Supertrain : Once more with feeling....

[Woulfe]

Someone asked me about Razorback Railway & Supertrain running along the route ... It would mean laying down however many miles of Acme Track or dropping HalfPint on it for testing ... and Razorback is for TANE & I just put up HalfPint on the Download Station recently .. and I got a few hours to kill so ;-)

[Woulfe]

I forgot how long it took to download Razorback, so much for a quick drive ;-)

Here I am a day later, I went to bed while it downloaded, and at last I setup a session with the half pint Supertrain, test results will come later on as to how long it takes to run the whole route in one go
Granted I could make passenger stops because well you can and that kinda seems the point to this route as I see the little green bars over the station here at the start, but that would take a bit of time
So I could make 2 different runs one where we just floor it & go as fast as we can while following the speed limits or not, heh heh heh, don't have to, but we could, the other stopping for passengers
And jotting down the times for each run for those that want to know this information seeing that it's close to 9am my time that sounds like a good time to start

[Woulfe]

Take Two, 'cause I needed to go over the route & make sure I wasn't going in circles in places or getting derailed forgot just how long all this was 'till I got going at a pretty good clip at 222 mph, was taking time but I noticed that's the same city and then it was again & again & again & you get the idea, so went into the editor and switched switches to head not in a great big circle and to avoid derailing, both are bad for a speed run after all ;-)

[Woulfe]

10:00 am - started at one end of the route as far from the other end as I could tell by the minimap
10:05 am - cameras were wigging out due to the speed, things weren't rendering in fast enough to keep up
10:10 am - halfway point of route, gah so many switches I hope I set them right, only one way to know
10:15 am - hope we don't spook the cows as the disco music starts to play as night falls ( set game time to 60x )
10:20 am - arrive at other end of route, wait that can't be right I remember this taking longer for some reason

I think I was running an AMTRAK train on there ages ago and that might be why I thought it took longer

[Woulfe]

Some changes made due to trying to get this up on TrainzLuvr

Had to make the sound files as part of one car & not the other car, so the day-time music only comes from the Disco car and the night-time music comes only from the End car, this was to keep the files sizes under 50MB as that's the limit of what I can upload to TrainzLuvr so call this YET another change to 8+ on one hand it's just those 2 cars cars that change and not the whole set so the number should be the same 'cause it's not a total overhaul like before.

So it should be good to go there, and it's all more or less 1 file for the whole thing not like the separate ones for each car, well except the Disco & End cars but that has more to do with the sound files being .wav which are not compressed like MP3s are so meh, whatever works to have a backup location to get this from.

The tracks will be as well as it can all be all under one project there, AND this prompted me to put up the train as a collection cdp not the tracks, but the whole train itself as one big file, less work to download under the new folder EIGHT PLUS on my google drive down below.

[Woulfe]

Full speed ahead ;-)

[Forester1]

That is impressive speed!

[Woulfe]

The Route

Still working on it folks just so you know, cleaning up a lot of missing content, replacing said content with something like it but still used for current game version, for instance
The crossing lights I used in the older game didn't port over namely, so found a generic one that's pretty much DIY add your own gates, or booms, whatever you call them
The crossing lights as you know go on the small grey squares on my crossings, I set them up that way so you can do up the crossings however you like, want wig-wags, just plop 'em there
Want just a simple wood sign, same deal, and so on

Custom Scenery

As you know I tested Blender on making something special for the route, good news IT WORKED, bad news it didn't texture it at all, so that was a bust pretty much, I think it was due to
the size of the textures, blender has no issue with that, textures can be any size at all at least in blender, once out of blender however, Trainz seems to have an limit to texture sizes
anything over 512 x 512 and it's good night Charlie, everything shows up as white or grey, depending on lighting conditions

So I had to remove the Easter egg I made, yea that was pretty much what I was doing was making something you had to hunt down in the route editor for only can't just see it when in
the train on the tracks, I got it in my head that there are these big empty spaces in the route, made to help knit together different maps back in the day, so I put something fun in there
Instead that should be easy to spot driving in the train or in chase view, both should work, well in testing they worked any way

However if can use something I did up in another game, like I did with Gizmoplex & Xanadu, made for VRC & Planet Coaster in that order, I have a 3D model of something I can place in LA
like I did The Big Bus, Gizmoplex, Hollywood Sign, that last one I resized and placed on what little hill there is on the map, still looks a little bit big but then again wanted to be able to see it
from a bit away from the object itself, so it's one or the other for that, use the GIANT SIZED ONE or the not as big but can still be seen from the tracks one, whatever both will be on my
Google drive, as A gmax file and as cdp so you can resize it yourself if you want to do so

Anyway the 3D Model I have may not really belong in LA, just like The Gizmoplex belongs on the moon as we all know ... I put it there anyway ... Mostly I'm putting everything that's HOLLYWOOD
there in LA, things from Movies namely and yes I got a lot of 3D models that can go there in one way or another, but I don't want to make it too crowded so I got to pick & choose from what I have.

I also noticed on the Las Vegas part of the route an "air strip" out in the middle of nowhere, no town or city nearby, like maybe a gas station and a fast food joint, that are NOT those things as we all know
I'm wondering how to make an "OBJECT" to put there in the air space above it, possibly glowing at night like I did the neon for XANADU, that was a fun experiment in how to get the game to do neon up,
But the idea is to have it look TRADITIONAL none of the niggly bits slapped on like ILM had raided a model store & stuck everything but the kitchen sink, granted they might of done that to see if anyone
would spot in by freeze framing a scene in one of their film they did FX on, hey it happens

The OBJECT in question is not of this world so not so sure what to name it, NUMBER is easy, name is the tough part, calling it UNKNOWN is right out as people may think it's broken in some way or another,
or not named in the first place, I could name it after my Fave 1977 Spielberg Film CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND, title is a bit long for a folder if you ask me, or simply CE3K for short ;-)
Or X-Files, or just UFO or whatever the term is nowadays for such an OBJECT, maybe call it NOT caught on tape ? heh heh heh heh heh

Trouble is that in the older games it will glow like mad, in the later games, not so much, still trying to figure that one out, XANADU looks just fine at night 'till we get to TRS 2019, oh well

OR I could slap the SOL over it as I got that in 3D ...

[Woulfe]

A R E A 4 2

[Woulfe]

I N F E R N O

[Woulfe]

I tried different ways to get the SOL into game, it would not go in no matter what I tried

Conversion from SketchUp to Blender to FBX to Trainz (as it started out as a SketchUp model) No Dice

Conversion from SketchUp to Blender to DFX to Gmax ... Gmax crashed file too complex / large ?

Conversion from Sketchup to Trainz generated a config file & a thumbnail but after that NADA

So the UFO will have to do as I guess the SOL is overly complex and might crash the game

Granted I could just make it in Gmax, a low poly version, just a giant floating bone ;-)

[Trainmaster189]

So you're now getting into modelling Supertall Skycrapers? I hope you don't model any of the actual "planned/vision" skyscrapers in Trainz.

[Forester1]

That would be a great asset for searching locations of unknowns! Sounds like you are "SOL" on the SOL, whatever it is.

[Woulfe]

So you're now getting into modelling Supertall Skycrapers? I hope you don't model any of the actual "planned/vision" skyscrapers in Trainz.

Nan' just Irwin Allen's Tower is pretty much it for the game ;-)

[Woulfe]

That would be a great asset for searching locations of unknowns! Sounds like you are "SOL" on the SOL, whatever it is.

To put it mildly yea, the SOL I found on Sketchup was possibly too complex, so I did my own low-poly version in Gmax the other day looks fine