[James Ross]

I'd like to propose that the following three options be promoted to non-experimental status:

• Use large address aware binaries
  
• Ambient daylight brightness
  
• Use model instancing

All three have existed for a while now and I don't believe have had any issues recently. I am not suggesting enabling either LAA or instancing by default just yet (although could be convinced of that for both).

What do people think?

[atsf37l]

James Ross, on 10 September 2014 - 11:51 AM, said:

I'd like to propose that the following three options be promoted to non-experimental status:

• Use large address aware binaries
  
• Ambient daylight brightness
  
• Use model instancing

All three have existed for a while now and I don't believe have had any issues recently. I am not suggesting enabling either LAA or instancing by default just yet (although could be convinced of that for both).

What do people think?

Acting like a newbie here but could you perhaps define one and three for us who ride the footplate, not being the 'other' kind of 'engineer?' :pardon: :rolleyes:

Ps: Ambient daylight looks good.

[disc]

why not make LAA and model instancing default enabled? LAA doesn't have drawbacks, and instancing is supported my all dx9 hardware. All of these should be non experimental.

[charland]

Hi All,

Has my vote. In the last 24 hours "large address aware" and "use modeling instancing" cured a developing problem with the Conn River route I've been working on. "Large address aware" ended a series of crash to desktop preventing long freights from coming within completed scenery tiles, and "use modeling instancing" smoothed out the loading of the heavily populated tiles.

I've been using ambient daylight for quite a while, the lighting for MSTS at noon on a clear day was always terrible, this actually makes you think there's a sun up there.

Paul :-)

[engmod]

Hi James,

I have been using all 3 for quite a while, and I have not found any issues.

Derek

[roeter]

Personally, I would like instancing to remain an option. It does do 'strange' things with dark and light sides of objects, in particular with berms and bridges if these are used around curves.
I will try to get some pictures to show what I mean, but I do not have these at hand at the moment.
For this reason I generally have instancing switched off.

Regards,
Rob Roeterdink

[James Ross]

atsf37l, on 10 September 2014 - 12:30 PM, said:

Acting like a newbie here but could you perhaps define one and three for us who ride the footplate, not being the 'other' kind of 'engineer?' :pardon: :rolleyes:

"Use large address aware binaries" enables Open Rails to use 4GB of virtual address space instead of the normal limit of 2GB, if you're running a 64bit version of Windows (which most people not on Windows XP are). The virtual address space limit is what causes Open Rails to run out of memory before your machine has run out and therefore doubling this limit can allow much more scenery and detail to be loaded at a time.

"Use model instancing" enables Open Rails to take advantage of a GPU feature which renders multiple copies of the same thing (think the same house model repeated along a street, or individually planted identical trees, etc.) using just 1 call, rather than 1 call per item. It uses a little bit more memory to do this, but saves a fair amount of CPU, which is typically the bottleneck in Open Rails at present.

To disc: If other people are also happy enabling "Use large address aware binaries" and "Use model instancing" by default, great, we'll do that. I just wasn't confident that we were all happy enough with the settings (well, mostly instancing).

[James Ross]

roeter, on 10 September 2014 - 01:21 PM, said:

Personally, I would like instancing to remain an option.

At no point has anyone suggested removing any options.

[markus_GE]

I´m all in favor of these suggestion. Have been using all three options for quite a while (actually, since every one of them has been introduced) and can´t recall any flaws.

Whether it´s LLA on or off and instancing on or off, I don´t really mind. I´ll just tick them if they´re off :rolleyes:
(That is to say, if that helps anything, I´m using them all the time) :pardon:

Cheers, Markus

[dennisat]

roeter, on 10 September 2014 - 01:21 PM, said:

Personally, I would like instancing to remain an option. It does do 'strange' things with dark and light sides of objects, in particular with berms and bridges if these are used around curves.
I will try to get some pictures to show what I mean, but I do not have these at hand at the moment.

I always have all 3 options checked and feel they should no longer be "experimental".

However, I have noticed using instancing that textures on some models with transparencies seem to "flicker". I've mentioned this in another post some time ago with screenshots. I still use instancing because of the (sometimes major) performance improvements and the "flicker" isn't enough to really annoy me.

Dennis