[Genma Saotome]

A couple of question about terrain mesh:

Will OR work if all the faces of a tile are removed? How about a patch?

Will OR work if there are more terrain verticies present than what MSTS defines?

[Lindsayts]

 Genma Saotome, on 10 April 2014 - 11:37 AM, said:

A couple of question about terrain mesh:

Will OR work if there are more terrain verticies present than what MSTS defines?

Not really enough information for an answer.

The amount of terrain displayed largely depends on the ability of the hardware, in OR currently this limited by the cpu. These days if one has a half decent graphics card a single cpu cannot feed it enough data to keep it fully busy. The form the data stored in the route slowing the routine little.

Lindsay

[charland]

Are you asking if you turn off parts of a tile to place something lower then the terrain, like a turntable pit?

Not really sure what this refers to... sorry, can you hum a few bars?

Paul :-)

[Genma Saotome]

I'm fed up with the inability to represent ditches along the ROW; fed up with the inability to match terrtex art in shapes and so I've been thinking about replacing some or all of the terrain mesh with either a terrain model or a MSTS terrain mesh file that has more vertices than normal. I'm curious if there is anything about OR that would barf if I removed all of the mesh and/or inserted new verticies into the MSTS terrain file.

[charland]

Hi Dave,

Don't think this has been done before... maybe you're the the one who's going to find it out! Do a little route like the tutorial and experiment with the added vertices and open it in OR and see what happens. Might be something everyone needs to know.

Never liked the way MSTS created terrain, way too large triangles to begin with.

Paul :-)

[captain_bazza]

Quote

Never liked the way MSTS created terrain, way too large triangles to begin with.

So late 1990's era computers could cope. The average video card then was a whopping 16 MB. In the early 20's, 32 and 64 MB cards were around, with the 128 MB at the upper-end with an upper-end price tag. When criticising MSTS you have to remember it was developed mainly in the late nineties, that's nearly a decade and a half ago!
Cheers Bazza

[Gman347]

Excellent point Cap'n.:thumbup3: On the one hand the technology is changing so fast we quickly forget what things were like. On the other hand time just seems to fly by and we also forget how far back the roots of our "favorite" software go. My latest video card purchase has 3 gigabytes of memory!:shock6: If you stop and think about the differences in hardware between then and now they are almost incomprehensible. So on the third hand, !!, we have come to take for granted the dramatic improvements with which we have been able to avail ourselves.

Paul :D

[captain_bazza]

Yes, Paul, since the beginning it's been an expensive hobby. I can't make up my mind; is train simming an obsession, or a fetish? :shock6: :thumbup3:

Terrain smoothing has been done in the past, but I don't recollect what the protocol was for that because I kept well away from route building.

Cheers Bazza.

[Hack]

 charland, on 10 April 2014 - 03:17 PM, said:

Don't think this has been done before...

TML Studios did this with their Line 51 add-on several years ago - no terrain tiles whatsoever - everything was a modeled as city blocks and carefully stitched together in the sim. The add-on was probably not as extensive as the Cal-P or other routes, but was interesting on how TML approached the issue with terrain (or lack thereof). FWIW, you were forced to view everything from street level without any free roam cameras. I never sat down to figure out how it was all done, however.

[Lindsayts]

 Genma Saotome, on 10 April 2014 - 01:49 PM, said:

I'm fed up with the inability to represent ditches along the ROW; fed up with the inability to match terrtex art in shapes and so I've been thinking about replacing some or all of the terrain mesh with either a terrain model or a MSTS terrain mesh file that has more vertices than normal. I'm curious if there is anything about OR that would barf if I removed all of the mesh and/or inserted new verticies into the MSTS terrain file.

I completely understand your pain, some thoughts on the subject below, now this is unlikely to be as simple as it sounds here. Hmmmmmmmmmm, another thing it would likely to be a real good idea at the same time as hi-res terrain is added that a second rendering thread is seriously looked at. The current single thread being seriously over loaded, this is not that simple either.

Now I have not looked at the OR terrain rendering code at all but its very likely one cannot insert a vertex in the terrain at a random location. Most terrain mesh generating routines use the regular spacing of the vertices to rapidly generate the N-S E-W indices.

A number of ways around this are suggested.

Allow a data hole to be drawn in the terrain, this hole say 4 x 4 roughly 32 metres to be filled by a mesh at a higher res, say 16x16, this to allow a local high detail section.

A variation on this theme is as far as I know the MSTS terrain tiles are broken up into 16 x 16 smaller tiles. As the standard 2 x 2 kilometre tiles are 256x256 this would make these sub tiles 16x16. These sub tiles could be replaced as required along just in the immediate vicinity of the track itself by higher res tiles.

Its very likely to really be able to do this some kind of OR terrain editor would need to be done.


Now in this world there really are very few free lunchs, a gotcha to this is the more high detailed terrain the less other detail can be include. To use much hi res terrain other scenery items, including distant mountains will need to be sacrificed.

Lindsay