Railworks Technical Update

[micaelcorleone]

RailSimulator.com Technical Update
See youtube video to accompany the text:http://www.facebook.com/l.php?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DlBF0pnookwk&h=d9b22

RailSimulator.com strives to bring ongoing technical advances to trainsimming, not only to reward our loyal fans for their on-going support but to push train-simming forward in terms of realism and enjoyment. With this in mind we have prepared this short technical briefing to let you all know about the technical developmentswe are currently working on. We are very excited about what lays ahead for us and our fans, and we hope you are too. Best wishes, Paul Jackson.

Lighting:
In the current version of RailWorks we use a very simple 3 point lighting system. We have a sun (or moon at night) light, a back light which mirrors this and an up-light which simulates reflection of light back from the ground; these lights move slowly around the world with the change in time of day.

One of the main visual goals is to implement a dynamic lighting system. This will allow us to have many more lights in the world, e.g. train lights, platform lighting and internal lighting.

The first step towards this has been the reworking of the terrain system. This is required because illumination of the terrain has always been done using the CPU. This works in RailWorks2 because the lighting is not changing every frame and so this can be calculated infrequently. The development work done so far allows this to be moved to the GPU (Graphics Processing Unit) so that lighting can be updated in real time. This is what can be seen in our speeded-up demo (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lBF0pnookwk) .It also allows the lighting to update ‘on the fly’ when using the terrain editor, and this also improves the response to changes in the weather in-game. Additionally with the terrain GPU lit we are improving the shadowing.

Draw Distance:
RailWorks currently renders 4km x 4km of high resolution textured terrain plus a further 6km of lower resolution 'distant mountain' terrain. In other words, when exploring your surroundings at the moment, only the nearest 4km are recreated in high detail which moves along continuously with you. By utilizing improvements in PC specs and refining the underlying code, we will be extending the draw distance further so that a much greater amount of the surrounding area is highly detailed, increasing the visual realism of the simulator.

Block Assets:
This development is intended both as a way to improve your ability to create routes quickly, and also as an efficient way of rendering large blocks of identical assets. With the new block assets, when creating a route you simply place down and drag out a rectangle on the landscape which defines an area of identical scenic assets. These assets are then placed automatically, following the terrain, and are rendered very efficiently. The main and most obvious use for block assets is laying out blocks of trees and undergrowth, or potentially city and town terraces and other uniform sets of buildings.

Online Play:
We are please to announce the RailSimultor.com boffins have started work on online multiplayer technology. While still in its early stages multiplayer game elements are likely to include Driver, Fireman, Signalling operations with up to 6 players and VOIP. We expect to go to BETA testing at the end April.

source:http://www.facebook.com/pages/RailSimulatorcom/258680273090?v=app_10339498918

[Dan]

Sounds good. But cue lots of 'but it didn't fix my pet peeve, wah, wah, wah' complaints at you know where.

[BNSF650]

This is very good news..Maybe now i can run a train at night ..lol

[Shortliner]

Sounds good. But cue lots of 'but it didn't fix my pet peeve, wah, wah, wah' complaints at you know where.

Oh that has already started.

Personally I love this update, and I can't wait to drive my train at night, in a Multiplayer session!

[micaelcorleone]

I think with this update Railworks will definitely replace that other sim as the number one. It'll be the state of the art trainsimulator and I think a lot of mocking will come to an end.

[kin3]

All of this sounds real good. RW keeps getting better and better.

[Shortliner]

I think with this update Railworks will definitely replace that other sim as the number one. It'll be the state of the art trainsimulator and I think a lot of mocking will come to an end.

Oh you know as well as I do that people will always, and I do mean always find something to complain about.

However, I don't care about that. RailWorks does what I need a train simulator to do, and that's all that matters to me. :)

[Samwolf]

Don't really care too much about the multi-player but the other changes sound good.

[thecanadianrail]

yay, online!

[Andimax]

; Night scenarios with interior lights, yippiee!

About multiplayer:
Maybe very funny to have other drivers and operaters on the same route to talk with. "Freight 753; the route at milepost 45 is still blocked; proceed to Somewhere track 7, and wait for further directions." "Freight 753, copy that".

Draw distance:
I think its ok as it is; so they hopefully will give us the oppurtunity to set the drawdistance in game, or it probably will slow down the game on older PC systems.

And ... NO, no other complainments here,sir!

[Toripony]

While it all sounds good, guess which part I am most anxious for?

trees trees trees trees trees trees trees, oh i am so sick of plopping trees trees trees trees

Nice to see another US east coast road fan here, Andi.

Tori

[micaelcorleone]

From a comment Paul Jackson (CEO of RS.com) made on Facebook:
"(...)First thing is to go Multi core (just done that in the dev code), then we need to add tons of new tech on top of that... its happening, huge amount of work. I am VERY excited by the first drafts of the code I am seeing here."

[thecanadianrail]

that's great to here! i wonder how long it will take to download when the update comes out???? it will definetly be longer than any previous update.

[Beakie]

As for me.

Multiplayer is meh probably won't use it....

Other features and tweaks mentioned have defintely been on my wishlist

Does this mean the update won't come out until after the Multiplayer beta is finished in April or May? I certainly hope not. but, you never know.

Beakie

[canadiannational1996]

multiplayer would be very very cool for railworks and i cant wait till it comes out:)...but i was thinking that how would multiplayer work of a player had a diffrent locomotive that the others dont have and what if a player changed his route for example added more track?