[Weter]

But cars need order, or You will correct every car, after seeding across city...

[eric from trainsim]

I was thinking of a large car park...

[Weter]

But there are slots on asphalt anyway.
With people crowd - certainly yes.

[Aldarion]

eolesen, on 20 November 2022 - 04:31 PM, said:

To your last question, Carlos... I could see an argument for having shape files instead of textures. Shapes can throw shadows. I'm not sure cruciforms or rotating panes can do that. It would also be an easy way to populate city streets, parks, platforms with things like flat people or cars.

I couldn't agree more.
Has a route developer I have been missing two things:

1- a 'forest' kind of tool that would populate with 3d objects. I have felt the need of it to make small vilages. I have created assets with groupsof houses to make it easier to create a small ilage but I find irritating when I have to place a vilage on a slope, cause most of groups of houses are to be placed on flat-ish land... and quite frankly I think it would be a waste of time (and disk space) to create houses to be placed on an incline....and then of several angles of inclination... Forest provides just that...

2- a way to associate scenery assets to a terrtex, so that, every time I place that terrtex, i can have the option to auto-populate it with some objects that would rotate with the terrain texture. That would be time saving if it could be done ith forests,but with individual shapes... would be awesome!

[Eldorado.Railroad]

eolesen, on 20 November 2022 - 04:31 PM, said:

To your last question, Carlos... I could see an argument for having shape files instead of textures. Shapes can throw shadows. I'm not sure cruciforms or rotating panes can do that.

Actually they do....if enabled. The Open Rails implementation diverts from the MSTS code AFAIK and remember. The camera facing trees are two panes at 90 degree angles to each other in MSTS. In Open Rails, this is reduced to only one. When you enable dynamic shadows for forest regions, the unrealistic result is that although the tree billboard follows the camera eye, the dynamic shadow created is locked to the position of the light source, ergo the "sun". What happens is that a billboard and the dynamic shadow cast from it are out of sync. If we had the two billboards at 90 degree angles to each other then the dynamic shadow "effect" would look more realistic. I have not fired up TSRE for route editing in some time, but it "correctly" some years back displayed two billboards at 90 degrees to each other for forest region items. I would be more than happy to see the MSTS implementation in Open Rails. Yes..cruciform can also display dynamic shadows. If you recall at trainsim.com in a PM, I had been working (for some time) on a utility to modify world files to either remove or add dynamic shadows to things like trees shapes/forest regions etc. Given my resistance to the "Microsoft Way" I will probably port it to another language that is O/S agnostic.

Glad to see you have caught Carlo's attention. I give him full marks to making changes happen. A simple thank you is never enough, but I will say it anyways.


Steve

[eric from trainsim]

Aldarion, on 21 November 2022 - 09:31 AM, said:

1- a 'forest' kind of tool that would populate with 3d objects. I have felt the need of it to make small vilages. I have created assets with groupsof houses to make it easier to create a small ilage but I find irritating when I have to place a vilage on a slope, cause most of groups of houses are to be placed on flat-ish land... and quite frankly I think it would be a waste of time (and disk space) to create houses to be placed on an incline....and then of several angles of inclination... Forest provides just that...

Villages are a great example of random placement of multiple shapes... Imagine having randomized houses without having to worry about trees growing up thru the houses....

A wind turbine farm would be another example where following the terrain might be critical. Same with cattle in a field, haystacks/hayrolls in a field...

Aldarion, on 21 November 2022 - 09:31 AM, said:

2- a way to associate scenery assets to a terrtex, so that, every time I place that terrtex, i can have the option to auto-populate it with some objects that would rotate with the terrain texture. That would be time saving if it could be done ith forests,but with individual shapes... would be awesome!

Doing with terrtex might be a challenge, but I do a lot of that with WorldFileHacker (shameless plug) -- you essentially have a parent object that triggers adding child objects that use the same axis and rotation as the parent. Allows me to add signal cabinets and ladders to signals, berms to track, handrails to bridges, light poles on roadways, etc.

For a while I experimented with adding farm buildings via WFH -- I'd place a specific farmhouse, and then use WFH to add the barns, silos, corn cribs, trees, other outbuildings, etc in a mass update. Then, I'd move those around as needed to provide some randomness. I can place 20 parents and easily have another 200 objects added by WFH in about 60 seconds or so. The trick is having shapes offset from the axis a bit. WFH isn't smart enough to place at a new XYZQ just yet, nor do I want to invest in the math needed to do those rotational offsets.

[Aldarion]

If shapes could be made like that, it would be very easy to lay a village,even using satelitee imagery has terrain tex, by using some technics I have been using after reading the following thread:

People, Animals, Rocks, even Mountains the Simple Way!

I also would like to refresh the topics of another thread.

Forest Regions thread

Now if this is all doable, defining it all in the forest.dat or another file in the openrails subdir is probably easy, no? would it be possible to follow the same logic that Goku appplied with that feature to define a static object placed randomly between a selection of various shapes?

a part of one of the ref files i have in the addons subdir

Quote

Static ( Class ("PT Residencial")
Filename ( Casa059.s )
Filename ( Casa165.s )
Filename ( Casa166.s )
Filename ( Casa170.s )
Filename ( Casa211.s )
Filename ( Casa229.s )
Filename ( Casa230.s )
Filename ( Casa264.s )
Filename ( Casa425.s )
Align ( None )
Shadow ( Dynamic )
SelectionMethod ( RandomSelection )
RandomRotY ( -180 180 )
Description ( "Random generic House" )
)

[Genma Saotome]

Eldorado.Railroad, on 18 November 2022 - 06:51 AM, said:

You have to accept the fact that route builders are NOT software developers, and certainly NOT often capable of thinking "outside the box" yet alone understanding what you are proposing in "code speak".

Spent my career in I.T. NOT crawling into the box. FWIW your assessment of NOT often capable of thinking "outside the box" applies very much to programmers; They can code the heck out of ideas, figure out hard to solve problems... and have no clue whatsoever their users are doing. They see the code... and that's it.

There are exceptions of course, both in industry and here at the OR Project. Obviously (Australian) Peter is keen on railroad physics and Rob really wanted timetable operations and both pushed the envelope. But a whole lot of programmers only "see" the code.


Out of the box: For a very long time, perhaps 6-10 years, I've been asking for some means, any means, to provide for texture substitution; to use the .sd file to carry more useful attributes, such as a window of time for the night texture to be applied; for camera sets so instead of camera #2 giving you one position in front of the train you could have 8 -- left or right, high or low, and in front or behind; displayed sprite text assigned to an activity so the unnecessary test isn't cluttering up the screen.

Still waiting.

I did get .inc files so there is that.

[Aldarion]

inc files have saved me a lot, and I mean a LOT of time.

Guess I also have to thank you for that Mr. :thumbup3:

[eric from trainsim]

OK, folks, it's been a year. And now we can't use "TSRE is no longer in development" as an excuse.


For a developer..... How hard would it be to take the following boundary and populate a forest within it?

	PolyForest (
		UiD ( 132 )
		TreeGroup ( JP2AutoTree1.ace, JP2AutoTree2.ace, JP2AutoTree1.ace )
		ScaleRange ( 0.9 1.1 )
		Population ( 10 )
		TreeSize ( 16 20 )
		StaticFlags ( 00000000 )
		Position ( -92.0677 0.87081 -118.481 )
		QDirection ( 0 0 0 1 )
		Points ( 6 
			Point ( -92.0677 0.87081 -118.481 )
			Point ( -108.81 0.894868 -73.4293 )
			Point ( -104.485 1.51015 -190.919 )
			Point ( -78.2488 -1.51429 -122.839 )
			Point ( -95.0944 0.857233 -144.572 )
			Point ( -95.5375 0.855669 -147.224 )
		)