Graphic's engine

I do not know if you are aware War gaming, World of Tanks Just released a new graphic engine Encore. It looks like real life, it is so amazing people stop in game to look at the scenery. I do not know about the company that developed it but might be interesting to look at for this game. It is so good you drive a tank thru the water and the tank gets wet. Drive thru the mud and it splashes on the tank. and I can go on....

New Dagor 5.0 graphic engine of War Thunder released in February also has excellent results. For tanks as well as for the aircrafts, ships and soon for submarines or helicopters. This game is one of few which I compare others to as for the graphical capabilities. It is great.

I know absolutely nothing about these games but if a 3rd party graphics engine is going to succeed as a possible "Trainz Engine" (no pun intended) then it must have at least the same "sandbox" capability as the current TANE graphics engine. It must allow users to create their own landscapes, add their own scenery items, set their own weather conditions, time of day and year, water features, etc, etc. If they cannot do that then they may be very pretty eye candy but they cannot be a practical replacement for what we have now. I can live with surfaces that do not have water droplets when it rains or dirt when it is muddy, but I cannot live with a graphics engine that will not let me build worlds the way that I want them.

pware said:

I know absolutely nothing about these games but if a 3rd party graphics engine is going to succeed as a possible "Trainz Engine" (no pun intended) then it must have at least the same "sandbox" capability as the current TANE graphics engine.

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The features you refer to are not the responsibility of the graphics engine. The engine is responsible for rendering the graphics objects presented to it. It isn't concerned with how these objects were created or how they got placed in the scene or how they move in the scene. 'Eye candy' is what the graphics engine does. It has to support the rendering features that the game designers need, and it has to do it quickly. But how those features are prepared, configured and manipulated in game is the responsibility of the game play, not the graphics engine.

Thank you for that explanation SailorDan. I was always under the impression that the graphics card and its drivers performed the task of rending the scene and that the game graphics engine provided the environment, Driver and Surveyor in Trainz, that supplied the data to the graphics card and drivers.

I just ran a search on the Dagor 5.0 graphics engine. The engine is produced by Gaijin Entertainment for its own video games as it's a proprietary technology, so its possible use in Trainz as a replacement for the current graphics engine is not an option at present. The game engine used in DTGs Railworks (Unreal Engine) is also a proprietary technology from Epic Games.

pware said:

I just ran a search on the Dagor 5.0 graphics engine. The engine is produced by Gaijin Entertainment for its own video games as it's a proprietary technology, so its possible use in Trainz as a replacement for the current graphics engine is not an option at present. The game engine used in DTGs Railworks (Unreal Engine) is also a proprietary technology from Epic Games.

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Hence why RailWorks doesn't have a lot of the capabilities of Trainz......we have a custom engine built from the ground up which replaced the very jaded Jet engine. Yes it has teething problems and other issues.....but in it's current latest beta form which is with us testers......it's the best yet.

For those of us on the Dev testing team....TS2018 as it is called internally is a large leap in what this custom game engine can do.

As for the op's question....none of those graphic engines can do what ours does....ours has to be able to render 1,000's of baseboards, know where every consist is, what that consist is carrying, and AI that does a lot of hidden things, industries of all types which need to be tracked, a complete world to render and then provide reasonable frame rates on a wide variety of hardware. IMHO....N3V has done a pretty good job so far....still room for improvement but none the less.....pretty good so far.

I have to wonder what would be possible on something like Eagle Dynamics' EDGE engine (used in DCS 2.5 sim). It has some parallels, like tracking a large amount of player-controlled as well as AI assets, payloads, an overview of all dynamic assets for AWACS (which would be a dispatcher in Trainz), phenomenal multiplayer position tracking (you can fly 5 feet from a guy in formation at 700mph!), and advanced physics modeling for all aircraft, as well as good 3rd party integration via their "modules" system (which is how it handles 3rd party aircraft and scenario add-ons). That said, I'm also very eager to see what the Trainz engine has in store, because the dev teasers look very nice to me. :udrool:

pware said:

I just ran a search on the Dagor 5.0 graphics engine. The engine is produced by Gaijin Entertainment for its own video games as it's a proprietary technology, so its possible use in Trainz as a replacement for the current graphics engine is not an option at present. The game engine used in DTGs Railworks (Unreal Engine) is also a proprietary technology from Epic Games.

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I am just comparing graphical output and my impressions from that, nothing else. I can eventually place some screens from Dagor engine here to compare results. There is nothing other important for player (customer) than results.

gawpo50 said:

...
For those of us on the Dev testing team....TS2018 as it is called internally is a large leap in what this custom game engine can do.
...
As for the op's question....none of those graphic engines can do what ours does....ours has to be able to render 1,000's of baseboards, know where every consist is, what that consist is carrying, and AI that does a lot of hidden things, industries of all types which need to be tracked, a complete world to render and then provide reasonable frame rates on a wide variety of hardware. IMHO....N3V has done a pretty good job so far....still room for improvement but none the less.....pretty good so far.

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Where did I see such statements already? Maybe here on forum? Repeatedly 2, 4, 6, 10 years ago? BTW is Jet2.0 going to be capable of multiple light sources? I am desperate how TANE is displaying those all meshes which are trying more or less successfully (but only from TS12 down) to substitute lack of this capability.