Railworks America

Hey guys, its been awhile since I've been on here. Looking for a refresher on getting scenery to appear or "load in" from a farther distance. I know I've done this before with the loading dock cranes on my CWRY route but I done went and forgot everything now lol.

So basically I'm working on a route that runs right next to a downtown city (Charlotte, NC actually). You can clearly see the skyscrapers from far off, especially in Charlotte yard as it looks directly toward the buildings. The main problem that I'm having is that the buildings appear way to late, and disappear way to close. (It looks very unnatural) The buildings in question are from a variety of sources, so I know I'll have to track down each one and edit them individually.

Here's my goal... I want these buildings to be able to load in from 10 miles away (if that's possible) so that when I'm running a train into the city you can see the buildings stand out above the horizon. But the question is.... is that possible? I remember being able to edit how far away you could get for the buildings (or objects for that matter) to stay visible until they disappear. But I want them to load in from the same distance as they disappear from if that makes any sense. No sense in doing this if I can't get the buildings to load in from 10 miles off as I'm running a train into the city.

With that being said, once I figure out what files need to be edited and what line of code needs to be changed, are the measurements in meters? If so I guess I would need to change the load distance to 16093.4 m.

Hi ET44C4,
welcome back here !

The only two things you can do here:
1.) Add the buildings to the "global scenery" by hooking the globe in the scenery properties:


2.) For you alone or for others if you may distribute the scenery blueprint:
- changing LOD level. There is a section in the blueprint like this:

Code: Select all

               <DetailLevelGenerationRange>
                  <cSceneryRenderBlueprint-sDetailLevelGenerationRange>
                     <HighestLevel_1isHighest d:type="sInt32">1</HighestLevel_1isHighest>
                     <LowestLevel_10isLowest d:type="sInt32">10</LowestLevel_10isLowest>
                  </cSceneryRenderBlueprint-sDetailLevelGenerationRange>
               </DetailLevelGenerationRange>


As I am not quite sure about what provides maximum visibility (I asume it's 10 / 10) I ask you to check different values. The pair 1 / 10 lets the TS decide itself.
- If you even may change a model, then you could change the distance in the geopcdx:
In the section <LODController> there are 2 distances which set when a model becomes visible. Experiment with these values.

The only pitty is: As I know, maximum possible distance in TS is about 7km, not the 16km you need.

Cheers

Kris

Thanks for the reply Kris! I'll definitely try these out and post my discoveries here.

I'm curious, what exactly does the global scenery do?

Normally all placed assets are saved in a bin in the route folder under Scenery\ . This is tile based, heck the numbering. All assets written in such a bin are loaded when the player enters the adjacent tile. Even assets with a larger visibility are only loaded when you cross the border of the adjacent tile.
When you hook the globe the asset is written in the single file Routes\RouteNumber\Scenery\GlobalScenery.bin which is completely loaded at the start of a scenario. Then you can see the asset at the maximum possible distance.
You can test this by moving all *.bin from Scenery\ to a safe place outside the TS and leave only GlobalAssets.bin there.

Interesting, thanks for the information!

The global scenery trick worked on only a few buildings, but I edited the other buildings' geo files to get them to work. It'll take some more trial and error, but I think I'm getting there! Thanks for the help Kris.

That is looking good ! You are welcome.
Kris