Questions on terrain mesh
#1
Posted 10 April 2014 - 11:37 AM
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?
#2
Posted 10 April 2014 - 12:47 PM
Genma Saotome, on 10 April 2014 - 11:37 AM, said:
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
#3
Posted 10 April 2014 - 12:55 PM
Not really sure what this refers to... sorry, can you hum a few bars?
Paul :-)
#4
Posted 10 April 2014 - 01:49 PM
#5
Posted 10 April 2014 - 03:17 PM
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 :-)
#6
Posted 10 April 2014 - 03:41 PM
Quote
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
#7
Posted 10 April 2014 - 06:08 PM
Paul :D
#8
Posted 10 April 2014 - 08:06 PM
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.
#9
Posted 10 April 2014 - 08:51 PM
charland, on 10 April 2014 - 03:17 PM, said:
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.
#10
Posted 10 April 2014 - 11:12 PM
Genma Saotome, on 10 April 2014 - 01:49 PM, said:
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