In laying down texture is there any down side to using the rotate tool in terms of screen reading speed? In other words if I have a layout using textures with no texture rotate applied and the same layout with texture rotate applied will I notice any significant difference in the performance of the route?
Thanks for any information on this.
Hi paul,
I don't remember who wrote that but whoever did it, he was very wise for having a performance map increase:
[FONT='Verdana','sans-serif']"There are however a couple of findings that may be of relevance to most route builders. Once again I point out that none of this is based on any technical analysis of the program or graphics engine, and none of it is new. It is based on my own observations on my machine and a heck of a lot of forum browsing and researching old threads. Also I use the single measurable parameter of “frame rate” as a measure of performance, a definition with which some may take issue.
OK, lets throw the cat amongst the pigeons.
Overall route size – the number of boards – is irrelevant to performance.
Overall content – the length of the kuid list– is irrelevant to performance.
Average content over any three consecutive boards is critical to performance. Trainz draws a maximum of two boards ahead of the camera – the board you are on, the entire next board, and at least a part of the next board ahead. This is the only content that matters. Either average your poly count across all three, or load one up and keep the others light, it doesn’t matter. Because I model rural landscape, I try to keep sequential boards in groups of three – lo/lo/hi – repeating. There is never more than one hi poly board loaded. How hi is hi? On my system not a lot, a small rural community, a couple of foreground farms, but even if I was building an urban setting on a dream machine, I would aim for that pattern. Trainz
appears to work best that way.
Rotate textures, but DON’T ‘spin’ them. In other words, don’t hold down the [ or ] key while applying. Move, rotate, apply – move, rotate, apply…. Firstly it looks better - ‘spun’ textures have a washed-out look. Secondly I am certain that a ‘spun’ texture takes more resources to draw than an un-spun texture - the same texture gets drawn in the same place more than once.
Splines are killers. Minimise splines. Some tracks are killers – mostly the really good looking ones [/FONT][FONT='Verdana','sans-serif'][/FONT][FONT='Verdana','sans-serif']. I took out every length of telephone line and fence which are not IMMEDIATELY apparent from the near-the-train exterior view I prefer for NO visual loss and a HUGE performance gain.
Detail is a killer. I LOVE detail, but the house across the river does not need a spline driveway, a fence, a utility supply or three kids playing in the yard. Maybe a parked car, but that’s it.
Drive from the cab (I HATE the cab view – how did MSTS do it??)
or a close-ish external view. But if its external DON’T rotate the camera all the time. Again, no tech knowkedge, but I am certain Trainz loads those three boards in the direction of camera view only. It doesn’t seem to load a ‘circle’ around the camera. Spin the camera, its gonna cache. Spin back, its gonna cache again."
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