Well you better remove ALL vegetation from any route you use then and just keep the tracks and rolling stock, in fact why not just have bare baseboards ? , then we can remove all those other superfluous items we don't need and simplify everything.Why didn't we all think of that before ? , possibly we don't have your intelligence level.
You apparently have no interest in the subject we are discussing and have no constructive comments to make , so I presume you thought you would inject some levity into the proceedings, well you failed as far as I'm concerned.
Please let me know which routes you have been using that have no shrubs and trees so I can avoid using them.
Middleton for laptops base system has no trees or vegetation. Adding them would need the speedtree engine and with a target of being able to run on a system with a 3D score of 350 above 20 fps it simply wasn't possible. Even none speedtree vegetation would have added too much demand. It does have the station layouts from RMWeb though so you can do fairly interesting things operationally.
I think with canals some vegetation was added.
I get the impression that for many the range of trees available in speedtree 6 is sufficient but for some reason the ones you'd like for your particular layout are not available?
I'm not even sure why the version of trainz the assets are made in matters. For scenery objects surely the objective is to make them in the lowest version compatible so they are available the largest number of users?
I have seen a beta of some new spline vegetation with some randomness but I suspect the content creator will be targetting content that is useful to a wider audience.
TurfX not available to Mac users, or AMD GPU or Intel GPU users either. There is a tradeoff between using standards and performance and how long the standards bodies take to incorporate something. nVidia would prefer you to use nVidia cards hence their extension into TurfX, N3V didn't have to make use of it but it was relatively cheap to implement and adds value to many clients.
In the same way there was discussion in the forum about what to do with trees before speedtree was introduced about what to do. It was felt that the 2D style trees didn't look too wonderful. When asked what did other games use Windwalkr mentioned speedtrees and that is the option that the community thought worth perusing to get a reasonable number of reasonable trees quickly given that it was recognised we didn't have the resources to create them from scratch. That was speedtree 5.
speedtree 6 came out and that meant all the 5 trees would no longer work and that wasn't nice. speedtree is now up to 8.4 and the licensing costs are substantial so I don't think that is an option these days besides too many layouts would need to be updated.
I think given the resources available N3V aren't doing too bad a job. Should they have diversified into the Mac environment dunno, I assume that the return on investment is equal to that of the PC in terms of numbers of copies sold per dollar invested but it keeps windwalkr happy which is a consideration.
At the end of the day it comes down to resources available. In general people specialise in their niches and are more productive as they gain experience. However it is open ended to an extent and you always have the option to create the content you'd like to see. Blender.org has the software and tutorials. In software development we used to think it took two years to become proficient in a language if you were working in it full time. I suspect the learning curve for Blender is similar. Whether or not you'll be able to create content that equals speedtree 6 trees at the end of two years is a matter of debate but if you have the time available you might like to try.
N3V I think commissioned some speedtree 6 trees, if there is something specific you'd like to see in speedtree 6 and you have the money available I feel sure some contacts could be found but we are probably talking $50 an hour and several hundred hours work.
Have fun
Cheerio John
