Well, that was fun. I was happily building away copy/pasting trees, laying roads, cliffs and grass splines when I noticed movement on the route slowing down and becoming jerky. I ran a train over the new section and looked at the profiler, 2.8 FPS. A real slideshow. That kind of threw a spanner in the works. I loaded up the previous backup of the route and was getting 27 FPS on heavy scenery. Back to where I was working on the current version 3.1FPS on the same section. Hmmmmm. What was the cause?
I began by deleting the DG cliff splines as I thought these might be dropping performance, but no, 3.9FPS. Too many trees, lets cull 30% of them, 4.5 FPS. 2 layers of TurfFX recently added were deleted and made no difference. I then recalled laying 5 kms of a JVC grass spline, surely that can't be it. It's skinny and not very detailed - but what a performance hog!! I deleted the grass splines and instantly I was back up to 30 FPS. On the working copy, I did some performance tuning and removed the grass splines, DG cliffs on the Moss Vale branch and then swapped the speedtree gum group for a larger single tree and ran the profiler, 45 FPS in heavy scenery area and pegged at 60 FPS in blank areas. Much healthier.
Where are we up to?
The route now includes the section from Kiama to Bomaderry/Nowra. A bit more to do but the route wouldn't feel complete without it.
North section
South section
I've really only just started on this section, but it will see some more buiding shortly
West section (Moss Vale branch)
This is probably the quickest area to build because of the lack of urban areas between Robertson and Unanderra.
Once the section to Summit Tank is complete, I'll be heading back to the Albion Park area to tidy up and extend.
cheers
Graeme