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An Australian Forum Friend made me aware of this outfit:http://www.transportgiant.com/?lang=en&rid=982Now that is a good example of what can be achieved ! Also very interesting to learn about what is involved in the making of such Graphics Software. O t t o
>If you zoom out far enough as those screenshot even the poor >looking MSTS1 will look like that. I agree for the most part. These are the pre-rendered animations and images ala Age of Mythology or Age of Empires.It's easy to get fantastic looking graphics using this style of development. It's basically a 2D engine using sprites consisting of 3D pre-rendered images.It's a totally different concept from a 3D environment. While I don't believe MSTS 1 graphics would look this good pulled back, it's not realistic to think MSTS 2 would be able to achieve this quality. -Jeff
Looks like some competition for RT3 as it is clearly a biseness sim and not an operations sim. Thanks for the heads up this the first I have heard of this.Be Seeing you. Michael
Jeff,not knowing much about the inner workings of Graphics code would the DirectX-9 Graphics Engine used for FS-2004 be capable of giving us similar Graphics Quality in MSTS if coded for it ?O t t o
Graphics wise MSTS 1 could do well if it was optimized for Dx9. However it isn't, and if it was the performance gains would not be much better than they are now depending on what sort of video card you are using. In my own testing I have determined that one of the biggest slowdowns to the MSTS engine is Alpha channels, this combined with the MSTS not having hardware T&L support, video cards sort of "top out" performance wise and your processor comes into play in better frame rates.I have yet to figure out where, but there appears to be a bottle neck of some sort in the sim. I am running a P4 2.7ghz computer with a GeForce 2 MX 400 (yes its old I know) I get typically a max for 30-32frames a second even using completely low polygon models or just an loco. Adding freight cars has nearly no effect until I add say 40+ cars to the train. I did a test of this to see how the sim handled polygons and the results were suprising. I setup two trains like this and tested them on Jon Lewis' Alpine Tunnel Route. All graphics slider set to "best" with dynamic shadows turned off. I then viewed from the rear of the train looking forward to the loco.Train 1 Loco: A.A. Denny Freight: 15 D&RGW boxcars with a polycount of 2,000 with a single LOD of 1000 29fps averageTrain 2 Loco: A.A. Denny Freight: 15 D&RGW "art" quality boxcars with a polycount of 8,000 each with a single LOD of 1000 24fps averageNot seeing much of a change in framerate I added a car with alpha channels, my DSP&P waycar which has a poly count of around 4000.Train 1 dropped in frame rate to about 22fps Train 2 dropped in frame rate to about 17fpsI was sort of shocked to see that one single car damaged the frame rate so much. I began to realise that when I get my worst possible frame rates it was in dense areas in a route. Its not because of a high number of trees or buildings, but a high number of alpha transparencies in a given scene. if you think about it, in a given frame in a heavily foreted route you're going to see around 100-200 trees? Given the fact that a single tree is 4 polygons or 2 faces this would mean a heavy forest would have the effect of adding a single 400-800 polygon model to a consist and viewing the entire train in one scene, normally this wouldn't be a huge issue. I believe that the problem stems from MSTS not being able to handle rendering alpha channels behind alpha channels very well as would be seen in forests or towns.Or course all of this is pure speculation on my part based on my findings. -=Andrew=-Northern California Narrow Gauge Model Builders http://www.western-spirit.org/trainsim/
Actually, the biggest drag on the MSTS graphics engine isn't alpha textures... it's intersecting polygons. And all of the default foliage in the sim is built of - wanna guess?