphics cards might not be so performance oriented.
Each asset used carries a 300 poly equivalent overhead for the mesh and 200 poly equivalent per texture file. So some passenger sets use one texture file for a dozen different passengers others use a hundred different texture files, no visible difference but performance wise you've just added 20,000 poly equivalents. I think the mesh for one passenger is doable in 400-500 polys so the extra texture files have a big impart here. The example is a little extreme but you can get an idea of the performance impact of different models can have. GMAX defaults to five sections for a column, and I think 18 sides, looks good but in Trainz if its a narrow tube one section will do fine and three sides with rounding. Difference visually nothing, performance impact roughly 2 polys per side times the number of sections so 6 polys for one and 180 polys for the other.
Now when you hit a city the number of buildings goes up. Each separate building has its overhead. If you are into UK scenery then I have a row of terrace housing which I think is 48 units long and uses a single texture. Some people think its big enough to warrant lod, its still a lot more efficient than 48 separate buildings and from the way its made there is a fair bit of variation in it.
In TS2010 the way splines are handled is different so items that ran well in earlier versions aren't so efficient in TS2010. Digging into the developer settings in surveyor can identify problem assets and your existing hardware might be enough if you switch them out. The other answer is to throw hardware at the problem. It depends a bit how much cash you have available.
You may have to end up doing a bit of both.
Cheerio John
