How to improve the performance of a route?

I wanted to know once, what measures must be taken to improve the performance of a map? Sure, to replace the simple things like Speedtrees by normal are clear. But what should you look for when it comes to houses or other basic building. LOD is important, but how content with meshes affects performance. What is important to note? How do splines affect performance? Should these be avoided if possible? Most splines are mostly grass splines on a route, if I delete them and replace with grass objects then TANE pushes its limits because of too many objects on a baseboard. Does it make an increase if I use the same objects more often than a large variety? Say I have a row of houses from 10 houses and take now instead of 10 different buildings only 2 different. As a route builder you have to compromise, but somehow I think that there is not really an acceptable way.

Too much of anything besides using a low poly track track, and simple painted textures, may bring your PC to a crawl ... T:ANE is a great screenshot creator ... but actually running a route that as a million high poly assets may be impossible on a low end PC. Try to keep things to a minimum

What do you mean with simple textures? Just one grass for everything or did you mean the size in MB from the textures? "Keep things to minimum" is also very simple said. How far is minimum from the tracks away? Just the baseboard with the tracks or is it okay with one baseboard on every side? Here maybe things with LOD should very useful?

It's much better to use a few objects many times than many objects a few times.

Textures and SpeedTrees. The same applies. The best feature of SpeedTrees is that they make themselves into different sizes.

To see this in practice, try one of my more recent model Trainz layouts. You should see excellent frame rates.

Phil

Another resource eater is splined scenery, particularly grass or vegetation. If you're doing a UK route hard to avoid when laying out fields with walls or hedges but perhaps best to avoid laying strings of grass alongside the track. It's often more effective to place a scattering of normal grass clumps or small bushes if you want that much detail.

Consider whether what you're placing will be visible from the cab. We've all spent hours putting Pendon like detail into that village 1/2 mile from the track only to find all you see from the train is a church spire, plus a few roofs peeking through the trees. A few simple objects or even a cleverly positioned 2D backdrop could produce the same result. This is particularly so on a high speed main line where your train is eating up the scenery at a mile a minute or more.

One block item is more efficient than several smaller, for example at stations (in the case of a UK route) consider using the VSR range which include the platforms attached to the interactive track sections, thus saving use of separate splines.

In terms of distance either side of the track, generally anything beyond 2km I simply paint with a flat texture (the MTR ones or those by clam1952 are good) to represent distant scenery, unless there is a pressing reason to be otherwise. In a built up urban area you probably need to look at less, no more than (say) 3 blocks (in US terms) from the line before again thinking of using backdrops or similar to reduce the load.

In many ways you have to look at route building like a movie set, we are creating an illusion of a real scene which needs to look convincing from certain angles, not an intricate replication of a whole area.

Thanks for the reply's! I've test some of your suggestions and get a few FPS more now. First replace M: speedtrees with Aurans and then delete all grass splines. Will now try me on the houses, maybe I can get out of there a little. How meaningful is actually the performance indicator in the surveyor? It says for example "Worst buffer count - Kuid blah blah". Can you also use this function to increase the performance?