[ExRail]

Genma Saotome, on 22 March 2024 - 07:06 PM, said:

Jan, I see, above, Chris' post on including your code in the unofficial version -- Congratulations!! Is there any necessary documentation to implement it or is it an easy to understand selection in the options menu?

Chris is talking about Erick's Skydome/smoke stuff.

I'm having a difficulties in telling who is coding and who is modding and who is using, so I cover them all,
From users standpoint it's just more selections in the menu weather selection and idk 300 MB of disk space if all the weather types have 2/4K textures.
From modders pov it's a lot more textures to play with and to customize without it's all or noting.
From someone who don't want it but getting it anyway, they could just create small blank texture files for the extra weather types that only takes 4 Kbytes of HD space rather than the 14MB 4K png's Few is using.
From Coders pov it's trivial set/get/switch/if/extra float's & texture shader effectors/extra sampler maps and ps function that's just copies of existing once.

[ExRail]

Weter, on 23 March 2024 - 10:27 AM, said:

Hello.
Looks great, but my doubt is:
OpenExRail_Weathertype_Few.jpg
stratus clouds are usually being higher, than cumulus.
Please, check, whether that's so, or not.

I have no doubt that if you or anyone else follow these instructions will be able to create some awesome looking clouds:
1. download, install and start Gimp 2.x
2. Use duckduckgo to search for images of clouds, you get the image not the site when clicking as goggle, select a high quality and copy it to clipboard.
3 With gimp open press ctrl+shoot+V to paste it from the clipboard.
4. Select Colors in the menu and select Colors to alpha
5. Click the eyedropper tool and select the blue back ground
6. play with the 2 sliders until best result is archived and click OK, you can repeat to get more blue background removed.
7. when done this on a few images create a 4096x4096 transparent image
8. copy/past or Clone brush the clouds into the 4K images and export as *.png

Currently all the cloudlayers have the same 'altitude' and that gets converted into flatness in the projecting or something,
and it is the speed difference that create separation, so you basically saying I should rename texture 2 and 3 to 3 and 2 and it's correct.

[Weter]

Oh, I see: we still have only one dome - so no different "altitude" for different clouds layres.
My mistake, sorry!

[ExRail]

Progress report:

I was struggling with the save/restore weather function last night, so returning to the code today was with a heavy feeling.
But I found out a few thing and noted Console.Writeline writes to the logfile, so I started debugging through that and things got faster and much clearer.

After implementing WeatherTYpe enum saving in the WeatherSave/restore functions I found out that was pointless and Open Rail already saved Season and WeatherType - it's in the log file,
but since it only ever had one real weather type consisting of Cloud/Skydome/Snowflake/Raindrops there was no need for it in the Save/Resore weather function
that only house a few parameters as Overcastfactor, Precipitation rain/snow flag, particle count and fog distance.
But since the debugkeys no longer control very much saving them seams pointless and simply loading the right textures and setting the correct parameters for the weather type was the way to go.



As a bonus for all that code browsing and tracking I bumped in the Window manager, saw fontsize was used in scaling of the windows and got curious, changed it from 96 to 128 and checked the results,
I was not expecting the hole thing to work out of the box, but It's seams to, and was now wondering if there was an official way to set it, but could not find anything Menu.exe or Windows Reg.


What ever I'm keeping this, works great for the 42" display I'm writing this on.

[ExRail]

ExRail, on 24 March 2024 - 03:22 PM, said:

What ever I'm keeping this

One a second though, since it also set the size of the Hud, I'm now down to 112 pkt, got a little too big when running activities, witch I just did with success.



I tested the hole current range of weather types 0-6 in the Open Rails tutorial Route, and apparently it's not hitting the limiting 0-2 function as I though it would.

So all I or anyone using this will have to do is make a copy of the activity and change the name and weather in notepad,
to have two of the same activity with different weather types, as always was the case, now there is just more to select from.
Btw. I changed a Surfliner activity/traffic to use a consist I had that seamed fitting.

Oh, precipitation particle size is now also controlled from the weather definition so Rain, Snow & SnowStorm can have individual particle sizes and not just a hardcoded 1.0f for all.

[ExRail]

Progress.
I've modified PreciptationViewer class to have two systems that get set with individual sizes, wind direction and particle count,
together they create a awesome dense field without overloading even my developer PC.
WeatherType.SnowStorm is coming along missing is only the wave files for audio.

The image is not much compared to the video, witch is very short to save storage space and because compression destroy how good it look on a real monitor live.


 ExRail_SnowStorm_DualDrop.zip (37.72MB)
Number of downloads: 17

[Jovet]

That looks pretty excellent! I presume it looks just as good with the camera moving through it?

[ErickC]

The NAVS environment sounds have separate storm_in.sms and storm_ex.sms files for rain storms, heretofore you needed to swap them for the "normal" rain SMS files to use them, but I wonder if the new settings could use them out of the box. Compared to the "standard" rain SMS files, the storm files have a few changes:

1. Two thunder streams were added, one close and one distant.
2. A separate stream was added for wind, since the wind should be much louder in a rain storm

I don't think it would be hard for me to combine the appropriate elements from the snow SMS files and the storm SMS files for a snow storm.

[ExRail]

The snow/ rain is currently working as always, meaning you out run it quickly and only holding still, driving slow or external view looks good,
but I'll look into that, know where it is, but not what to do about it right now.

There is a huge bunch of Open Rails screenshots on the internet and there are those this version can now produce.







Designing Weather Types has just become much faster, than changing a rgb value a bit,
recompile to check and readjust. With the build in 'Weather Editor'
matching the colors of the Skydome, Clouds & environment has become super easy.

21 new Debug keys to adjust the weather parameters and a key to dump it to the log file.
They look like this right now:

Shift +/- = Scenery Fog
Ctrl +/- = SkyFog
Ctrl+Alt +/- = Particle count

Ctrl + Ins/Del = Overcastfactor 1
Ctrl + Home/End = Overcastfactor 2
Ctrl + PgUp/PgDn = Overcastfactor 3

Ctrl + Shift Ins/Del = Scenery Fog Color R
Ctrl + Shift Home/End = Scenery Fog Color G
Ctrl + Shift PgUp/PgDn = Scenery Fog Color B

Alt + Shift Ins/Del = Sky Fog Color R
Alt + Shift Home/End = Sky Fog Color G
Alt + Shift PgUp/PgDn = Sky Fog Color B

Alt + Shift Backspace: Save Weather Parameters to Log File
Alt + Shift Arrows Snow/Rain direction

The logfile now has this section to show witch Weather textures was loaded
(0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7)
##########################################
## Exrail Weather Extension V0.1 ##
## Load Sky & Clouds Textures ##
## WeatherType = 0 ##
##########################################

And This dump when 'saving'
##########################################
## Exrail Weather Extension V0.1 ##
## Saved Weather Parameters ##
## WeatherType = 0 ##
##########################################
Weather.FogDistanceSky = 2500
Weather.FogDistanceScenery = 2000
Weather.OvercastFactor = 0,05
Weather.OvercastFactor2 = 0
Weather.OvercastFactor3 = 0
Weather.FogColorSceneryBase.R = 141
Weather.FogColorSceneryBase.G = 156
Weather.FogColorSceneryBase.B = 235
Weather.FogColorSkyBase.R = 140
Weather.FogColorSkyBase.G = 166
Weather.FogColorSkyBase.B = 255
##########################################



Been playing with gradients and switching between Skydome textures at runtime depending on the Sun height,
it works, but off cause needs to be cross-faded over an hour to be good.
Here I'm cutting out a section from a image and blurring it to creates a nice even gradient to use for the creation of a defined one in a paint program.

Conclusion: It's easy to quickly get something that looks great for the route & season, but with the Sun so dominating it's hard to make one for all season and height(longitude) And I'm already testing WeatherType Foggy if it's winter or the rest and selects between two type of parameters definitions, so the 8 weather types could be 24 specifically designed but that's to much to do now with so much changing and having to redefine them all.
Running Scandinavian routs in the winter means low Sun and orange sky from sun rise to sundown in Open Rail, there are no blue sky as in reality, I'm considering a bitmapped Sun like FS2004/FSX does it for better control, and a Userdefined Weathertype where the parmeters can be set in a text file or windows reg at least, but that's for later.

More people should jump on coding in Open Rails just for fun, the programming language is fairly easy and the framework also, I mean just tinkering with the code to see what does what,
everybody can change a number from 3 to 2 and watch the Sun go down in size or The window Text size or what ever, write your handle in a label in Open Rails Menu.exe program just to say look what I did, this is now my version. Off cause a little prior knowledge of the C family would help, but what better reason to learn than Open Rails.

[ExRail]

After 6 hours I finally managed to get wind direction to work again on the two cloud layers, that got lost during to move to ORNYMG.
So now both windspeed and direction can also be controlled from the debug keys. At least I got some great shots during that time, witch was about to run out as was my patience, x = 180; work then 5 hours on a f... float replacing the 180 with a variable, that could be accessed in the weather definition class also.

I got lost in some of them be cause some birds was singing and combined with the morning fog and slow moving clouds the atmosphere was alluring.
The difference just some color and fog setting does on the same route season and weather is amazing. To bad that the scene only last for some hours +/- before the suns color goes astray. Going to try to render it like the Moon to see what that looks like.