Genma Saotome, on 19 September 2020 - 05:40 PM, said:
But by that logic you would have a slider that controls how many AI trains are going to be active, or even how many cars get to see in a train. That's not acceptable of course because somewhere there is a line beyond which the player has to accept "this is what you are going to get". Effectively that is the content placed in the route.
But in some sense, we do have such a slider! AI trains and railcars that are located beyond the view distance, or in a distant world tile, are present in the simulator but will not be rendered.
Genma Saotome, on 19 September 2020 - 05:40 PM, said:
The sliders you mention are there to REDUCE that content when it's just too much for the hardware... and that's good too. The irony here is you have been arguing that no, all those users are going to get all those car swaners no matter what! :D and I'm the one saying there are going to cases where that is just too much.
You misunderstand? I'm not suggesting we render every car spawner in perpetuity (although we do that right now, seemingly without issue...). I'm saying that, if this is a performance problem we really need to worry about, we should implement an algorithm that determines which subset of car spawners to render based on objective and generalizable criteria, such as view distance and available resources.
Genma Saotome, on 19 September 2020 - 05:40 PM, said:
How does this sound: In the long run it might be better for some car spawener paths to be conceptual similar to the paths used by AI trains (perhaps even including "switches" to change lanes or have some subset make a turn at an intersection). If you want them on, you define it in the activity. As for the rest, such as over on the freeway, let 'em drive.
No, I cannot agree with this because AI trains and car spawners are drastically different concepts. AI trains are distinct entities defined individually in an activity, while car spawners spawn vehicles on fixed paths with headways as short as a few seconds. One is a crucial component of railway operation, while the other is just eye-candy.
So, here's my personal strategy for reaching a consensus: What specific, actionable thing do we want to implement in the simulator? We've identified two distinct problems in this thread:
- We want activity designers to be able to modify the scenery of the route, of which car spawners are one component. This is a sound and desirable idea. You've identified one use case, which is selecting active and inactive car spawners for street-running sections.
- Activating every single car spawner when a world tile is loaded may be harmful to simulator performance. But, again, to what degree? This needs to be quantified and triaged, and then "softer" workarounds and optimizations could be identified before taking the drastic step of introducing yet another graphical setting.
There are good reasons to implement (1), but you can't argue it's a sound solution to (2), because the "pick which car spawners you want" strategy places an unfair performance burden on the activity designer, and it doesn't do a thing for existing content.