[Csantucci]

Goku is suffering a serious health problem AFAIK.

[Weter]

And still he deserves to be called "genius", with all good and "different" sides of that term in mind.
I will appreciate, what TSRE have given to me, but wait for some development at the same time.

[rickloader]

Yes indeed, and like many a genius he has not had the recognition he deserves from the community, Sure TSRE could be improved, but every day I use it I`m grateful to Goku, Without his efforts we would still be struggling with MSTS RE.
I hope Goku has some respite from his health problem. If he can still be contacted perhaps ORMT might consider offering him a vote of thanks?
Rick

[cjakeman]

Our next session is in a week's time, on Sat 14th Oct.

Is there any topic that you would like ORMT to discuss?

[Jonatan]

Possible improvements to pickup objects? In particular going beond the limitations of MSTS with advanced animations beond 1 frame, the possibility of looping the animation during loading/unloading, and the ability to set wether or not loading should commence once the animation has finished, as we have with unloading.

There's a lot of possibilities here.

EDIT: Maybe a dedicated switch stand object for route builders, to relieve us of using complicated signal setups to simulate it?

[railguy]

There is a topic, well-worn, that I believe needs to be revisited: Spheres of light for all locomotives. Herewith, is some background and some possible suggestions:

Background.

Since its beginning, OR has been hamstrung by the MSTS limitations of only two spheres of light for only a player locomotive. This renders night running of the sim inherently unrealistic. The reasoning behind this appears to be that light spheres can be taxing on sim performance on older or slower computers. That said, many, if not most, simmers are likely running computers that could handle the load of additional light spheres.

Suggestions.

A possible solution would be to implement light spheres in such a way that the additional spheres could be "turned on or off" as an option in the in options tab of the sim, such that people with older computers could simply uncheck the option and the sim would not attempt to load the additional spheres.

To facilitate the above, the "new" light spheres, could be given ORTS definition options in the light definition of the engine (or even maybe .wag) file. Here might be some examples:
ORTSSphere ( 0 ) - MSTS default operation of spheres
ORTSSphere ( 1 ) - OpenRails operation of spheres
So, an example might be:

Light (
comment( Sphere of light )
Type ( 1 )
Conditions (
Headlight ( 2 )
Unit ( 2 )
ORTSSphere ( 1 )
)
Cycle ( 0 )
FadeIn ( 0.5 )
FadeOut ( 0.5 )
States ( 1
State (
Duration ( 0.0 )
LightColour ( 80ffebac )
Position ( 0.0 4.7 19.6 )
Transition ( 0 )
Radius ( 50.0 )
Angle ( 15.0 )
)
)
)

This would give the simmer the ability to add light spheres as desired to locomotives (even for things like step lights, etc.) that would add immensely to the realism of the sim at night.

Just some thoughts. Finally, I have to express my continued gratitude to the OR development team. They have already taken OpenRails much farther ahead than I would have ever thought possible. I went through a long period of complete disappointment with the lack of real progress with MSTS--MSTSBin being the only real glimmer of progress in the sim itself. With OR, I left MSTS in the dust almost 11 years ago and I have never looked back. OpenRails is the future--please keep up the great work!

[Jonatan]

Yes, I completely forgot about the light spheres! I've championed their expansion for things like firebox glow in the cab etc. It's a worthy venture to be given focused attention by the OR team.

[eric from trainsim]

If that could include static objects, even better.

[railguy]

eolesen, on 09 October 2023 - 02:27 PM, said:

If that could include static objects, even better.

I would love to see static objects have light casts, as well, but the processes to render them might be different from those of a moving light sphere. My thinking is that the adoption of light spheres might have to be incremental--maybe experiment with "headlight" spheres on front and back of locomotives, and on AI locomotives as a starting point.

[James Ross]

railguy, on 09 October 2023 - 05:11 AM, said:

Since its beginning, OR has been hamstrung by the MSTS limitations of only two spheres of light for only a player locomotive. This renders night running of the sim inherently unrealistic. The reasoning behind this appears to be that light spheres can be taxing on sim performance on older or slower computers. That said, many, if not most, simmers are likely running computers that could handle the load of additional light spheres.

Open Rails only supports a single light cone.

It has been a while since I tried to change this code, but as best I can remember the limitation is not directly a performance one; it is instead more of a code and graphics feature level issue.

The way we render a light cone currently, using immediate rendering, is that every pixel drawn to the screen must calculate how much the light cone affects it as it is rendered. This is the code which applies the effect.

The issue is that DirectX feature level 9_1 (the minimum spec for Open Rails for ages) has a tight limit on the number of instructions in a shader. It is so tight we cannot even do all of the dynamic shadow effects (we are limited to a single shadow map, not the 4 we prefer to use).

The higher feature level that we support, 9_3, has more space, so it might be possible to expand this to multiple light cones but then you do start to get into performance issues, because immediate rendering is poorly suited to multiple lights.

So, as I understand it, we can have more light cones either by:

• Only supported in featrure level 9_3 (or maybe it needs something higher), at a performance cost
  
• By switching to deferred rendering, which might mean a higher minimum spec

At the end of the day, it's mostly down to nobody trying to implement it, as with most other desired-but-missing features. :)