[lateagain]

Jovet, on 13 July 2017 - 04:10 PM, said:

The irony here being that you question this forum's reasonability while insensitively trying to bash the President of the United States. Colour me confused.

I spent many years on TS.com's forums and I know very well how it works, and I myself bent over quite a bit. Above, I was merely stating a fact related to my personal opinion based on experience; if I wanted to "bash" I have some fabulous saved emails which can do that job for me. There's an expression "the more things change, the more things stay the same" and TS.com is the epitome of that, in my view. My life is too short to give caustic napoleons second or third or fourth chances. If it makes you feel better about my mental trenches, I have not outright deleted my account there completely.

I do not believe it unreasonable to accommodate the request, but I don't have to like it. I can go get "the right" pickles and ice cream from a store 20 miles away at 2AM too, but I don't have to like it. Some things are worth it. Others aren't.

Whatever our political beliefs the Train Sim forums all have discussion of them as a "no-no", but quite how quoting your President's OWN Tweets is bashing him I leave for individuals to decide?!

I'm not saying that ts.coms forums are great, that they're better or don't have their share of "Caustic Napoleon's" (like that BTW ...very funny) ....just that the site is without question the biggest and oldest library of freeware for the Hobby. As a Brit I've spent a lot of time on the Forums at uktrainsim.com and they too suffer (perhaps even more) from idiots and bullies, BUT they too have the "Go To Library" of UK stock. Many contributors there also specify that their creations can be freely shared BUT only via that library.

I cannot agree with your 20 mile drive analogy though? Downloading at ts.com is (compared to uktrainsim) easy even without a premium membership. "Premium membership" with instant faster downloads supports the sites and from a value for money basis beats ANY other form of download for our hobby.

As this part of the debate was prompted by the reaction to the simple announcement that the update would be uploaded there, the subsequent posts about the forum seemed to indulge in what the posters were themselves complaining about? Colour ME confused.... LOL!

[pnrailway]

<<<Admin Comment>>>

This part of the conversation has gone on far enough. Paul stated that he needed to upload the the update he has been working on at TS and he gave the reason why. So we live with his decision. The rest of the comments were really not appropriate.

[jdgremsjr]

<<ADMIN COMMENT>>

Please try to remember that is thread is about screenshots of the Surfliner 2 re-texture project. Please try to keep things on topic.

[Genma Saotome]

<<ADMIN COMMENT>>

As usual, Paul and John (both are admins) are completely correct, no more political commentary.


I would like to add that gossipy and/or negative comments on other sim web sites is, IMO, rather rude and should be avoided. Nobody over here likes to read negative stuff about us on other sites; In turn, none of those folks remain content when word of snippy bashing occurs over here. We are all in the same hobby... there is no need to be clannish.

If your comment about other boards is, at it's core, simply characterizing your peers in this hobby in a negative manner you have crossed the line from sharing information into bashing people. Please don't bash people in posts on this board.

[timmuir]

I have a question, Paul, concerning your ocean and beach terrtex patches. What size are they? Are they 512x512? Or did you go with larger files. They look great, especially with the rock outcroppings. The reason I'm asking is I'm adding painted beach and ocean textures through Mosaic on 512x512 patches, but now that I've got about a whole world tile done, the RE is throwing a fit. When I open the route, the patches all over the route blink off and on like a tilted pinball machine. It opens and runs fine in OR and TSRE5. I just downloaded the latter and haven't learned how to use it yet.

[paulytechnic]

They're all 512x512. I also experienced the odd "blinking pinball" issue with some areas with many unique terrtex (i.e. a single texture used only for 1 sub-tile and is not used again), and that also had really heavy object counts. My guess is that MSTS was just running out of memory and freaking-out (even using the memory switch, which even still, can only do so much). What fixed it was converting all terrtex to DXT1 when I was finished with all terrain painting. I'm not sure how many terrtex files MSTS generally has loaded at once, but multiply that with the roughly 75% reduction in file size with DXT1, and that really cleared things up!

The one drawback with converting to DXT1 is that you can't really go back (sorta). I kept all of my uncompressed terrtex as a backup (since there is some loss of quality with DXT1), in case I need to fix something later. For the Surfliner 2, all those uncompressed files use up about 8 GB of disk space! Luckily, the final release will only be around 3.

[timmuir]

Ahh, yes, that's right. I've totally forgotten converting to dxt format. (duh). Well, it's been over two years since I last worked in the RE, I'm bound to forget a thing or seven. Thanks, Paul. I hope that takes care of the pinball machine! ;) :thumbup3:

[hiball3985]

I can't imagine how anyone can create that many terrtex files and remain sane :ko2: I'm in the process of converting another route to DTX format, a little over 4,000 and I'm not even half way :sweatingbullets:

[paulytechnic]

Yeah, no kidding! There's no way I'd even attempt it without Mosaic and Route Riter... both of which are invaluable. Even with the tools, it is still a bit mind-boggling. For this route, I'm just shy of 10,000 terrtex files. Whether I'm still sane remains to be seen, however! http://www.elvastower.com/forums/public/style_emoticons/default/crazy.gif

[hiball3985]

paulytechnic, on 14 July 2017 - 01:36 PM, said:

Yeah, no kidding! There's no way I'd even attempt it without Mosaic and Route Riter... both of which are invaluable. Even with the tools, it is still a bit mind-boggling. For this route, I'm just shy of 10,000 terrtex files. Whether I'm still sane remains to be seen, however! http://www.elvastower.com/forums/public/style_emoticons/default/crazy.gif

So many members at the different forums have gone missing over the last few years, makes you wonder how many are in straight jackets :rotfl: