HD Terrain Discussion Thread

Very much liking the look of Trainz Living Railroad, sessions will never be the same again. Just another reason to keep the subscription active for all these game changing developments.

I really like the direction the Trainz is going. HD terrain will allow modelling the closest proximity of the tracks (the area which players see the most) with great detail. And Living Railroad may basically add more life with less complexity. I hope that it will be smart enough to understand the purpose of different tracks at the station (possibly with some guidance with surveyor markers), so that we won't eg. see AI trains shunting on the mainline instead of dedicated tracks or using passenger stations for freight operations (instead of the dedicated stations) just because they can

All in good time, we should see the scenario you've outlined.

The prototype will be much more basic. The current process is roughly:
- Industry B needs Commodity X
- Find an Industry that has X in "stock"
- Find a car that can carry X
- Find a loco
- Couple to the car
- Send it to pick up from A then deliver to B
- Return cars to where they started

My thoughts on reading the new documentation carefully which I suggest everyone do.

HD Terrain:
Sounds like a giant change of direction for the better. Well done. However, everyone should pay attention to certain big changes like the new limit of 16 textures per baseboard. And those textures must be newer PBR textures with I believe height maps to make them 3D in appearance. Conversion is NOT a simple flip a switch and my TRS2004 layout looks amazing now. Clearly an amount of re-texturing is going to be required as older 2D lo-res textures are not supported. I sense that the use of objects and effect layers are going to be much more important in the overall look of a route in the future with ground textures taking their proper role of background imagery rather than trying to paint details on the baseboard. I do not believe this is a problem that many are going to make it out to be once they start playing with HD Terrain. It is a required step to deliver much more detail to Trainz routes and very very badly needed.

Trainz Living Railroad:

Looks interesting at first glance. Much of it is still in the "Concept Stage of Phased Development"™ so we must wait an see on how development goes. I certainly likes the centralization of information. That is a giant step forward. Tying it into computer controlled train movement is a bold step. Will there be new re-written Driver Commands to handle this function? But I must say it is appears to be a proper step forward.

I was looking forward to the HD terrain feature, until I read this...

Textures can no longer be rotated or scaled, but the ability to paint dozens different textures in a small area,
as well as apply a color tint on larger areas, should more than make up for that limitation.

I use a lot of cobblestone textures on my routes and wihout the facility to at least rotate them to align them with buildings, for example, then this could be a non starter for me.

Could it be done by a copy/rotate/paste method?

Thanks,
Graham

Before deciding what will and won't work better/worse, how about we let people check the tools first?

Firstly, non-PBR is still supported. And, now that we have displacement, the "jelly" issue and poor blending is almost gone. Instead there's a height change - I'm sure our Alpha testers will provide plenty of evidence of where it looks much better, and a few edge cases where it looks worse. Pretty sure this will become a non-issue once complete.

Directional textures is something we're still exploring. Clearly there are a few things that are truly directional (like cobblestones). The problems occur when people randomly rotate everything causing significant performance degradation. We're at the Alpha stage now, so we'll see how the feedback goes when people are using the tools and figuring out how to get the best results.

To be clear, when I heard 16 textures per baseboard, I thought this will never work. However onceI played with the tools, I realized the whole concept of "painting textures" is quite different when you're able to mix and match below the 10m x 10m limits. (Or 5x5).

I threw this together in about 10 minutes - does my non-artist update change any opinions ?

Old system with 10x10m grid.




New system with multiple textures using a 2m brush (so not even doing any fine detail yet)

euromodeller said:

I was looking forward to the HD terrain feature, until I read this...

Textures can no longer be rotated or scaled, but the ability to paint dozens different textures in a small area,
as well as apply a color tint on larger areas, should more than make up for that limitation.

I use a lot of cobblestone textures on my routes and wihout the facility to at least rotate them to align them with buildings, for example, then this could be a non starter for me.

Could it be done by a copy/rotate/paste method?

Thanks,
Graham

Click to expand...

I was thinking of rotation more along the lines of a paddock where the rotation key is spammed to get rid of the tiled effect. I could be wrong ( I often am according to my wife), but perhaps Tony could elaborate on that.

grazlash - most likely your post and mine overlapped. The tiled effect is now easily overcome by using multiple textures in an almost "random" over-paint operation. And combined with colour tinting, I can't wait to see what proper route builder/artists can do!

Tony ty for the nice examples and answering questions


Questions part 2
-rotating and scaling textures is still possible on the 5m and 10m terrain parts right?
-can old water still be used on 5/10m baseboards?
-what happens if an old route with a rotated/scaled textures gets converted to HD?
-"dozen textures in a small area" textures are a lot of mb atm, specially pbr
don't we get loading problems if too many are used on top of eachother?
-scaling is important for many current textures, does it now require many variants? (more loading time)
-rotation is important for "crop" textures, does it now require many variants?


Things that worry:
-Legacy water is not supported, but the new water, is far from finished and not user-friendly
and sadly not looking as good
-how will areas/borders look when a 10m baseboard meets a HD baseboard ?
-how will it look on steep hills, stretched textures?
-will the developer of transdem get support?


Still see this as the best development in TRS22 so far and a step forwards
greeting GM

wreeder said:

Trainz Living Railroad:

Looks interesting at first glance. Much of it is still in the "Concept Stage of Phased Development"™ so we must wait an see on how development goes. I certainly likes the centralization of information. That is a giant step forward. Tying it into computer controlled train movement is a bold step. Will there be new re-written Driver Commands to handle this function? But I must say it is appears to be a proper step forward.

Click to expand...

Looks like a very good concept, but as it's described as alpha, also a very long way away down the tracks.

Tony, just quoting what you wrote in your document.

It's normal and expected that distant terrain will lack some of the finer details. It also means that the “low res” 2D textures previously used are now avoided.

Click to expand...

Is "low res" 2D textures a euphemism for something other than Non-PBR?

To GM, read this document for your answers.
https://docs.trainzsimulator.com/docs/hd-terrain

Again, I say that I don't see a problem with the listed limitations. I do think that you will have to re-learn how to use ground textures. In the past we have had a giant roller to lay down ground textures over a massive area of ten meters x ten meters. Now you will have the ability to lay down a base texture such as grass and add subtle touches of bare dirt, flowers, weeds, litter for variety and then use the Color Tint effect to add even more variety to the ground surface. Textures have been created this way for games for thirty years. It is called having a texture budget.

I do think that many things that are now painted on the ground like parking lots will be better done as an object or a spline with full control of rotation.

Trainz Living Railroad looks very interesting. Currently using an app called SwitchList, http://www.vasonabranch.com/railroad/switchlist.html a random automatic switch list generator, but it doesn’t reflect industry supply and demand like Living Railroad seems to promise. Might bring a sense of urgency (stress?) to operations.

Apologies if this has been addressed already, but I couldn't find it directly.

We've heard the new HD terrain will improve the performance of clutter; will it also have an affect on TurfFX such as addressing the below?



Cheers,

PLP

That tuffx looks like a density setting - check the doco as it can be avoided.

Questions part 2
..
and answers

-rotating and scaling textures is still possible on the 5m and 10m terrain parts right?
>>
yes

-can old water still be used on 5/10m baseboards?
>>
yes

-what happens if an old route with a rotated/scaled textures gets converted to HD?
>>
the process of updating makes some guesses since you can't do 1:1. This is the sort of thing we need to hear about after practical testing during Alpha

-"dozen textures in a small area" textures are a lot of mb atm, specially pbr
don't we get loading problems if too many are used on top of eachother?
>>
performance in our testing has been similar.

-scaling is important for many current textures, does it now require many variants? (more loading time)
>>
This is the sort of thing we need to hear about after practical testing during Alpha

-rotation is important for "crop" textures, does it now require many variants?
>>
This is the sort of thing we need to hear about after practical testing during Alpha

Things that worry:
-Legacy water is not supported, but the new water, is far from finished and not user-friendly
and sadly not looking as good
>>
This is the sort of thing we need to hear about after practical testing during Alpha

-how will areas/borders look when a 10m baseboard meets a HD baseboard ?
>>
There is a noticeable break. Either hide the border r convert the whole route.

-how will it look on steep hills, stretched textures?
>>
MUCH better

-will the developer of transdem get support?
>>
we don't provide the file format for a number of reasons.

Tony_Hilliam said:

Questions part 2
..
and answers

.....

-will the developer of transdem get support?
>>
we don't provide the file format for a number of reasons.

Click to expand...

Tony,
This is a big problem. I've said before that you have the right not to relase your internal formats, however there either needs to be an intermediate format, and/or Trainz needs to support DEMs etc to bring the real world in to the game for both OSs, please. There is a lot of complexity with all the DEM formats. You have an awesome update with HD terrain, but the only tools operate using the old grid system, which is lower res. DEM data can be very high res and it would be nice to have that high resolution data directly in to the game, rather than go to the low resolution grid, and converted using approximated computations when converted to the HD Terrain. it is just not the same. I'm with you 400% with the need for HD Terrain, however you are throwing up showstoppers by not giving any hint of what the future of DEM data is going to be. I know it is early, and probably one of those yet to be decided, however there is many questions on what is happening. TransDEM has provided this gap of getting real world data in to Trainz for decades with, friendly, helpful advice, and your answer is he is essentially going to be left out in the cold. I understand it is impossible to program every need, but it would be nice to have better support for third party utilities.

Tony_Hilliam said:

That tuffx looks like a density setting - check the doco as it can be avoided.

Click to expand...

Cheers Tony, it's good to hear that it's probably user error than a limitation of TurfFX!

Could you possibly give me a pointer as to what exactly in the documentation I might need to look at to resolve this? I'm still struggling to get my head around it all!

Cheers,

PLP

capdiamont said:

Tony,
This is a big problem. I've said before that you have the right not to relase your internal formats, however there either needs to be an intermediate format, and/or Trainz needs to support DEMs etc to bring the real world in to the game for both OSs, please. There is a lot of complexity with all the DEM formats. You have an awesome update with HD terrain, but the only tools operate using the old grid system, which is lower res. DEM data can be very high res and it would be nice to have that high resolution data directly in to the game, rather than go to the low resolution grid, and converted using approximated computations when converted to the HD Terrain. it is just not the same. I'm with you 400% with the need for HD Terrain, however you are throwing up showstoppers by not giving any hint of what the future of DEM data is going to be. I know it is early, and probably one of those yet to be decided, however there is many questions on what is happening. TransDEM has provided this gap of getting real world data in to Trainz for decades with, friendly, helpful advice, and your answer is he is essentially going to be left out in the cold. I understand it is impossible to program every need, but it would be nice to have better support for third party utilities.

Click to expand...

Totally agree. TransDem makes such a difference. I have used DEM in a DTG route, just no comparison. Think you need to think seriously about an intermediate format or have direct support for DEM. I use LIDAR data sets which also make a huge difference. It would be amazing to have HD Terrain that is accurate. Cherry on the top.

John

Very much agree with what other posters have said. TransDEM is the best application we we currently have to use accurate DEM data in Trainz. Will the new HD terrain model include a way of generating DEM? If not, then we will have to stick with the 5 and 10m grid in order to be able to generate DEM routes.

I would urge N3V to reach out to Geophil and bring him in as a partner for the new HD terrain - if it comes with a DEM add-on, that would be a huge selling point.

Paul

Tony_Hilliam said:

TRS22 owners will benefit from the new HD terrain. They won't be able to edit those routes (but can convert to the old grid with some loss of detail and edit in Classic).

Click to expand...

Apologies if I'm misunderstanding this but does that mean that people who own the normal edition of TRS22 will only be able to use routes with HD Terrain and won't be able to use HD Terrain on their own routes?

AV3 said:

Apologies if I'm misunderstanding this but does that mean that people who own the normal edition of TRS22 will only be able to use routes with HD Terrain and won't be able to use HD Terrain on their own routes?

Click to expand...

Probably...... We don't really know yet.