Railworks America

You can make higher resolution ground textures, I think they have a disproportionate effect on fps though. If you've seen any of the tech demo vids you'll know there's higher resolution ground mesh coming along with a new rendering engine, so hopefully there will be higher res textures too.

One thing we need to be mindful of is that unless all of us are going to go out and buy race machines that this higher and higher definitions and more and more detail will lead to severe degradation of out fps. At that point most of us will just be turning details down and giving back most of what might be gained.

Buzz

Well, the update will finally use DX.. 9 or 10, either way it will make much better use of what you already have - currently most of the work is done on the CPU when you've got a perfectly good graphics card not being fully used, and I think Derek mentioned once that a great majority of the work is the landscape. Anything new there is going to make a huge difference.

I think that's a good observation and well described, Dick. I wonder if improving the pc platform utilization will result in our routes looking and running better overnight? Or if this new tech will be something where we need to use new tools and graphics to gain the most benefit? In any case, the improvements you suggest would also reduce route production time, especially in the case of the COA where I expend considerable time and effort on the landscape "painting". The overspray problem is both evil and necessary. My greatest wish is that someday 3D art can get rid of the gridwork of little tiles/surfaces.

Tori

If I remember correctly, the next version is to make use of multiple cores, dividing the work load. Such as physics on one core, sound on another, or something to that effect. I do hope in the future that there is a recompile to 64 bit allowing one program to utilize more that 2 Gig of RAM.