Atomic Systems

Just reading through the latest 'Rail Times' news letter this line caught my eye "procedural flora popping up when you paint terrain textures".

After creating routes for Trainz I consider the placement of trees, bushes, shrubs, etc the most time consuming task in route creation.

Now that's what I call a time saver Good one Kuju !

Steve.

Good point Steve But to be really effective and useful lets hope that the objects are user configurable and that we can add our own objects for specific countries .

~A~

MaxFreak wrote:But to be really effective and useful lets hope that the objects are user configurable and that we can add our own objects for specific countries .

By "objects" you mean procedural trees and other vegitation, it'll depend on what Kuju releases with their initial package. I suspect it'll take some time for 3rd-party developers to build a suitable library, because if SpeedTree is used, the license can cost upwards of several thousand dollars. With all this new "tech", as well as having to hold official licensing from the real RRs, it's safe to assume addons for KRS are going to cost much much more than their MSTS and Trainz counterparts, simply due to the huge overhead placed on developers.

Cheers!
Marc - 3DTrains
http://www.3dtrains.com

A convincing scene is best achieved by individual placing to reflect real life.

Obviously nothing grows without a reason and often in specific places.

The idea of stuff popping up doesn't sound very good.

Agree the amount of detail which can be added to Trainz and the individual placing is very time consuming and few bother on any scale.

As the Trainz program is as old as MSTS, route building is likely to be a lengthy process given many like routes hundreds of miles in length.

No amount of improvements to the editors can lessen the effort required for individual placement of diverse objects significantly beyond that which exists in Trainz Surveyor.

Terrain forming and basic land texturing may well be possible though using maps obtained from the Internet.

Cheers

John

johndibben wrote: The idea of stuff popping up doesn't sound very good.

Of course not everywhere could this be useful. But imagine having associated XML config file with a texture, where it would be written type of vegetation, that "grows" on this texture (not only one type, but a random mix of several types, defined in XML file). That would very much simplify adding grass, bushes and even forests.

Adding particular trees will ceartinly stay an option for more precise arangement of route vegetation.

johndibben wrote:Obviously nothing grows without a reason and often in specific places.

...

No amount of improvements to the editors can lessen the effort required for individual placement of diverse objects significantly beyond that which exists in Trainz Surveyor.

I hope you will be very surprised by KRS. There are quite some approaches around to model biotops, i.e., do exactly this: Specify what grows where, but not by doing the placement but by defining rules. E.g., some plant only grows within 1 m from running water. Or some shrub always grows 5 m around a certain variety of tree, or in any ditch wider than x cm. Also the gras growing on embankments or hills is always lush near the bottom and rather thin at the top (depending on the soil).

I'm not saying that we get all this out of the box (but I hope for it). But in any case, there will be additional tools along these lines, if the data format is open enough.

As one who likes making little layouts for Trainz and would prefer to make larger ones, I'd love to see that form development.

I'd presume a fair amount of data would have to be entered to create even a basic library of the many unique environments contained in European landscapes.

Cheers

John