Railworks America

I figured I may as well give this whole route building thing a whirl, and so far it's been going pretty well. However, asset blocks such as the one pictured here disappear way too quickly, at a distance of maybe a hundred meters or so. The actual asset trees here, Wayne's from the CVP, have a much higher draw distance and can be seen from over a mile away. This means that at the moment, all trees are being manually placed - something which isn't ideal for something based on the dense forests of New England. Is there any cure for this, or am I stuck with this issue?

Who's asset blocks are you using?

They're just the core ones - it's one of the few assets, along with the track markers and tunnel decals, that is available on any route without adding any extra assets.

That's the same one I've been using. This is just quick pic of all asset blocks.

What graphics settings are you running in game Matt? I use the same base Kuju Asset blocks, and they stay in view about 1000m before 'popping' out of sight. The scenery density and 'view distance' settings are the ones that would potentially influence this.

Its worth noting that the the irregular asset blocks, will disappear from view completely, regardless of range, if they are built with sides with very acute angles. They will pop in and out as you pan your view across the point of the acute angle. Based on your pic, I don't think that this is the case here though.

Just a FYI:

These are my settings. The same thing happens with the regular square ones as well. I'll try loading up a brand new route with a different template in a bit to see if that does anything.

I did a few quick tests, using CVP trees in an asset block, and was able to replicate Railfan722's behavior.
I substituted in some simpler 'flat panel' trees from another route and those stayed visible for a greater distance.

I think the cause might be that CVP trees have two LODs' - a high detail model used below 150m and a low detail model beyond that. I haven't seen it mentioned, but it appears Railworks requires that Asset Block models have only one LOD.

It may be that the CVP trees can't be used in Asset Blocks.


Wayne

This is good to know.

Thanks Wayne. I'll have to swap out the asset block trees for a different set, maybe the Radiomaster ones, but the CVP ones are still hands down the best on the market.

I have always used some 3D trees which are very nice for the close up trackside stuff and then used flat ones for the more distant stuff. Maybe that's the whole key. That way you can get the best of both worlds using the CVP trees and the others.

Railfan722 wrote:Thanks Wayne. I'll have to swap out the asset block trees for a different set, maybe the Radiomaster ones, but the CVP ones are still hands down the best on the market.

From my various experiments, the contents of asset blocks do not LOD, they stay at their 'base' LOD - so if there is a first LOD set for 150m that is where they will vanish at, they won't change to the 1000m (or whatever) LOD as you'd expect them to.

Also, don't forget that some assets blocks have a habit of disappearing at times, particular when the camera is close up. It tend to copy and paste the asset block for reassurance much of the time.

I don't quite understand the above comment by savv_nz. Are you saying that the asset blocks comply with settings that were applied to the scenery object initially? I have never heard of special LOD (level of detail) settings for these.

SAR704 wrote:I don't quite understand the above comment by savv_nz. Are you saying that the asset blocks comply with settings that were applied to the scenery object initially? I have never heard of special LOD (level of detail) settings for these.

A model is made, ideally, with several levels of detail, that display depending on how far from the camera the model is.
For instance, a model might display:
50m - High-Detail
100m - Mid-Detail
500m - Low-Detail
This model would display the High-Detail version until the camera was greater than 50m from it, at which point it would swap to the Mid-Detail version.

Now, if you stick this model into an Asset block, only the first (High-Detail) LOD will work. None of the others. This means once you are 50m from the object, it will vanish entirely instead of stepping down to the Mid-Detail model.

The above makes sense. I overlooked the fact that the blocks excluded varying LODs.

And I have thought of the irregular ones disappearing prematurely. But come to think of it, I have seen them vanish earlier than expected. I wasn't aware that it was to the fact that they were not standard. It is a nuisance to place multiple standard ones just to portray a group of trees that aren't spread out in an even fashion.

Even editing the positions can prove to be tedious. It seems to be a game flaw that DTG just don't care about due to the fact that they don't seem interested in making any improvements to the game editor. They are pretending that they support this roughly 13 year old game, but it's basically just an updated name and new loading screen image each year.

But looks like we are stuck with it for years until they attempt to build a new game that is more friendly towards content/scenario creation than TSW, that hopefully does NOT use UE4.