[ExRail]

ExRail, on 12 March 2024 - 05:08 PM, said:

Genma was choking from seeing the haze, looking at the color numbers in the code it was red dominated, I'll give him that.
with a new blue dominated color haze, weather type Foggy looks really frosty in the winter season.

[Genma Saotome]

Looks damn cold. Good edit.

Don't lose the smog tho. What you have is about right for major cities in North America, let's say 1900-1945. The introduction of Natural gas for heating after WWII greatly reduced the use of coal in cities and the Clear Air Acts, starting in 1963 made more progress. That said, smog was still there, just not so much near ground level, but go up 500-800+ feet and you'd be looking right into it (a personal experience in Chicago). Massive progress by the end of the 70's as coal utilities all over built 1000 foot high smokestacks (giving eastern Canada acid rain).

A question about skydome size: What, if anything can be done in OR when, at various locations, you can see as far as the horizon? DM tiles can extend 100km in all directions. What you see in the sky windward at distance might take 4-10 hours to get overhead (depending on the strength of the wind) and look very, very different from what you see departing leeward.

[ExRail]

Genma Saotome, on 14 March 2024 - 08:57 PM, said:

Looks damn cold. Good edit.

Don't lose the smog tho. What you have is about right for major cities in North America, let's say 1900-1945. The introduction of Natural gas for heating after WWII greatly reduced the use of coal in cities and the Clear Air Acts, starting in 1963 made more progress. That said, smog was still there, just not so much near ground level, but go up 500-800+ feet and you'd be looking right into it (a personal experience in Chicago). Massive progress by the end of the 70's as coal utilities all over built 1000 foot high smokestacks (giving eastern Canada acid rain).

Thank you, I'll do and interesting perspective, But but the good old days.

Genma Saotome, on 14 March 2024 - 08:57 PM, said:

A question about skydome size: What, if anything can be done in OR when, at various locations, you can see as far as the horizon? DM tiles can extend 100km in all directions. What you see in the sky windward at distance might take 4-10 hours to get overhead (depending on the strength of the wind) and look very, very different from what you see departing leeward.

I have my scenery view distance set to 3,500m and I think the skydome primitive was 6000m when I looked into that class, so not a issue for me, but it is very small.
I've also pushed the idea of more the one skydome in smaller or larger size for real 3D clouds back for now, it's to large a class to just take a copy of a start fiddling with as this point.

8 hours ago I was watching a video of a screen recording I made of the Foggy winter weather, and said to my self, this strong RGB green tree looks out of place in the winter,
the route is properly not providing a winter texture for it, but what about that Vegetation shader I saw and the Destatuation/brightness/contrast function I saw in Skyshader could I use that.
What is a vegetation - tracing and tracking lead me to *.sd 252 as being the flag that sends the object to the vegetation shader, and that's a very great thing, for now I can control it and adapt it to the weather:



I'll properly turn up the colors a bit again now that I got the rest implemented also.

If anyone know how to create debug keys I'm ready, my track got lost with the enums and strings in UserCommand.cs and the bridge to Menu.exe

[ExRail]

ExRail, on 15 March 2024 - 05:05 PM, said:

8 hours ago I was watching a video of a screen recording...

With this picture I'll conclude weather type Foggy & winter and go on to the next, Foggy Summer evening.

[Genma Saotome]

ExRail, on 15 March 2024 - 05:05 PM, said:

I have my scenery view distance set to 3,500m and I think the skydome primitive was 6000m when I looked into that class, so not a issue for me, but it is very small.
I've also pushed the idea of more the one skydome in smaller or larger size for real 3D clouds back for now, it's to large a class to just take a copy of a start fiddling with as this point.

I've been expanding the view distance on a few routes. One of my own uses 10km near terrain and 100km distant in all 4 directions of the ROW. I have added 10km near terrain (all directions) on several downloaded routes... I don't recall right now what the DM is... not as great as what I mentioned above.

What I have learned from doing this is (1) that there is a huge increase in realism and (2) the "far" answer really depends on how flat the entire route is. With hills/mountains next to the rail ROW there is no need to extend the view distance very far but if it is really flat, the far horizon is the limit.

[cjakeman]

pschlik, on 05 March 2024 - 04:28 PM, said:

Chris is interested in having a go at enhancing the built-in graphics assets, and your set of enhancements is a good starting point (don't know of anyone else who has directly shown interest in contributing assets to official builds). I am planning to put what I can into the Unstable version to get the ball rolling and gather some feedback on the potential changes

Phillip has submitted the collection and it's now in the Unstable Version, so everyone can provide feedback.
We usually provide a video to accompany the next Stable Version (v1.6). It would be great if we could include some "before" and "after" images which show the improved assets (ideally taken from the same viewpoint). Would anyone volunteer to provide these, please?

[ExRail]

Genma Saotome, on 16 March 2024 - 11:14 AM, said:

I've been expanding the view distance on a few routes. One of my own uses 10km near terrain and 100km distant in all 4 directions of the ROW. I have added 10km near terrain (all directions) on several downloaded routes... I don't recall right now what the DM is... not as great as what I mentioned above.

What I have learned from doing this is (1) that there is a huge increase in realism and (2) the "far" answer really depends on how flat the entire route is. With hills/mountains next to the rail ROW there is no need to extend the view distance very far but if it is really flat, the far horizon is the limit.

Now I know why I've not been concerned so far, I live in a flat country, on a mountain route things are different.

One could just externalize the variable RadiusM witch is now 6000M to windows reg and play with it trough that.

Just did a test with the view distance set to max 10 km and turned Open Rails into a slide show, and did a comparison between the two,
it did not do anything for landscape as far as I can tell, -it's properly rendered first so the size of it, is only really crucial in VR 3D.

But the clouds and horizon looks better I think, so I'll properly keep it.



Edit: Here opposite and Clearly better - a 1024x1024 grid texture projected to reveal it accurately.

[FS.E652 091]

Here is also a my test on 7km View and 45km View of Distant Mountains.. Tested on a Ryzen 9 5900x and RTX 3060 System With 32Gb RAM
Well Done...!

Attached thumbnail(s)

• 

[ExRail]

FS.E652 091, on 19 March 2024 - 08:51 AM, said:

Here is also a my test on 7km View and 45km View of Distant Mountains.. Tested on a Ryzen 9 5900x and RTX 3060 System With 32Gb RAM
Well Done...!

Beautiful picture, MSTS environment or modded Skydome ? paywhere route ?

The Slideshow pc I tested on is a I7-3770 1600Mhz DDR3, GTX1060 6GB. Normally it run GTA V/Red Dem2 fine 50-70fps
I don't think this game is made to have a large viewing distance, GTA V assets has something like 5 LOD levels and
is only rendering the highest close to the player, we only got 'one' all over the landscape,
scaling up will never work or demand much more electricity, and it's properly also a huge number
of render calls using the current MSTS assets.

Did you externalize the RadiusM, I'm having troubles translating the well done part ?

[Genma Saotome]

ExRail, on 17 March 2024 - 01:29 PM, said:

Just did a test with the view distance set to max 10 km and turned Open Rails into a slide show, and did a comparison between the two,
it did not do anything for landscape as far as I can tell, -it's properly rendered first so the size of it, is only really crucial in VR 3D.

But the clouds and horizon looks better I think, so I'll properly keep it.

The 10k near terrain mesh and long distant mtns work best when there are mountains off in the distance and a long run of relatively flat terrain before it. If you change the visible distance for larger buildings the results can be the same just looking straight along the rail line (essentially the buildings are subsitutes for mountains)