nm Versus nmc Conundrum

[tntrainer]

Hello,
Can anyone shed some light on the game deciding if it uses the nm high resolution repaint file versus the nmc? Is this a game setting for high resolution or related to some other setting on the computer? I have my in game sliders slid over on higher quality at the largest screen resolution.

Many thanks for your thoughts,

[wacampbell]

According to my notes, _nmc will be used when the scenery quality slider is set below ~80%.

There is some concern that compressed normal maps can cause visual artifacts in the rendered model. So the Railworks Blueprint Editor avoids compressing _nm files to provide maximum fidelity. However these files can become large and can impact loading time and GPU board memory. So the BPE also generates the _nmc compressed normal maps for lower spec computers.

Truthfully, in my experiments, I don't see a difference visually between the _nmc and _nm version files.

[tntrainer]

Thank you for your reply,
I can understand the need for the two files in order that folks with average computers can enjoy the asset and not suffer low FPS, hopefully. Thus the need to repaint both files if you want to share the repaint with others. I was curious what the benchmark was where it changed from nm to nmc.

Thanks again for your kind and prompt response,