[Eldorado.Railroad]

?

[spud]

I am sort of at a loss here Eldorado, you show a revision to an .eng file for the smoke but earlier in your post you say:

"So for some fun I created a consist of four EMD GP 9s from a nameless vendor."

Is the 'fix' a general one or only pertaining to the unamed loco. If the latter then we would need to know which engine it pertains to.

[D&RGW]

spud, on 26 April 2011 - 06:26 AM, said:

I am sort of at a loss here Eldorado, you show a revision to an .eng file for the smoke but earlier in your post you say:

"So for some fun I created a consist of four EMD GP 9s from a nameless vendor."

Is the 'fix' a general one or only pertaining to the unamed loco. If the latter then we would need to know which engine it pertains to.

It seems to me that this not only applies, in this case, to the 'unnamed loco' but a number of locomotives originally built for msts. Since the effects of smoke were different in msts, the same framerate problems encountered here would not have occured and i would guess that more than a few msts .eng files have those higher values that would cause problems in ORTS. Whatever the case, than you, Eldorado, for bringing this up; unfortunately, on my dinosaur of a computer I have to do everything I can to keep framerates from plummeting below 10 or 20 and so this is much appreciated.

Could you tell us which locomotives those are, though, so that we may keep an eye out for them, or revise the .eng files, in the future?

Anyway, cheers!

[johnfrum]

I suspect that we're seeing a very early implementation of ORTS smoke effects, so figuring out how to cope with them right now might be premature. (Perhaps one of the Open Rails guys can comment on that.)

My understanding is that the number on the last line for the various smoke effects in an ENG file (like the one that Eldorado highlighted above) is supposed to state the width of the aperture where the smoke comes out. But there seems to be sort of an inverse relationship between what MSTS does and what ORTS does.

For example, here's a smoking caboose (a recent Tim Muir model) to which I added smoke effects. When I was fiddling with the aperture width I found that reducing the number cut down the size of the smoke cloud in MSTS, but had the opposite effect in ORTS. Raising the number reversed the effect in the two simulators.





In both of these screenshots, the aperture is 0.45. Looks fairly good in the top MSTS shot but the ORTS smoke is completely out of whack. When I raised the aperture width to about 0.7 ORTS was OK -- but then MSTS was laying down the smokescreen. Unfortunately, there wasn't any happy medium: averaging it out made it look wrong in both.

I've decided to maintain the settings that look better in the old simulator and live with the big smoke cloud in Open Rails for now. I'm still spending more "quality" time in MSTS than I am in ORTS, although I expect that to change eventually.

By the way: I haven't noticed much of a frame rate hit now that ORTS has smoke. I'm running an Nvidia card though, so maybe that's a factor.

-JF-

[James Ross]

johnfrum, on 26 April 2011 - 12:39 PM, said:

I suspect that we're seeing a very early implementation of ORTS smoke effects, so figuring out how to cope with them right now might be premature. (Perhaps one of the Open Rails guys can comment on that.)

You are correct; the particle effects (i.e. smoke, steam) are the very first step in implementation and there's a long way to go yet. :(

johnfrum, on 26 April 2011 - 12:39 PM, said:

My understanding is that the number on the last line for the various smoke effects in an ENG file (like the one that Eldorado highlighted above) is supposed to state the width of the aperture where the smoke comes out. But there seems to be sort of an inverse relationship between what MSTS does and what ORTS does.

Very interesting; I was not aware that OR was using any of this data yet. At least the colour and rate of particles is not supposedly hooked up yet so I'm a little surprised this is. We can certainly correct the misinterpretation of the data, though.

johnfrum, on 26 April 2011 - 12:39 PM, said:

By the way: I haven't noticed much of a frame rate hit now that ORTS has smoke. I'm running an Nvidia card though, so maybe that's a factor.

It is certainly a possibility that the frame-rate issue Eldorado noticed is related to and/or caused by the problem with particles being somewhat intermittent on ATI cards.