Trainz on what I thought was a pretty good system...

D

dan0h

New member
Just moving over (maybe) from Railworks 2, installed TS2010:EE today, and got through the tutorials, which all ran beautifully (save for the painfully slow texture update when changing views) with everything set to "give-me-all-the-eye-candy" mode, so with the tutoring done I figured I'd try a route, I went to the first route on the list (an american mountain pass, really great scenery), but the frame rate is wildly up and down from one moment to the next - I can be in the cab with 50+ FPS one moment, jump to the exterior cam and have to wait 20 seconds for the textures to come up to full res, then have to endure another 10 seconds or so of stall before it starts moving again...

Reading around a little it seems as though Trainz is a fickle kind of creature, but surely this isn't right?

Here is my PC spec, which runs everything else I can throw at it, at full bore.

AMD Phenom II 965 Black @ 3,880 Mhz
8GB DDR2
MSI Nvidia 480GTX M2D15 (1.5Gb)
Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit

I've tried a few tweaks (OGL/DX trainzconfig options etc), but wanted to see if there are known issues with the Phenom/Nvidia/Anything that might be the problem...

Thanks :)
 
Welcome to trainz, and yes it is a strange beast that will test your system. Should run fine on yours but try a few adjustments.
Run trainz at your screens default resolution. When in driver open the main menu (top left), options, video settings and drop the draw distance.
 
Fran, thank you for your reply, I omitted that I am running at 1920x1080, which is the native resolution for my display, I've just tried again with the draw distance down at 3000, and with the textures and details set at "Normal", and I'm still getting these bizarre pauses when changing views, along with the big delay in switching back to hi-res textures.

I should also mention I am on the latest NVidia drivers (266.58)

Will have a little more of a play around and see if I can improve things :)
 
Thanks for the speedy replies!

Mike : The route does indeed appear to have ALL of the trees in the known universe (its beautiful!), and 2+2 have just clicked ... it must be the speedtree algorithm at work. I will try another route in a moment and report back :) If that is the issue, can I get rid of Speedtree!?

Fran : Its the latest build (44088) that I could find, without wanting to go beta.

Hopefully its just that route thats the killer, as I'm definitely loving TS so far, it feels "better" than RS2 for sure.
 
Dont go beta unless you want to try multiplayer, apparently you lose compatibility mode.
 
Dan, the frame rate should get better as you play it, as the game will keep the most used assets in a state of permanent memory for faster loading so the more you play it, the better it becomes. But it has to learn the route first.
 
Thanks for your replies everyone, I've played around with the settings and no amount of detail reducing makes any difference, its purely down to the way the game handles the assets by the looks of things.

I was feeling quite disheartened by the whole thing last night, but this morning I've just had my first experience of the Surveyor ... and created a usable and interesting route with various industries in a matter of minutes - versus hours for RS2, so while neither game is perfect, TS definitely has a major edge when it comes to user content creation.

I'll persevere with things and see if it keeps me hooked - loving the power of Surveyor that's for sure. Hopefully Auran can come up with another patch to perk up performance and memory handling. A dedicated 64-bit version would be nice! :D
 
I find when I build systems for trainzers I get performance like you .
I change to DX then back to open gl that reatart and change back to dx and it's all good after that.... hope that helps....
I guess you have found the star in the menu if you untick that you will find routes for slower systems. Not saying yours is. And I hope my trick helps
 
winjmoore : Interesting tip, I will give that a go and see if it makes any improvement, its just that one route by the seems of it, most other places its pretty good. Its just not as sprightly as I'd have expected, being as I can't really slow this machine down with any other game, even Arma2 (which is well known for being a system hog) runs beautifully. Railworks 2 (other than the known rubber-band effect from time to time) is 60+ FPS everywhere, at all times. I've never seen it slow yet.

Beattie : Its all very weird, and I have to say for me the fact it runs so well on your hardware, yet not so, on a machine that by the numbers is probably 300-500% faster in terms of raw grunt, suggests to me TS is either very poorly optimized (if at all), or nothing like as happy with Windows 7 as it would first appear. Glad you still get use from it though - can't go wrong with a trusty ol' Dell.

On a final note, and making me lean a little more towards the (how can I put this), "poorly optimized" side of things, the patching process is unbelievable, I've not seen a game take that long to patch in my entire life...

But as I said above, on the positive side, its a far better game than RW2 for me, and the Surveyor is just awesome, so much more intuitive to use, and the results just come thick and fast - great work on that aspect by the devs, just a little more needed in terms of actually utilizing all the nice modern PC hardware and OS.
 
dan0h said:
suggests to me TS is either very poorly optimized (if at all), or nothing like as happy with Windows 7 as it would first appear. Glad you still get use from it though - can't go wrong with a trusty ol' Dell.

On a final note, and making me lean a little more towards the (how can I put this), "poorly optimized" side of things, the patching process is unbelievable, I've not seen a game take that long to patch in my entire life...

But as I said above, on the positive side, its a far better game than RW2 for me, and the Surveyor is just awesome, so much more intuitive to use, and the results just come thick and fast - great work on that aspect by the devs, just a little more needed in terms of actually utilizing all the nice modern PC hardware and OS.
Click to expand...

One cause of poor performance is bad splines and assets that don't work well with the newer versions of Trainz, usually track or fences roads walls that sort of thing, If it's just the one route that's being awkward use the developer settings to show performance stats and look for worst buffer count in Surveyor, it gives you the worst kuid, anything IMO over 100 is bad anything way over 200 will slow things right down. The trick is to replace the items or fix them by adding the line uncached_alphas 1 in the config for that asset, improves things dramatically most times.

Also have a look at the Nvidia Control panel, it has settings for Trainz 2004 however they are what the card is using for all versions upwards, changing the settings can make a big difference.

Make sure that you have it set for single display performance mode.
Have a play with the other settings as they tend to vary from card to card.
DirectX seems to be far better than OpenGL with the newer cards


I'm using a 6 core Phenom 2, 8GB of DDR3 a 1GB DDR5 GTS250 and Win7 64 bit and I can assure you it is anything but slow.

Other things to check is your AV, if it's scanning on access, that can slow Trainz down when loading and sometimes during use and extend the time required for patching, repairing the database and updating the database, exclude Trainz from any scans.

The time taken to patch? Trainz is not like other games in that it has
a database which depending on how many assets are installed is very large with several thousand items all of which have to be updated, checked, catalogued or whatever the patch does. If it was the 600MB Patch that is bound to take a long time anyway. The more items you collect the longer patching or database repairs take, having a fast PC does help as well.
Some one was complaining a few weeks back that a database repair had taken 14 hours I think it was, he then went on to say he had 200GB of Assets................ Most have a lot less than that but you get the idea

Also make sure Trainz is run as Administrator, saves a lot of grief later when Windows blocks the write access in Program Files, or better still put it in it's own folder.
 
There are some tweaks you can make for trainz.exe in the Nvidia Control Panel, as apparently the default set when the program installs are not necessarily optimal.

See this thread for further details...

http://forums.auran.com/trainz/showthread.php?p=540131&highlight=Nvidia+settings#post540131

Not 100% guaranteed though, as once I filled a few tiles with fairly dense (non-Speed) trees on my latest route things still slowed to a crawl but that could well be down to the laptop HD dying. It's out of its misery now (and mine when TS2009 crashed after 20 minutes of work and I forgot to save) with the new one due in a couple of days.
 
Thank you all for further replies, I've just entered the settings from the linked thread and will do a further test now.

I am going to a new MB and Memory in a week or so, as this is a Phenom II on DDR2 memory, which I have never been happy about (I know, small gains in DDR3), so I am moving to a new MSI MB (AMD 870 Chipset, Currently Nvidia 720i chipset) and 8GB of Corsair DDR3. Not expecting huge leaps, but it might show up something.

Will keep you all posted :)
 
To add a little more information to this thread, I've now spent more time with Trainz and have a few more observations. I've now implemented the Nvidia settings for it, and have ensured that I am on the latest drivers for everything on my board (for its last two weeks of useful life before changing over to DDR3 based).

Today I spent a good hour or so, in the Surveyor, and there are distinct, 1-2 second pauses, where the entire editor freezes, and responds to no mouse clicks, this is also the big pause that screws up my frame rate in game, as most of the time its 60 fps (full refresh) everywhere, until these mysterious pauses occur, during that time it drops as low as 0.5-1 fps. Yes, stationary. After these pauses, it recovers and carries on for a pretty random amount of time, before occurring again. This happens also in Surveyor (as I mentioned above) even when there is a single baseboard, with no textures and no assets.

These pauses are not present anywhere else, in any other software on my system, it frequently sits for hours on end rendering in Blender and never has any hiccups, the machine is a dual loop liquid cooled box, with CPU and GPU on their own loops, with their own rads and reservoirs - my GTX 480 runs at a core temp of only 42c on full load, so its definitely not overheating, nor is the processor, as this has never topped 38c on full load. Its a very weird one thats for certain, though as I said in a previous post, I do have a bee in my bonnet about this motherboard now as its a rather ropey chipset (to be precise as I used the wrong name previously its an NForce 740a chipset (rebranded 720D)).

I have disabled AV and tried also, but no change of any kind. Very mysterious. Its present in both OGL and DX modes. I've also seen a few threads now with similar "pauses" in game, on systems that should breeze this game (i5 and i7 boxes). I do have a second box I could try it on, an E2180 Dual Core with an Nvidia 8800 Ultra, might give that a shot and see...
 
Here are some other things to look at, Dan regarding performance.

Turn off hard drive indexing. This will affect the performance considerably, and even worse is Windows Search, which comes in with MS Office 2007. This will bring the fastest system to its knees and make it run like an old '486 running Windows 95 with only 16MB of RAM. (just kidding, but you'll know what I mean!). Indexing is disabled by right-clicking on your hard drive, opening up the properties.., and turning of the search indexing option at the bottom (uncheck).

The Windows Search add-on from Office, needs to be disabled in the services. Look for Windows Search and stop it. Right click on the service, and choose disable for the start-up options. MS Outlook, if you use that, will give you a warning about not being able to search for something faster than normal, but who cares. I'd rather have faster hard drives than worry where an email or document went!

Defrag your hard drive. The hard drive that holds Trainz, has to handle lots of little bits and pieces of data as it loads in the route and plays back the route. If your drive is highly fragmented, this will defintely cause a performance issue. I recommend either JK Defrag (free) or Disk Keeper from Executive Software (not free). DK is a really great program that will alow you to also defrag your MFT and other system files in addition to your data.

I have personally found that Trainz runs a heck of a lot faster after a disk defrag, so even if you opt for the really free, built-in one, and not the two I mentioned above, you'll definitely see a nice performance gain after doing this.

Hope this helps.

John
 
Last edited:
Thanks for that tip about indexing John.

Just going through the drives on both the desktop and lappie to disable it.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Similar threads

I
Help with a new computer
Replies
18
Views
7K
jamiechi2
J
D
Trainz on Thinkpad?
Replies
3
Views
1K
DjHammers
D
Back
Top