[Oleg]

Hello, I apologize for not having appeared at the forum. I understand I have moved to the group of inactive users. But then I went back and try now regularly go to the forum.

[Sparky]

Greetings from Ohio, USA! Happy to be here. Looking forward to learning a little & having some fun. Had MSTS since it came out, and became increasingly frustrated with its performance on newer machines. Hoping to get some better performance from Open Rails.

[captain_bazza]

Sparky, on 13 April 2017 - 12:55 PM, said:

Greetings from Ohio, USA! Happy to be here. Looking forward to learning a little & having some fun. Had MSTS since it came out, and became increasingly frustrated with its performance on newer machines. Hoping to get some better performance from Open Rails.

Hi'ya Sparky, welcome to ET. As a veteran user of MSTS you no doubt have the usual battle scars to prove it. Curious about your nick... does it come from that iconic record of the 1950s, "Sparky and the Talking Train"?

Cheers & Good Wishes
Bazza.

[Sparky]

Sorry to disappoint- it actually comes from the sidekick in Speed Racer, and a lifelong passion for things electrical, electronic, etc.

[Sparky]

I'm hoping to learn enough about Open Rails to get the kind of performance i wished I could have had from MSTS. Just set up a new PC- well, new to me anyway, so i should have sufficient hardware. Now, if i can just work out the "knowledge & understanding" part. I've always had a passion for trains - how could one not? My grandfather's postwar Lionel consumes all physical available space at the moment, so any expansions need to be "virtual", simulator ones.

[Kenny Eaton]

I definitely understand the frustrations of MSTS and newer computers. About 5 or 6 years ago my wife brought home her old computer from work. It sat here untouched. I had decided that I had had just about enough of MSTS on Windows Vista so two years ago I fired the old one up. Wiped the hard drive clean. (C:) drive 80GB and installed a (E:) with 150GB. Added 2GB of memory along with a 2GB video card. Windows XP Professional Service Pack 3. This brought MSTS (to me) back to life.

[Sparky]

I was always frustrated with the performance limitation of MSTS. Even with a decent machine & Win XP, a 100-car train would slow views to a crawl. With a few generations of development MSTS could have been something really great. Its limitations brought us to Open Rails, however, & it seems to be the sim i always wished MSTS had been. Now i have to learn how to get my ancient favorites to run like real locomotives in OR. actually, I have to learn how to get them to run at all in OR. Right now most of them just spin their wheels & disappear in a huge cloud of black smoke. Kind of fun to watch, but rough on the timetable...

[Kenny Eaton]

Hey Sparky. About two weeks ago I was trying to find some answers to an issue I was having problems with when I ran across something by accident. I believe it was posted on Steam4me by Jovet. This improved my frame rates tremendously. Especially in heavily populated areas. Give me a few minutes and I will find it and post you a link.

[Kenny Eaton]

http://msts.steam4me...s/xtra_mem.html

This was very simple to do and there was quite a noticeable difference in performance.

[R H Steele]

Some more command line parameters for MSTS, from this old thread >>> http://www.elvastowe...ch/page__st__30 (post # 35)

The switches can be used in combination eg...\train.exe -mem:1536 -vm:w
"C:\Program Files\Microsoft Games\Train Simulator\train.exe"
...\train.exe for playing train sim in full screen environment
...\train.exe -mem:1536 for playing MSTS full-screen with memory allocation in megs per Bin modification
...\train.exe -vm:w for playing MSTS in a window
...\train.exe -perflog for creating a performance log file in root directory of Train Sim
...\train.exe -toolset opens msts editor

****NOTE: forwardslash used on following switches***** these are used AFTER any parameter switch containing a - minus

...\train.exe /timeacceleration opens with time acceleration feature --- (Ctrl+T increases and Ctrl+Shift+T decreses time acceleration)

...\train.exe /anisotropic activates anisotropic filtering if supported by 3D graphics card

...\train.exe /fsaa activates full-scene anti-aliasing if supported. (Adding this switch renders the view at a higher resolution and then samples it back down to the resolution you have chosen--it can slow down performance quite significantly but can also reduce jagged edges and improve the general appearance of the view.)

...\train.exe /fsaa /anisotropic activates both full-scene antialiasing and anisotropic filtering. (Adding this switch improves the filtering used to render the textures, particularly on polygons that are almost perpendicular to the screen. Note: Be aware that by using a shortcut to train.exe you bypass any options selected in the Troubleshooting menu. If you need to reproduce the effect of these options you can add the following switches: all the parameters )

/forcemaskz -- Smoke displays in block form.
/pixbias -- Text displays in block form.
/maxtex:256-- Textures are distorted.
/nofiltercab-- Seams are visible in cab cockpits.
/ttfblitfix -- Text is distorted or not displayed.
/skipsizecheck -- Skip texture size limit test.
/skipbiascheck -- Skip pixel behavior text.
/simpleclipping -- Snow causes game to crash or does not display.

\train.exe /fsaa /nofiltercab Depending on the precise implementation of full-scene anti-aliasing on your 3-D card you may see a seaming or tiling effect in the Cab views, in which case adding the switch /nofiltercab may help.