Railworks America

The program has excellent objects, rolling stock, structures and vegetation. However, the ground textures are out of focus. That is, they are very blurred. You see this as the significant difference between a track's built in ballast and the texture it sets on. Maybe I have a bad setup or something but the fuzzy textures are quite poor when compared to other games.

The sharpness of ground textures will vary according to what type of terrain is being depicted and the quality of the original texture sets. The biggest problem, however, is that each texture tile can only be 256 pixels x 256 pixels and that tile represents about an area about 8 metres x 8 metres in the game so there is a bit of a problem here in getting a really sharp texture when close up.

In practice the terrain is generally viewed from a reasonable distance and looks quite sharp and clear so it is only really close up views that don't look so good. Route builders can get over this to a certain extent by covering ground that might be seen close up with foliage, buildings or even modelled 'ground' and in the situation of track ballast not matching the terrain it is on, I have in the past created an undertrack loft which sits under the track section with a matching ballast texture and the added advantage of being able to create a clear defined edge between the ballast and the adjoining game generated terrain.

I think it unlikely that there will be any change to the way in which terrain textures are created and rendered by the program for a number of reasons, particularly because the current arrangement is relatively gentle on the graphics engine.

Don't forget to check out your TS2014 graphics settings as if they are set too low you may be not be seeing the best rendering of textures which would not be too helpful.

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Does the game seriously not support a higher resolution square texture file for ground textures? Wow.. I can only imagine how beautiful the game would be with 1024x1024 or 2048x2048 ground textures.

BNSFdude wrote:I can only imagine how beautiful the game would be with 1024x1024 or 2048x2048 ground textures.

And how much overhead that would add.

Doesn't bother me none. I get 32 FPS on max settings as is.

If you have a rig that is built to support Hi Def textures then that cool, but RSC has to design and build a product with an average I can only imagine so more can enjoy the product. And besides, how sharp do they really need to be when you're driving a train?

When driving you are only 15ft or so above the ground texture. Not every train is moving at 90mph. I get excellent FPS with everything max'd.
i5 2500K 3.3 GHZ nVidia CTX 550 1gbyte speed and 1 gbyte memory.
From cab height at 20mph how the ground looks becomes part of the experience. For some that is of no interest and others may spend hours perfecting the realism only to be stymied with lo-res textures. There is another train program where the ground textures are in abundance and at a very good resolution Seems that RW would benefit from slider control improvements in this area.

Look and see what resolution their textures are at just for S&G.