Meanwhile, back at Chicago Metro...

**sniper297** · 06-05-2011, 10:30 PM

Looks like the Auran forums are back up, but now I forgot what I was gonna gripe about.

Skinning a bunch of freight cars for Chicago Metro, need to take screenshots for the thumbnails anyway so I figured i might as well dump a bunch of them in here.

**sniper297** · 06-05-2011, 10:33 PM

**sniper297** · 06-20-2011, 03:57 AM

Chicago Metro route, Western Avenue Interlocking, 0600 stormy.

**ftldave** · 06-20-2011, 11:04 AM

Got to respect the railroad crews who work in bad weather like that, day and night, even on the holidays. Thanks for that fine video.

**sniper297** · 07-14-2011, 01:36 AM

Not gonna say "coming soon" because I still got a lot of work left before it's ready for prime time, but finally, thanks to Justin Cornell, the new major stumbling block that stopped progress completely for over a month is almost fixed. Testing sessions on this monster I discovered that TS2010 loads all the physics for every single car on the entire route and continually processes the physics for every single car, even if it's sitting in a siding as a loose consist. I call it sloppy programming, the fanboys say it's needed and I should just get a faster computer. It's a big switching route, gonna need at least 1000 loose consist cars, gonna need Alienware just to run it. So, I went back to what I did for MSTS, static scenery cars on tracks not connected to the main tracks. That helps, but still a big framerate hit just from the CPU being too busy crunching a bunch of numbers it has no current use for to render the here and now at any kind of decent speed.

Then I discover Wulf 9 invented a script to overcome this very problem SEVEN YEARS AGO and it was never incorporated into the game?! Testing with a couple of British freight "wagons" proved that it did work very well, and Justin was kind enough to write a similar script that works for US freightcars without all the extra stuff for lights and chain coupling animation. A car moving at 0 mph not coupled to a train sets the handbrake and "goes to sleep" so the CPU doesn't get hammered with data from 1000 cars sitting still, when it starts moving it "wakes up" and the physics are loaded, so it works like any regular car, you can kick it and hump it, it doesn't go back to "sleep" until it comes to a full stop. No downside at all that I can see from the tests, so it's not even a compromise, it's an all around improvement.

Okay, so screenshots, these are a bit overloaded (the whole point of destructive testing is to holler FIRE IN THE HOLE! and find out the limits by passing those limits!) with about 200 static scenery cars and 250 actual test cars in the same yard, still getting 15-25 FPS on my 6 year old Dell.

Brightly colored red and blue are the real cars, drab colors are static scenery trains that are actually track objects like the bumpers that are placed in the route editor. The real ones are unweathered test models, once I get the conversion process hammered out I'll be doing KUID2 updates for all the current Chicago Metro and Port Ogden & Northern freight cars. At some point I'll find some time to finish the route and upload it. I hope.

**sniper297** · 12-24-2011, 01:08 PM

Haven't posted in here for a while, got all the sleep script stuff done and version 1 and 2 of the route have been out for a while, next phase Chicago Metro 3. Going a lot slower than I thought it would, main thing in addition to the subway route tweaks is a makeover for some of DMDrake's building splines. Pretty hard to improve on his work, most of what I've done is update some textures to add variety and eliminate trees for buildings close to the L tracks. Shot of downtown Chicago;

Still got assorted cleanup and packaging and testing to go.