ECML Kings Cross too big

I think the E.C.M.L is brilliant in Trainz and very well put together,

But I must agree the route is far too long and demands so much on any computer.

I would of loved to have seen the E.C.M.L cut up into smaller sections, and if you wanted the entire route, then that was included too, it would have been very similar to the Settle and Carlisle line that was in TC3, one entire route, and about four or five sections of the route, all with various senarios.

To be honest with you, I don't think the route is completly to blame, I think it's how the jet engine is running the game, I think it is trying to load everything in place in the route, instead of only what you see, it's loading the bits you cannot see.

I think it also struggles with splines and speedtrees, if it had a better way of dealing with splines and speedtrees, this might give it the E.C.M.L a better chance to perform.

In Trainz 2010, I could leave York Station and get as far as Peterborough, before a fatal crash of the computer, "Trainz cannot read memory" but now in Trainz 2012, It crashes instanly without even a warning, I get all green ticks, but still a crash, I think it is too much for a computer to handle.

Making smaller versions of the route maybe the only way forward to getting the best out of the E.C.M.L, which is such a shame really, because I know it has taken years to build, and a lot of talented people have been involved with it's creation, but it is such a shame, a great route cannot be played.

Thank you for the E.C.M.L, just wish it was in smaller parts.

Joe Airtime

Hi Rob, thanks for the reply, I can see your point about the stations and understand now why they were not fitted.
As for the route merge, do you mean for me to delete the part of the new KX to Newc route that I have placed stations, then import/merge that section from the older KX-York?

Yup that's pretty much it, takes a bit of time with the old delete button, but its still allot quicker than ts2010 and earlier for deleting.

Hi Everyone

Well it seems all of you would like the higher spec but in shorter sections ? Presume something like Kings Cross - Peterborough, Peterborough - Doncaster. This decision would not be up to ourselves but N3V so you will have to ask the guys there nicely.

On extra sections of routes being added to the ECML I would very much like this to happen. Some of the original team have no longer any spare time with getting married or having to work longer hours in there paid job etc. So it would be up to some new blood to take this on. I have had in the past individuals asking for the latest version to join to new sections of which these are never dished out. We have been building this route since 2004 so would be nice to see some new help.

We have a gentleman above LieLestoSbrat who has built the whole of March depot and Whitemoor quite a few years ago and looks very nice indeed but need someone else to finish off the Spalding - March section and also to build the Peterborough - March - Cambridge - Hitchin section. Any takers ? I have for the last two versions left on purpose a bare Hertford loop if anyone feels the need to fill it in correctly.

Look forward to celje finding faults to the northern section. If you fancy doing the rest your most welcome as I didnt mange to finish off your last list. I am at present going through the whole build finishing off some areas and updating content etc. So nows the time if anyone has spotted parts not finished off correctly.

Cheers
Stuart

ECML Project Leader

Stuart,
I for one don't think the route should be "split up"!!! Those that want it small/shorter/less detailed can '"cut off" - "delete" what they want. For me, big is good. The longer and more detailed, the better... (probably easier/quicker to upgrade ones PC, rather than farting around reducing the size/detail of the route). Stu, at the end of the day, whatever you and your team decide to do, you are not going to please everyone !!!

I don't have any problems running the route in 010 (& 12) on one of my medium spec PC's. (I-7 8600 - 4gigs DDR3 1600 - 280 GTX -Win7 64bit). I certainly get acceptable, playable frame rates and luv the route.

On my high end gaming PC, I get very good frame rates running EMCL. I know the route is still a "work in progress" and will continue to be for a while yet, (hopefully)...
I know we have some excellent session makers in the community, so in the meantime, I'm hoping that a few of the better "session" makers can make some more good sessions for the route. Any takers ???

Cheers, Mac...

I'm with Mac, please don't start hacking it to bits, no problems running it here either on medium spec or high spec PC's.

napierdeltic said:

Hi Everyone

Well it seems all of you would like the higher spec but in shorter sections ? Presume something like Kings Cross - Peterborough, Peterborough - Doncaster. This decision would not be up to ourselves but N3V so you will have to ask the guys there nicely.

Cheers
Stuart

ECML Project Leader

Click to expand...

I like the idea of this above, but as I said in an earlier post, to also include a completed E.C.M.L from London to Edinburgh, for those who wish to travel the entire route, this way you may be able to please most and not some...

But you would have 2 Intercity trains, one ready to drive from London to Edinburgh, and one ready to drive from Edinburgh to London, this way, it gives the operator a choice of which way they want to go through the route, but also watching out for the AI in both directions.

When it comes to the AI, the Intercity train that leaves either Edinburgh or London, AI frieght trains will start up (at the same time) in Newcastle, York, Doncaster, Peterborough, and any other main stations along the route, and make there way in both directions, one heading North, and one heading South, this way there is always a number of freights ahead of you, coming towards you on seperate tracks.

Hope this helps and this is just an idea, not a must do.

Joe Airtime

Love the route the only problem is that it doesnt love me, I was looking foward to making a Hull excutive session for the route but for some reason my computer has a major crash, about 10 minutes into creating the session. I would love a bit of deltic thrash through the tunnels at kings Cross but at the moment I cant.

meatloaf747 said:

Stuart,
...."session" makers can make some more good sessions for the route....
Cheers, Mac...

Click to expand...

I think that's a big problem in this moment.
It seems that TS10 and TS12 are not accurate enough. Making session for so big route is unreasonable, if ''save function'' don't work properly. A couple of hours driving is not enough to make any progress on the route, you will take the brake and save the session, but when you continue later, you will find that things are broken. I'm waiting to see if patch will solve this problem, i really wish that this will be solved.

I undertook to add the Widened Lines to ECML over a year ago now. You may think I have wimped out, but believe me I'm still working on it, although it's only three miles long there's a lot of work in it. I found I had to make all new tunnels for it, etc. It will appear one day!

napierdeltic said:

Hi Everyone......... I have for the last two versions left on purpose a bare Hertford loop if anyone feels the need to fill it in correctly.
Cheers
Stuart
ECML Project Leader

Click to expand...

I'd love to see that prt of the route completed! Used to ride it regularly in steam days.

Mick Berg.

I confes to being a little puzzled earlier when someone said that the additional boards wouldn't effect a route much? How that squares intrigues me as the more boards surely the more on them and consequently a result? I have noticed this in my city tramway which is around 250 boards while oddly my present rail project which has now passed 300 boards (and a ways to go) loads faster! May well be that the tramway is a bit more intensive being constantly built up. In building the whole of one British rail company an awful lot of time is spent on side scenery and being a real situation rather than fictional I want at least a degree of perception but not too bogged down as one wants to run trains. I am putting in a reasonable amount of side scenery for a reasonable distance then put in a background at a fair bit culminating in a backdrop. I don't want to be spending oodles of time on endless fields, towns, etc. A balance is needed.

Massive routes in Trainz have always been a problem, it isn't just the track length, but, every baseboard needs to be textured and scenery compiled and placed. I played this route in TS2010 and the amount of splines used was absolutely horrendous, although, reading Stuart's response I understand why so many creators do it. However, splines have always been a resource hogger irrespective of how powerful your PC is, added to that the Speedtreez power grabber issue and most folks's threads on this forum seem to indicate having poor FPS, and as I utilise Windows XP, I can't have any more than 3.5 GB RAM anyway. I also deleted a few baseboards, but, not that many iirc, it depends on what folks like and whether you're driving from the cab, or, from the outside, whereby if you want to take screenshots you need some depth of field which extra baseboards provide, rather than just a big void as you drop off the edge of the route......:hehe:

Looking forward to your next instalments team, keep up the great work.

Cheerz. ex-railwayman.

Don't worry we have no intention to split the route into sections it will be all 393 miles in one lump if not more. The splitting would be an extra option but would be entirely up to N3V. When I started off the project eight years ago we soon found that TRS2004 would splutter with the 70 miles sections we were building. I always told the team don't worry about the mass of content as PC's are getting more powerful by the day.

The route would never be built without splines as there must be thousands of house splines with three main houses being used. Grass again mainly two but thousands of these. Building with individual components wouldn't see the route built in my life time.

Hi Mick look forward to your section to Moorgate. As Ive said before once its built we will slip it in as some of our timescales are very loose.
Thanks for everyones kind comments and as some of your guys say your not going to please everyone at the same time. There is only so many hours in a day to build. On that score Im off to fill in yet more content just North of Kings Cross.

If anyone in England here is fee this Saturday you may like to come to Alycidon's (55009 ) birthday party at Barrow Hill. Shes 50 like me - a very good year !! I'll be running 55008 simulator from Kings Cross - Newcastle and rtn if you fancy driving a section. Let me know when you arrive at the cab that your a Trainzster. Entrance to the site is free but please read this first - http://www.thedps.co.uk/

Cheers
Stuart
ECML Project Leader.

Sometimes, an old thread is still the most appropriate.

Its 2023, I'm using Trainz 2019, and after all these years I can finally run this route smoothly.

Every since its introduction, its massive size and my less than leading edge hardware made Kings Cross a slide show and rural high speed sections and exercise in gliding silently over a baren landscape as loading assets could not keep pace with the trains speed.

As a result, I had largely ignored it.

But just a few days ago I returned from a trip to the UK, that included a Lumo trip on this very route from Kings Cross to Waverly (Edinburgh) and back. So with renewed interest in the route I loaded it up.

Time and versions have been unkind, with various splines draped across the ground and misaligned tunnels, but those matters aside it looks and runs wonderfully.

So, I'll be exploring it more.

I assume these spline issues, which are super common when routes from previous versions are loaded in newer versions of the game (glaring at you N3V), won't be addressed. (?)

It would be nice to have guidelines for larger routes. I tried "Create Session" on <kuid2:582486:101273:4> DSEPR03 HS1 London to Lille V6.1 today, and after an hour I don't think half of it was loaded. My system generally gets good marks and I haven't had problems before, but this route was just too much, I guess. I finally selected to "Quit Surveyor", and it crashed Trainz altogether. Had to bring it back and sit through a DBR.
EDIT: Corrected to "Create Session" above.

It really depends on the route and the number of assets being used and loaded in addition to how strong your hardware is. I run trainz from a NVMe drive and assets load very quickly on all routes. As an example, I have a heavily detailed merged route with well over 1000 miles of track at 1750 mb installed, which loads just inside one minute, on a platter HDD it used to take anything up to 15 minutes to load. A fast processor, 32gb ram and an SSD drive will increase performance and your trainz experience out of sight. The greatest performance increase came from the NVMe drive on my system, giving faster loading times for any route and real time asset loading while driving. There is a negligible difference between NVMe and SSD drives, as I discovered while testing my latest route upload last week. The increase in RAM from 16 to 32 gb gave only a small increase in performance, but allowed me to merge much larger routes and the jump from an i5 7600 to an AMD 5600 greatly increased the smoothness when driving. All the performance increases were achieved while keeping the same GTX1660ti graphics card.
Personally I havent tried the London to Lille route as yet, but I will load it up today and see how it performs.
cheers
Graeme

London to Lille turns out to not really be my thing, but I did install it, and it ran fine.

Meanwhile I started editing a clone of ECML - Kings Cross to Edinburgh for my self. The goal *was* to simply correct the drooping splines and maybe continue the electrification to Waverly so as to run electrics the whole way as is done today.

I made some interesting discoveries so far. One, is that at least one asset was deliberately "dummied" by N3V. DS Road 01 T Junction no paths has had its .IM model replaced with an empty one. Seems it was done to work around a CM error because the original author used attachment points twice for two different "tracks" in the config.txt - CM now flags this as faulty.

It's particularly interesting since a similar asset, from the same author, was "fixed" by (correctly) altering the config.txt instead. I find that in T:ANE this route already had this issue, visible if you examine the roads around the Gasworks Tunnel (first one out of Kings X) you can clearly see the where the automobile roads should have a T intersection, but there's just nothing there. Problem is it IS there, but also isn't, and I can't imagine this doesn't make the engine at least do extra work.

Second and possibly related is the discovery that some of the roads in this area are doubled. Road splines have duplicated occupying the same space - at the very least this adds extra assets to render needlessly.

Again, these seem to be issues N3V caused - possibly back when T:ANE was released as I can recall moving routes from TS12 to T:ANE would result in road assets going faulty and splines disconnecting all by themselves, and I'd bet this is related to whatever changes they made that caused those issues.

It's a pity, but this isn't the first time I've seen "progress" butcher people's work - and more appallingly, N3V just keep on selling these items as DLC (It's one of the chief reasons I avoid buying DLC at all costs honestly)

Just as an aside, I corrected myself above. I was trying "Create Session", not "Create Route".

I did try to create a TANE scenario for the ECML a month or two ago, but I've had to give up.

The biggest issue is that I'm running SP4, but the ECML version is SP3 so "QuickDrive" is unavailable. Every time I want to test my scenario I have to save, exit surveyor, wait 10 minutes for the ECML to be unloaded from memory, go to Driver, select ECML, select my Scenario and select Drive - and then wait 10 minutes for the ECML to be loaded into memory again.

Frankly, life's too short...

I see similar performance issues if I open the route in T:ANE (takes forever to load, slideshow FPS) but it runs fine in 19.

Same system, same route, VASTLY different performance.