NEC TS 2012 Optimized

[dcushing]

Ok, now I'm a little bit confused. I went looking for the Lights folder in my NEC file (00000030-etc) and noticed that the most recient up date was on 10/8/2011. What was it that got updated on the 11th, and is this maybe why my NEC refuses to run at all? All scenarios go almost directly to the SBHH screen. It won't even run under the old settings (without TSX). Is is possible I have a screwed up installation, and if so, how do I fix it. I have already tried to verify the cache but that didn't work. I refuse to purchase the Acela until I have a operating route to run it on.

Duncan

[styckx]

Verifying cache is a good thing.

The lights folder isn't in the route folder, it is in assets/rsc/northeastcorridor

I should stress. If you aren't comfy with these work arounds, don't try. Verify your cache so everything is how RSC wants it and email their support team. Because if you email them and explain you did this, that and the other thing you saw on a forum from me is they will tell you don't listen to Bill ( ) and to verify your cache and email them back if you are still experiencing issues

Bill

[gtw5812]

All of those choices are/were possible through Steam settings and by maintaining backups of your game and system. I get no ads, no updates unless I ask for them, and still have RW2 running fine on my system. Also, Steam can be completely closed by exiting the small icon in your tray (except sometimes I find the latest Steam version running in my Windows Processes list even after all icons are gone from desktop/tray; I kill the process from there). Take a few minutes to explore your options.

Yes...I know that now...however, not when I first started. Working on the railroad...we just don't "kick" a boxcar into a spur, and hope that what they want. We actually ask them. Maybe before updating, a "pop up" should appear and ask you if you wish to proceed... Then without having to "cick, click click, your computer to death, and hope that you did it right, the customer can just click NO. The end. Bottom line..the product claims made, are not the ones in place..and many, people are upset with the end result.

[johnmckenzie]

Wow! Real framerate of 5fps... That's a real performance hit. Ouch!

[MugHug]

Lights folder fix on the NEC.

Seems to really help on the night drives on the route. Nearly double the FPS, but as discussed already does not do much during the day.

At least until RS optimize the engine better, it is a nice quick fix for such situations. THanks very much, styckx.

Still surprised that TS2012 does not even fully load my 4.5Hhz o/c i5-2500K, 8Gb ram and dual GTX460s in SLI (mode 2), Even maxing everything out does not cause issues with the hardware or saturate it which as most of us suspect, means the bottleneck is clearly the TSX engine.

Is it really a good idea of waiting patiently for RS to get the TSX engine utilizing our hardware fully to give better performance, or am I grabbing at straws?

Things seem to have quieted down on that side. What have we heard from RS, etc.?

[styckx]

RSC generally do not acknowledge a problem until a fix is about ready to go out or it is a fix they know can get done quickly and out quickly. I'm sure RSC are well aware of performance issues, they very well be working on a fix for all we know. If they say "We are aware the game runs bad, we are working on a fix" but that fix will take weeks, a month or more to code and test you will have people 2 days later on Facebook posting "Y NO FIX YET!! YOU SAID WORKING ON FIX, WHEN FIX COMING??????"

[gtw5812]

Lights folder fix on the NEC.

Seems to really help on the night drives on the route. Nearly double the FPS, but as discussed already does not do much during the day.

At least until RS optimize the engine better, it is a nice quick fix for such situations. THanks very much, styckx.

Still surprised that TS2012 does not even fully load my 4.5Hhz o/c i5-2500K, 8Gb ram and dual GTX460s in SLI (mode 2), Even maxing everything out does not cause issues with the hardware or saturate it which as most of us suspect, means the bottleneck is clearly the TSX engine.

Is it really a good idea of waiting patiently for RS to get the TSX engine utilizing our hardware fully to give better performance, or am I grabbing at straws?

Things seem to have quieted down on that side. What have we heard from RS, etc.?

This statement...are you saying they have put out another patch for the NEC today fixing the lights and bring up the FPS?

Thanks

[g_nash]

I don't want to get into this old chestnut of an online argument. My point was that the new TSX engine doesn't appear to allow for the usual AA settings and setting AA to x4 or even lower should increase performance (FPS) significantly. Give it a try. I'm unable to detect any difference in aliasing in the sim at the different AA settings with TSX on, and so dropping the setting to increase performance comes at no cost to visuals.

Keep your FPS around 30, and as long as the frames are rendered smoothly (with the help of a FPS limiter) and it will look like smooth and believable motion to you. That's the ticket, right?!

That's very interesting about deleting the lights folder on the NEC (which I was wanting to buy as soon as I saw it had been "optimized" for 2012...but then decided not to after reading these posts). I wonder if that will work with Horseshoe. It slows down to the proverbial 14FPS or so on my system with settings that allow the other routes to fly. I will give it a try (after backing up) when I get home. I can live without lights for smooth performance on that great route.

Fair enough , we'll forget the film and digital television stuff

AA can't be done onTSX , it's technically not possible using DX9 so best bet is FXAA , a rather poor substitute for the real deal . If you want to mess around with HSC , clone the route , load one of the freeroam scenario things , enter the world editor and delete all the ambient sounds and all rollingstock ( excluding the player train ) and go for a drive .. watch the frame counter , then go delete the lights and drive again .. watch the counter .

[artimrj]

Looking in the trackrule I see the uneveness is set to 50! I put it at 2 on my route and thought that was a little rough. You guys bouncing around might want to change this for a smoother ride. I also want to report I just made a freeroam for the NEC using some of my repaints of the stock equipment and I used the GG1 with heavy weight coaches and it ran just fine. no SBHH for me, so I guess I should be happy...

[MugHug]

This statement...are you saying they have put out another patch for the NEC today fixing the lights and bring up the FPS?

Thanks

Nope, re-read my post.

[RSAdam]

Hiya,

Another patch did indeed go out today regarding the NEC route, in relation to the release of the Amtrak Acela Express.

Regards

[Shadders]

Hello Gentlemen,

Just thought I’d say hello and take the opportunity to chime in with my thoughts on the Northeast Corridor.

I’ve been a member of UKTS for quite a while but this is my first post on Railworks America. I decided to sign up since you guys seem to have an interesting discussion going on about the “Optimised” NE Corridor. The discussion over on UKTS hasn’t really taken off yet.

I paid for the Commuter Pack, since that gave me all the recent locos along with the route. I have to say I took a look at this thread before purchase, when it was about two pages long. So I saw styckx’s comments about the route along with the tip to delete/rename the lighting folder.

But, I decided to hand over my £30 anyway.

First, with lights, I tried a free roam scenario starting in NY, I got about 25fps, which I didn’t think was too bad. Then I tried the Acela Express scenario…

Oh - My - Word!

I don’t think that I’ve ever seen anything run so badly! The frame rates are appalling, there’s no other word for it. Worse than horseshoe curve and that’s saying something! I didn’t even bother trying to use a frame rate counter that goes below 14 fps as I could count the frames. And I’ve never had this before on any other route, but the darn thing froze for over a second while diving along, loading more scenery no doubt.

So a quick rename of the Lights folder later I tried again. This time I managed 17-18fps, while it’s an improvement it’s still pretty bad.

I’ve not done much more fiddling yet, but there are two things that struck me right off the bat.

While paying with lights, I littered York Station on the Newcastle to York Modern route from Just Trains with lights by adding lights as clutter to a scenario. I really went for it, even adding lights to the street lamps near the station. I got hardly any frame rate drop. I should add these were lights I had created myself using the core lights as a template. So, either there is a huge amount of lights present on NE Corridor or there is something wrong with them.

My second observation is the scenery, there’s so much of it, and I’m not just talking about near the line, I used the 8 camera and travelled so far from the rail-road I could not even see it, even though the camera must have been at a virtual 500-1000 feet. Why add scenery out there? I mean I like scenery as much as anyone, but what’s the point of populating landscape you can’t even see from 800 feet above the train? Also there’s the quality of it, for example, right next to the track is a good to high resolution rendering of a tree, travel a mile or so away from the track and the trees there seem to be the same model, what the reasoning behind having a reasonably high resource model all the way out there? I’m sorry but I think this route had not been optimized at all. RS have added TSX features but failed to address what would seem to be fundamental problems.

Now, I know that assets that are not visible from the current camera position are not rendered, and that polygons that are not visible are also ignored, usually by a process such as hidden surface determination. But consider that the game engine still has to know about those assets and where they are in relation to the camera in order for them to be ignored. High frame rates in things like FPS games are helped because nothing is placed anywhere that the player can’t see.

It makes me wonder if anyone from RS installed this route on a PC, set everything to maximum detail and then actually played it. I can't see how they would have let it out the door with such poor performance. And if they did, and they got good frame rates, I'd love to know the specs of this mythical beast they tested it on

Anyway, it’s taken quite a while to write this criticism (well done if you read it all). I'm normally OK with RS and what they do, I feel I cant criticize the TSX engine too much as it was issued for free. But with a route I paid for (all be it at a knock down price) I do feel that something should be done to address these shortcomings, weather it needs to be done in the core engine or on the route itself I don't know.

But I’m going to end on a slightly happier note.

The locos, I think they are brilliant, the Acela especially. Just about every knob does something, such a great model. I should have read the manual a little more closely though, for the first 15 miles I was diving with the tilt isolated! And I won’t say how long it took me to work out that I should release the handbrake to start moving

Best regards,

Shad.

PC specs:
i7 980x @ 3.33GHz
16GB Corsair Dominator Ram
XFX Black ATI 5970 2GB
Xonar D2X soundcard
Windows 7 Ultimate – 64bit
I use RW3 at 1920x1200.
EDIT: Forgot to add that RW runs from it's own dedicated 128GB SSD.

[JackD]

Just got the patch Adam mentioned:

Northeast Corridor DLC optimized for Train Simulator 2012
Added TrainSim2012 lighting to AEM-7
Added TrainSim2012 lighting to Amfleet coaches
Added TrainSim2012 lighting to Philly, NYC, Newark Penn, Trenton & Metuchen stations
Added illumination to Hudson River Tunnel
Added Manual and Automatic junction infrastrucutre to track along the mainline
Added billboard signage along the length of the route
Added placeable characters
Added TrainSim 2012 rain effects to AEM-7 Cab
Added TrainSim2012 Sky dome
Added urban glow through towns along the mainline
Added super elevation on appropriate curves along the NEC mainline
Added uneven track surface physics
Added appropriate cab sway physics for AEM-7
Added more scenery around Metuchen Yard area
Added Flash loading screen
Improved track in Zoo and Philadelphia areas
Improved overhead wire gantry placement on southern end of route
Improved Trenton Station model
Improved Secaucus Station model
Improved Metropark Station model
Improved Newark Liberty Station Model and added monorail representation
Improved coupling characteristics of Amfleet coaches and AEM-7
Improved texturing under track to remove vegetation poking through
Improved city skyline and surroundings at Philadelphia
Improved AEM-7 cab texture details
Improved station clutter detail with benches and bins
Improved yard areas with manual junctions
Improved freight yard population in scenarios with more rolling stock
Fixed Sander not working via Keyboard on AEM-7
Fixed speed limit issues on Evening Clocker Scenario
Fixed fuel usage error in career scenarios
Fixed incorrect Level of Detail settings on some artwork
Fixed missing winter texture on track
Fixed incorrect AEM-7 Pantograph height
Fixed floating cars at Zoo
Fixed floating scenery along tracksideFixed Sander not working via Keyboard on AEM-7
Fixed speed limit issues on Evening Clocker Scenario
Fixed fuel usage error in career scenarios
Fixed incorrect Level of Detail settings on some artwork
Fixed missing winter texture on track
Fixed incorrect AEM-7 Pantograph height
Fixed floating cars at Zoo
Fixed floating scenery along trackside

Thanks Adam et al

[MattW]

So what was in the newest NEC patch? The "changelog" on Steam still just shows the big NEC update to TS2012.

[styckx]

Nice post Shadders! Welcome!

One new feature I don't see mentioned.

Go to #3 view on an Amfleet train and release the brakes. Wait.... And.. Psssssssssst. Air release on the Amfleets. Cool stuff.