Trainz Plus Alpha Release

Lot's of bug reports coming through our Bug Report Form - thanks for that everyone. Please ensure you make a DETAILED report including ALL the steps required to reproduce the issue. (And please keep them coming! We're sure you'll find a bunch of issues, and that's why this is called an Alpha build.)

DX12 - please ignore that option for now. It may make it in as a beta feature in the final release but isn't ready for testing yet (and should really be disabled in this release).

Loading will be very slow (known issue, will be resolved)

"Smooth ground under track" should work - it won't be instant as there is an enormous amount of data to process, but should only take a couple of seconds per 100m of track. If not, please provide the repro steps.

Regarding updates, this build is yours to play with for two weeks while we take our summer holidays here in Australia. Please ensure you report any reproducible bugs using the online form so that we can process those when we return to work.

@ RoysTrainz


What is your internet Speeds?
At first try it was kind of of slow, so I canceled the DL, and did a unplugged, and a restart on my xfinity Modem, then it was fast and smooth.
I have to restart my modem about once every few weeks when my internet get wonky.
I hope that you can get it solved let us know?
Cheers!

Update to this reply @Tony_Hilliam.
Thank You Tony for letting us know that the Directx12 was not ready.
I set it back to directx11 and the HD Tools do work very good, my bad I thought that the directx12 was needed to make the HD compatible.
Having a great time testing this Alpha, happy to see it working this soon.

@jeff dl speed if one can call it speed is 0.7.
Other reputable games I use have speed average 4MB/sec up so it is NOT my internet connection for sure but we all know trainz has its road bumps and potholes.

Yeah, I think I'll wait for the beta release...

RoysTrainz said:

@jeff dl speed if one can call it speed is 0.7.
Other reputable games I use have speed average 4MB/sec up so it is NOT my internet connection for sure but we all know trainz has its road bumps and potholes.

Click to expand...

Speeds vary depending on the routing between your computer and our servers. Our servers will deliver the 10GB file in as little as a few minutes.

The main bottleneck is usually your ISP (who, for example, may choose cheaper options to route certain traffic). There may be other options available in your router to prioritize certain traffic.

Without being a techie myself, all I can suggest is you try again and hope for a better and more reliable connection.

Also please note that any disconnection happens between your PC and our server. There is nothing we can do about that at all. (i.e. the server is there and available, and it requires a stable connection for long enough to deliver the file).

Hi Tony --

I downloaded the installation file -- very quick, almost instantaneous
Installed -- downloaded the main file and installed, all in a matter of minutes.
Did a data base repair.
Set the Trainz Settings -- I'm pleased to see it now supports my 2560 x 1440 200Hz monitor.

All ready to go.

My main interest at this stage is the HD terrain.

I imported a model railroad layout I've been working on. This one:



Content Manager captured dependencies all OK.
I edited a section of the layout in Surveyor Classic to remove all the TurfFX and Cutter Effects -- so that I can see the actual textures and terrain.

I then used Surveyor 2.0 to create a marquee and convert the part of the layout within the marquee to HD terrain.

Hmm -- the result is certainly not quite what I expected. The right side is the original, the left the HD terrain:



So OK, what does this mean?

It don't look too good to me.
Was the process I used incorrect?
I was hoping that the textures would remain the same (obviously they don't) so that it would be a simple process to update existing routes.
Can we expect some improvements in the fullness of time?

Phil

Done a little test tweaking on the driver list

pic is clickable

Hi Phil. You're doing things correctly. One of the main reasons for this Alpha is to get feedback on what works well and what doesn't (and as a result, what we need to change).

Converting from low to high res is never going to be perfect, but we are able to tweak various things to work out the best balance. Ultimately, there will always be some amount of detailing required to tidy things up, the question is how much.

We've currently experimented with rescaling the textures since many of them are grossly over-scaled right now (such as the "boulder field" in the example below). The rescaling works well in this case, but makes textures in other areas tile more frequently.

It looks like the impact of this upon converting is that you end up with too many tiled textures. I think it would be roughly 25 textures per existing texture with that setting, so that isn't going to work so well in many circumstances.

The system also needs to map textures from one system to another using default values rather than using any rotation and/or scaling information (which would introduce another order of magnitude more data). So that's going to create additional problems.

Then there is also a case where excess textures are removed and replaced with one of the existing set (per baseboard). So reducing to a set of 16 textures prior to converting (e.g. by bulk replacing) may help quite a lot.

Keep playing with things and keep the feedback coming. Find out what works better and what doesn't (e.g. does painting with the smaller textures on HD terrain outweigh the negatives of having over-scaled textures?)

We know the end results will be better than the alpha - hopefully much better.

G.M. said:

Done a little test tweaking on the driver list

pic is clickable

Click to expand...

Yes, and still w.i.p and I see the bug with the FOV for the animated characters is back.

Be sure to check out all the buttons, r-click for contextual menus etc.

It'll definitely take a bit of learning to use the new texturing effectively - but I like not having to use meshes / splines to make a cut

unpleasant start and not see the finishline

dl finished after 4 hours. Login succeeded after 15 min
Authorization login failed.
After a logout and restart of trainz yet another variant of malfunction of trainz login: "now it says check your internet (which is up and running fine.
Unable to contact mytrainz server. Downunder pls you keep me busy for nothing and I not into this stuff. If continue give my alpha seat to someone else.
I bet it is the server not the internet.

Roy - everything looks correct this end and the build has the same login requirements as your existing Trainz Plus build. Please re-enter your details, double-check you're running the correct build 120247.

You could also try a reboot - might be Windows, your router or anything. It's easy to blame Trainz I know, but given it's working for everyone else, I'm afraid the issue is somewhere art your end.

i did reboot and wait patiently for the validation which looks around 15 min it will take again.....and see now it works . beats me unable to connect to server then 3 times login failed finally reboot....arrgggh

Tony_Hilliam said:

Regarding updates, this build is yours to play with for two weeks while we take our summer holidays here in Australia. Please ensure you report any reproducible bugs using the online form so that we can process those when we return to work.

Click to expand...

Do you want a bug report for all assertion messages? Had one that was saying something about a route object being not found in "core". Might be route specific so not really subject to this test.

And thanks for letting us play! Love it!

lockheed02 said:

Do you want a bug report for all assertion messages? Had one that was saying something about a route object being not found in "core". Might be route specific so not really subject to this test.

And thanks for letting us play! Love it!

Lockheed
​

Click to expand...

Assertions messages can be ignored for the most part, unless it triggers as part of a bug. The "not found in core" sounds like one of the GetJunctionPermit that are known. It shouldn't impact game play and it is safe to Continue and Ignore.

Dx12 is a no go for me, I have tried many times and the menu just freezes or even tries to start in driver or surveyor and it either locks up, freezes or crashes. Staying in Dx11 works fine so far for driver or surveyor with the exception of errors i just ignore and continue on.

Hello nugget2225


Tony had mention a page back that directx12 was not really ready yet, and suggested not to use it.
Stay in directx11 for now. I am using directx11 as 12 did not want to work with me also.

So far as I can see 11 is doing a great job at the HD Tools. Textures need to be tweaked a bit to get them to look good. Probally will have to go thru my Map at a later point and touch up a lot of textures, and that for sure will take some time, but I do want to do it as it looks as this HD update is a major update that will work in due time.

As with directx12 more than likely will be for the Ray Tracing, and point lighting features at a latter time.
Cheers, and Happy Holidays to all.

TLR: have to change each driver to Automatic Schedule 1 by 1, hope in the future it can be stored in the session


Could not resist to test if my Set-Driver-Condition-Rule still works...
have to find the Triggers with Async it seems, quite sure there are a few in Kickstarter

The driverlist starts to get the shape/layout I like, a lot smaller
not sure if blue belongs in the overall design, but knowing which train we watch is cool


The Properties window although too big and dark to my liking, has many nice features
and in my initial post I missed the sub scrollbar that is included
Is there a way to turn of the color paths, when properties is open?


on goes the discovery of this new improved Trainz

The download and installation went without any problems for me.

I tested the current version of the editor a bit. Overall the introduction of the high-resolution terrain seems to me to be very good. You can see the potential and changes for the better.

I have a question about the "smooth ground under selected" tool. Are there any plans/possibilities for some changes or improvements? I mean more customisable parameters for this smoothing to work with. I have noticed that the standard width of the embankment/trench created is a fixed 10 metres, in the case of a single track route this is a bit too wide, in this case the width should be around 5-6 metres. It would be ideal to be able to manually adjust the parameters of this tool. For example, by means of an additional window in which to enter the parameters we would need at a given moment, but I realise that this is already a great deal of interference. I therefore think that for the time being it would be sufficient to reduce the width of the alignment under the spline to ~5-6 metres.

The old tool didn’t have any need for customisable options as it did the best it could given the grid size.

We will need to schedule time to implement customisable options for the HD terrain. And also figure out how to deal with things like then moving the track. Does the embankment/cutting created move with the track or not?

Definitely something we want to improve (along with performance).