Acleantrack2.ace - jaggies, flashing, marching ants

LAST EDITED ON Aug-19-02 AT 02:02 AM (EDT)

I think I found a new trick to the rail textures, to get rid of the little white "marching ants" that you see from certain angles. There are a few different default rails, all of them look too wide and squared off, and from certain angles they give you these little white "jaggies", even if you're apathetic enough about framerates to enable FSAA.
I discovered this while trying to narrow down the appearance of the rail tops, thought I oversprayed the white areas with dark paint, and went back with the white to clean it up.

Thinking I had overdone it, I started over with a fresh copy of acleantrack2, and noticed the white jaggies were there in the original.So I loaded it up in TGAtool2 again, this time I used the color replacer to replace all the white blank area with a dark gray.That's maybe too dark, now I get some black on the distant curves, but I can adjust that, and at least we now know where the distant rail texture comes from, namely the blank areas.Obviously I want more color in there, but replacing the white with a light gray will get rid of that white sawtooth effect.

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RE: Acleantrack2.ace - jaggies, flashing, marching ants, smmille1, Aug-19-02, 08:22 AM, (1) RE: Acleantrack2.ace - jaggies, flashing, marching ants, sniper297, Aug-19-02, 11:23 AM, (2) RE: Acleantrack2.ace - jaggies, flashing, marching ants, smmille1, Aug-19-02, 12:54 PM, (3) RE: Acleantrack2.ace - jaggies, flashing, marching ants, sniper297, Aug-19-02, 10:14 PM, (4) RE: Acleantrack2.ace - jaggies, flashing, marching ants, 3DRailHound, Aug-20-02, 00:22 AM, (5) RE: Acleantrack2.ace - jaggies, flashing, marching ants, jleslie, Aug-20-02, 06:58 AM, (6) RE: Acleantrack2.ace - jaggies, flashing, marching ants, smmille1, Aug-20-02, 08:15 AM, (7) RE: Acleantrack2.ace - jaggies, flashing, marching ants, Hawk, Aug-20-02, 04:04 PM, (8) RE: Acleantrack2.ace - jaggies, flashing, marching ants, sniper297, Aug-20-02, 10:35 PM, (9) RE: Acleantrack2.ace - jaggies, flashing, marching ants, jpmurd, Aug-20-02, 10:45 PM, (10) RE: Acleantrack2.ace - jaggies, flashing, marching ants, blue comet, Aug-20-02, 11:08 PM, (11) RE: Acleantrack2.ace - jaggies, flashing, marching ants, sniper297, Aug-20-02, 11:25 PM, (12) RE: Acleantrack2.ace - jaggies, flashing, marching ants, jpmurd, Aug-20-02, 11:53 PM, (13) RE: Acleantrack2.ace - jaggies, flashing, marching ants, sniper297, Aug-21-02, 02:18 AM, (14) RE: Acleantrack2.ace - jaggies, flashing, marching ants, smmille1, Aug-21-02, 11:29 AM, (15) RE: Acleantrack2.ace - jaggies, flashing, marching ants, Hawk, Aug-22-02, 05:48 AM, (16) RE: Acleantrack2.ace - jaggies, flashing, marching ants, jerseycentral, Aug-22-02, 01:30 PM, (17) RE: Acleantrack2.ace - jaggies, flashing, marching ants, smmille1, Aug-22-02, 02:04 PM, (18) RE: Acleantrack2.ace - jaggies, flashing, marching ants, CNfavorite, Aug-22-02, 03:50 PM, (19) RE: Acleantrack2.ace - jaggies, flashing, marching ants, sniper297, Aug-22-02, 07:24 PM, (20)

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LAST EDITED ON Aug-19-02 AT 08:28 AM (EDT)

I could make a comment here as to what's happening, but then, you should already know what I'm going to say. But I'll do it anyway.The problem -once again- is makeace not mipping properly. Since it more or less smears the textures the farther away the mip is, it manages to smear the white into the region that's actually mapped to the rail. so you see white sneaking in. ScottEdit: Check your email, Jim.

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OK, I beamed it aboard this morning, Scotty. The previous one worked just fine:
Before, orange tint in the distance;
After, looks much better. Only problem is that's 1,413 kilobytes, and if you're planning to upload a route with it that's a hell of a space hog in the zip. Unless you're distributing on CDs or putting in a "sorry, DSL and cable customers only" restriction, it's gotta be compressed somehow. I tried it with both TGAtool2 (Compress, patch #1 makace, no DXT) and using Route Riter's ace compression, either way it wipes out the remip and goes back to the way it was before, and only compresses to 950k or so.
"Compromise" is a dirty word among people who consider themselves serious artists, fortunately I don't take anything seriously, so I look at:
1. How good does it look close up,
2. What does it look like from the incab view (usually crappy, the cutoff angle gives that blurry middle distance texture)
3. How much space would it take in a zip (PO&N5 track texture is a 1 bit alpha, don't look as good but it compressed a lot smaller)
4. What does it look like when moving (Nvidia, flashing/crawling/rippling/dazzling/sparkling, ick)
5. WHAT DOES IT DO TO FRAMERATES?!That last is one thing many people overlook, all the model railroads I built in the past were designed for operation, not still-life photography, so where compromises were necessary for playing and ease of maintenance (keep the track and switch points clean, no dead zones or jerky motion, please) I made the compromises without any teeth gnashing.With all that in mind, I sent your remipit to stand in the corner and think about improving it's performance, and used the old method of spritzing the lower right corner with dark brown and gray, reducing color depth to 32k colors, and exporting with Zlib compression (if that's what TGAtool2 uses when DXT is turned off, I never did get that clear). That nets me 693k, and it don't look too bad.

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LAST EDITED ON Aug-19-02 AT 12:56 PM (EDT)

Makeace can get it down to 693k? Wow. That's still using ZLib compression, which is the same as what Martin's acecomp (the thing with Route Riter) uses. It might be that makeace's bad mipping is good for ZLib compression (same colors all in a row in a scanline).If you really want to save space, try a 256x256. it doesn't really make that big of a difference(Edit: appearance-wise, that is). I'd bet a remipped 256x256 still looks better than the default 512x512, and it'll be smaller, too. Give that a try, I dare ya.
1. well...
2. better...
3. less...
4. about as good as anything with horizontal lines does on an NVidia board
5. More! Faster! Better!

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Can never resist a dare, so I did it. You might have something there, the uncompressed 256x256 is only 355k, and with the remipit there's really no detectable blurring with the 50% size reduction. (I tried that with the forest region weeds, from 256 down to 128, and they were really pixelated!)Here's the 256x256 remipped uncompressed textures:And the incab view, which is pretty good too:I also found something else, I thought everything looked kind of dim so I cranked up my brightness and contrast, and that didn't improve anything. When I was changing glasses I noticed it was a lot brighter, so I got some Windex and cleaned my glasses, big improvement. While I was at it I sprayed some on the monitor screen and cleaned off a 3 month coating of nicotine film, and that was so much brighter I decided to clean my eyeballs too. Didn't work, Windex in the eyes hurts like hell, and actually makes everything blurrier.Anyway, when my nose stops running and I can see again, I'm gonna head over to Nvidia, I hear they got a new driver that gets rid of the dazzle effect.

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>I also found something else, I thought everything looked
>kind of dim so I cranked up my brightness and contrast, and
>that didn't improve anything. When I was changing glasses I
>noticed it was a lot brighter, so I got some Windex and
>cleaned my glasses, big improvement. While I was at it I
>sprayed some on the monitor screen and cleaned off a 3 month
>coating of nicotine film, and that was so much brighter I
>decided to clean my eyeballs too. Didn't work, Windex in the
>eyes hurts like hell, and actually makes everything
>blurrier.
>
>Anyway, when my nose stops running and I can see again, I'm
>gonna head over to Nvidia, I hear they got a new driver that
>gets rid of the dazzle effect. LOL!And the track looks great, and roger that on heading over to Nvidia, and thanks for the good laugh..hope you are feeling better, heheheBest regards,
Brad Brownwww.3DTrainStuff.com

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<After, looks much better. Only problem is that's 1,413 kilobytes, and if you're planning to upload a route with it that's a hell of a space hog in the zip.>That's fine, don't include it in the zip, just make it available here - I only have to download it once.
That's the best looking track texture I've seen so far. Looks good close, looks good far. How is it on framerates?Jeff Leslie

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Exactly the same as any other track texture - it's just a texture. That's the fun part. Anyone tried the new driver yet? And Jim, didja try fixing acleantrack2.ace yet? You could probably do the same thing to it. I just wish I had more time to mess around with this stuff. If you wanted to get fancy, you could probably put a gradient from the edge of the railhead color to the side of the rail color in that little gap, and then just flip that little section and copy it to the other side of the railhead. That ought to cover you from any minor size changes in the mapping.

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OK! Sniper. What are you, some kinda junkie dealer? Teasing us with these new textures.
When can we get them?
I bid five (5) cases of coconuts.
Awright! Awright. And a Villa Nova Pizza.
What? You want root beer, too.

Hawk
It's the "Orange Blossom Special" bringing my baby home.

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Guess I oughtta upload them, they're actually starting to look pretty good. A little funky from some angles depending on the lighting, so maybe they need a little more tweaking, but to me they are a lot more realistic than the KUJU krap.

Attachments

http://www.train-sim.com/dcforum/User_files/3d62fc5c518579a1.jpg

http://www.train-sim.com/dcforum/User_files/3d62fc6751bae81d.jpg

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Something you might want to put on your to do list. The standard water textures are too dark. and the AWE textures and Watertex2 textures give you a strobe effect especially on Routes like the BlueRidge Sub where the river is next to you most of the time. Doesn't have to be animated, just a "little" bit more blue, or lighter color than the orig. If it's already been done just point me in the right direction. Thanks, John

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sniper,How about this for a track texture!Its Rock Island train # 12 at Seneca, Illinois, March 1976Bob S.Hope this pic posts!

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http://www.train-sim.com/dcforum/User_files/3d6303876ebca8a8.jpg

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Yeah, that's nice, what I'm trying to do with my weed forest regions. I'm in Chicago, where the hell is Seneca, Illinois? Thought I knew all the little towns, that's a new one on me.
Hmmm, my "to do" list is already 18 miles long, I gotta buy a shredder. Unfortunately that flashing effect from certain angles is a KUJU bug, it happens with any water and any moving train, just more pronounced with certain colors and particularly with the big drivers on steam engines. Has to do with the krappy KUJU way the alpha transparencies are assigned priorities, when the alpha that makes the wheels round instead of square gets in the same picture with the transparencies from the water, the rotating alpha channel on the wheels makes the water flash. I got an Nvidia card (and no, the new driver makes no difference that I can see), so I get dazzling/rippling/crawling/flashing on things like building roofs and freight cars too at some angles. Maybe they made the water too dark for that reason, who knows.
As far as pointing you in the right direction, TGAtool2 from http://fly.to/mwgfx , freeware ace editing tool. Worst trouble with somebody else doing it for you, they really can't adjust for your taste, only you can do that. So what color is water, anyway? Pacific is blue, Atlantic is gray from what I saw. Here's one with the shadow in PSP-7 adjusted to a little bluer, and the brightness turned up 10%, just paste it into the \Envfiles\Textures folder on the route you're hacking. Wouldn't be surprised if it flashes more tho, since it's a lighter shade of blue.

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http://www.train-sim.com/dcforum/User_files/3d63083f0c3b84fc.zip

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The bugs do abound don't they?
Thanks Sniper, I'll try all of the above. And keep up the great work, you are doin a GREAT job. Sounds like you really know what your'e doin most of the time. John

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Only by process of elimination, I've been trying everything that DON'T work for over a year now. 2000 monkeys typing on 2000 typewriters for 2000 years theory, sooner or later something has to finally make sense.

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here's your new catch phrase:
Jim "Sniper" Ward: Better than 2000 monkeys with typewriters...

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Lookin' Good!HawkIt's the "Orange Blossom Special" bringing my baby home.

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that looks hot! are you planning on a "snow" texture?

CURRENT CNJ ROUTES:
Newark & New Jersey
CNJ Southern Sub-Division
Lehigh Valley
Any others? Tell me about them!

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Yeah, Jim. And how are you going to explain THAT in the mine?

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Kudos again Sniper! And you mentioned 'krappy KUJU' - we bringforth, bug, and bitch about MS and/or other gear/route developers, but Kuju seems totally out of the loop? Is that MS that has to take these issues to Kuju and return with their bug fix. Or do they have a site with F.A.Q's and download enhancers/upgrades? Or does that fall back on a system thing to the user? If we all had 512MB Pentium 5's with 300GB HD's - Kuju would be off the hook?Just trying to get my head around these situations still?

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Man, go away for a day and the questions pile up!
Well, lessee here, welcome to the land of caveat emptor, MS/KUJU got your money, they ain't even remotely interested in earning it after the transaction. So it's pretty much up to us rabid foaming trainfans to fix it up, kinda like my dad always used to go out and spend 500 smackers for a brass HO loco, then spend several weeks taking the whole thing apart, quartering the drivers, fitting Kadee couplers, replacing the pilot & trailing wheels with RP-25s, and finally pulling the motor out and replacing that with a Sagami can motor and regearing it before it actually ran on his layout. When he got done it was always smoooooooth, at lowest power it would creep at half an inch per minute, no herky-jerky starts & stops.Anybody not comfortable with using Windows explorer to make and keep tabs on backup copies shouldn't try this, but here's what I did:
Made a new folder in \Program Files\Microsoft Games\Backup2\, copied Acleantrack1.ace and Acleantrack2.ace from \USA2\Textures and pasted them into the new folder. Now to restore Marias Pass back to it's default state I can just copy these two files back in, overwriting the hacked ones with the originals.
Here's Marias with the original track, obviously made in Windows Paintbrush by some kid who never saw real track, so he tried unsuccesfully to duplicate HO scale cork ballast.
After pasting Acleantrack1.ace and Acleantrack2.ace from Rusttrak.zip. I haven't tested it personally on a low-end computer, but Scott says it has no effect on framerates.Snow textures? Not a chance, I live in Chicago, I hate snow. To me snow-covered is snow-covered, nothing really interesting about snow covered textures, they all look the same. In the readme I reccomended copying \Europe1\Textures\Snow\Acleantrack1.ace, but after trying all four default snow textures I can't see any difference. Somebody did a heavy snow track texture, might be worthwhile to try that one if you like snow.Coal mine: Sorry, Union coal miners, they refuse to work on snowy days, the sight of snow falling thru the roof is too traumatic and constitutes a mental job hazard.
Something funky about those light sources too, guess I gotta look at the snow texture for US2spot.s and see what THAT'S all about, yet another undiscovered KUJU screwup.

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