Railworks America

Hello all,

I'm plugging away on the Siskyou Route, and have began scenery on one of focal points of the line; the looping eastbound descent from Siskiyou Summit to Ashland. In this area there are several miles of track where three 'tiers' of trackage are visible simultaneously from upper level of the grade. The route overlooks a valley about 1/3 of a mile wide. The real area is heavily forested, and I'm nervous that this section may be the 'backbreaker' for some computers that arent packing a lot of firepower in the RAM or GPU department.

Is there a rule of thumb for how many 'draws' or 'assets' in view at one time start to get excessive and bog down the average system? Are there any tricks to giving the appearance of a fuller forest without cranking up the asset block density?

I've been playing with asset blocks for the area, and my mid-range system is starting to drop FPS with only about half of the area forested. I want to make the route accessible for all to run, but don't want to compromise too far on the authenticity of the scenery.

Hi,

In my experience, the TS engine is quite forgiving when it comes to scenery density, even given its age and DX9 base. I wouldn't worry too much about asset count in general. Places like the one you're describing, where several highly packed tiles are going to be adjacent to each other will require some more care, but even so: the area you're working in is forested, so how much worse than a switching yard next to a busy downtown could it be?

BoostedFridge wrote:Is there a rule of thumb for how many 'draws' or 'assets' in view at one time start to get excessive and bog down the average system?

The general rule is the obvious one: the fewer the better. Even so, you can have tiles with 5,000 or more assets on them and nobody will complain. It's generally more important to keep the number of unique assets per tile in check than the total number of objects placed. So for example, placing a thousand houses, using the same five house models all over again, is much better for performance than placing a hundred unique house models. When working on highly stuffed tiles it'll also pay off to generally avoid complex / poorly optimized models.

BoostedFridge wrote:I've been playing with asset blocks for the area, and my mid-range system is starting to drop FPS with only about half of the area forested.

That, in my experience, shouldn't happen if you're using the right trees and density settings. What I'm usually doing is stacking five or a few more asset blocks on top of each other, each with a different tree and a density setting between 2,000 and 5,000. Then select the stack of asset blocks, and copy/paste place it all over the place.

Only use 2D trees for the asset blocks and there shouldn't be a noticable dropoff in performance even when you fill almost the entire tile with it. 3D trees should be restricted to the immediate trackside area, usually two or three "rows" of them are enough. The area around the horseshoe curve east of Skykomish (Foss River Trestle) on Stevens Pass might be a good example of a similar situation.

Cheers
Michael

One of my tricks while redoing Donner, is to eliminate overlapping asset blocks and use the ability to place more than one type of tree in one block. There are two boxes for that in the right flyout when placing an asset block.
I also put the 3D trees no more than 2 rows thick, except for an occasional small area.
I blend asset blocks together with individual trees and shrubs rather than have them overlap.

That little trick works for when looking up or down a slope.
You can also paint the terrain under the trees with blend of dark greens, browns etc farther from the track. You seem to know that trick already. Unless of course it's supposed to be a sparsely wooded rock face.

With the Donner Pass assets there are pine tree rows that I use away from the track, to plug up a scene that seems to "airy" . Those row trees look really bad when right next to the track though.