Railworks America

And I thought that NEC was a tough cookie! But at least I can get 17-20 FPS when out of the main terminals.

WCML is a nightmare. Hardly ever break through the 13fps barrier, even when away from built-up areas. And I'm using lower settings than NEC.

I'm just finished with any stupid RW3 'optimised' stuff. 'Optimised' just means "Dont bother even trying unless you have a monster rig - and we mean MONSTER! (that means read the 'recommended system' guidelines, then multiply it by four, then multiplay that by the number you first thought of)"

Pa!

I've got a monster rig and I still have gripes with DLC. WCML is pretty cool, especially at maxed FPS... but it's riddled with bugs and I gave up on it about a week after I bought it. If you want the best out of RW, make your own route. That way you can not only build it around the limitations of your computer, but you can do it right for the game play and not for the money.

i don't need to build one - there's plenty of freeware out there. A few I remember give WCML as a requirement, so I'll have a look at those next. Anyway - I have no probs running the RW2 routes. I think HSC is the only RW3 route that runs with any kind of good perfoemance on my rig.

btw: what's your max CPU utilisation when running any route on your system?

Well I've logged an official complaint for what it's worth, as the screenshots in the steam page for WCML are over a (laughable) list of system specs suggestive of what's required to reproduce the quality in the screenshots (and still be 'playable' - IE: FPS > 18)

OS: Windows XP / Vista
Processor: 1.7 GHz or faster
Memory: 512 MB RAM
Graphics: 64 MB with Pixel Shader 2.0* (AGP PCIe only)
DirectX®: Version 9.0c (Included)
Hard Drive: 6 GB of free space
Sound: Direct X 9.0c compatible

Since I turned into a bat driver (since Nov/2011 I've been played only at night) I started to tweak the game according to nighty trips, but only past week, and due to new core update (the game is running far better, at least to me), I surprisedly got a very nice (and quite unbelievable) smooth performance even within 10-14fps range in most of routes! (people playing over the 30fps barrier please don't laugh!).

Someone posted about the difference between framerate (the time in miliseconds to render a frame) and frames per second (how much rendered frames is loaded by second) and how the "shader" option effects the smoothness when playing (even at low fps) because it impacts the framerate more than the fps. I also have a medium rig, and what I'm doing with excelent improvements is setting the in-game options to High or Highest, and then (with Custom option) reducing to lower settings especially the Shader (don't confuse with Shadows) and others that don't make relevant difference at night: Water, Passenger, Distance View, Terrain texture etc.

In my country we have a say (in literal translation): Who doesn't have dog, hunts with cat. (likely, in English: one makes the best of a bad job).

Cheers,
Lisboa.

Machinist wrote:In my country we have a say (in literal translation): Who doesn't have dog, hunts with cat. (likely, in English: one makes the best of a bad job).

Cheers,
Lisboa.

When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

I have done so much with so little for so long, I can now do anything at all with absolutely nothing. US Marine Corps.

LOL :)

Well I managed to eek out quite a nice little performance improvement on the NEC (after reading a post somewhere). Disabling SHADOWCAST for headlights (and 'tail-lights'). Then I edited all my locos which had a HEADLIGHT.BIN file and did the same there. I was starting to get real-nice performance in the NEC, even upto 13fps at the terminals with a few AI present. I felt so good about getting this improvement I decide to risk another RW3 'optimised' route, thinking nothing could get as heavy as the NEC.

HOW WRONG I WAS!

To add insult to injury, the recommended system spec for running this route (see above, or the actual steam page) is little better than that of an electronic piggy-bank (well... OK... make that a smart-phone).

Maybe one day RSC will manage to teach their game to be a little more sociable with the CPU and its lil family of cores - then we might actually start getting better FPS all over.

BTW: NEC performance boost thread: http://forums.uktrainsim.com/viewtopic. ... C#p1519818

This tip to disable casting shadows of locomotives' headlight is not advisable unless you indeed need to do that, for example if you are running under (say) 10-12fps or less. This is because when the headlights are not casting shadows the projected lights go through the objects lighting up everything through and beyond the vehicles, which causes a weird visual effect. In LEP there is an especial version pack named HPFS (higher fps), in which locomotive headlight doesn't cast shadow and therefore provide same fps doesn't matter if headlight is on/of, however is to be used only as the last desesperate attempt when the question is play or not to play with TSX on.
If I was at home I'd post some pics of the weird effect of headlights when not casting shadows, on NEC also... But it is easy to you check yourself: ride a loco with "rearlight" like a HSC PRR GP-7 coupled to empty hoppers at night, and you'll understand and see what I meaning.

This is the weird effect when the headlight is not casting shadows (is litting up through the vehicles), therefore, as I said before, IMHO is strongly not recommended unless you really need to run with TSX on.