slight stops and starts in train simulator

[Lad491]

Seek some professional advice my friend

Unfortunately I am the professional

PC Support Technician - which is why i consulted AMD direct and applied their solution. I do believe later AMD CPU's perform at lower temperatures

[saddletank]

Mods Note:

This is an excellent thread with lots of helpful information. However I felt some comments were getting a bit heated and detracting from the threads usefulness. With that in mind I have gone through it and edited out all the 'sharp' comments and pithy asides, and deleted some irrelevant posts. I think that has made it seem a friendlier thread, even more useful to the casual reader.

Martin
Moderator Team

And now with my Moderator hat off:

Ray, up there a way you mentioned the 'cake walk' effect. I'm not sure what you mean by this although I might be experiencing it as I see some apparent 'surging' that spoils the otherwise smooth movement of a train. Can you describe it to me please so I can see if it's the same effect I'm seeing.

As to Highworth, yes it has been optimised to the nth degree. We have DXT compressed all textures both in the route and in the rolling stock. We replaced the entire signalling system for one that had a tiny percentage of polys and object numbers and still looked better (by the same author, he'd just improved his techniques 10 fold), we've used some clever tricks with distant massed buildings to get a city effect very cheaply in both polys and object count. LODs on scenery objects have been scrutinised and optimised, Display Values for MSTS lower quality sliders have been checked and optimised on all models (so if you drop the slider from, say 9 to 8 you will see an improvement in framerates on slower machines but won't really notice too much loss of clutter. Although as you move the sliders lower the route will begin to look a bit bare). We've done a few other tweaks too by removing what were felt as 'luxury' clutter items which had to go even though we liked having them in the route. At one point a year ago I was getting about 6 or 8 fps in Swindon with just a light engine in explore mode. Now after lots of careful optimising we are getting 20+ with a player train, 2 AI trains and a couple of loose consists, so we think we have improved the end users chance of having a better gaming experience.

[alan2]

I just took a look at my system, the processor runs at 40deg C while running Msts,

My system is a P4 2.4Ghz, 1Gb ram, 2 X normal hard drives (IDE). Epox Motherboard. recent 256Mb Graphics card A360 Leadtech. 3 case fans. (cooling the hard drives mostly). the Processor fan on the Pentium 4 is not up to the job so I improoved the fan when I bought the Processor.

The Pc is turned on 24 / 7 / as many days during the year as it will be. lol.

I just had to change the case for a larger one due to the Graphics card not fitting the case. (which has increased the case size)

I have upped the Power supply on this pc. From 300Watts to 500 Watts. This has increased the performance of the PC while running Msts.

I also have a AMD athlon 2500 + with 512Mb of ram, 256Mb graphics, 500Watt power supply, 2 normal Ide hard drives but can support RAID. This uses DDR ram 400Mhz, and produces much higher frame rates than the Pentium computer (though it has less ram it's processing speed is faster (memory) ) Svr moves along at a steady 20Fps.

I would suggest that you Defragment your hard drive (I had 65% fragmentation last time I checked and defragmented it. ) This speeded up my msts Tremendously.

Adding lots of routes to a msts install will slow all the routes etc down. Try using trainstore and moving out some of the routes while you use msts. (having only the stock and routes you want open at one time.)

try not to spend any money at the moment just try and solve problems by tweaking your current set-up.

(do you know how to check what processes are running on your PC?) If so check and tell us how many processes are running / also What operating system you have. (these will have more effect on your msts frame rates than you think).

Hope we can help.

[rlmathers]

[Neptune50006]

I always find this web site to be of use when looking for tips and tweaks to help improve performance. http://www.cybertechhelp.com/forums/index.php There are, of course, many other similar sites about. It's just my personal preference.

[saddletank]

Hello Martin

Terry Cunliffe posted back in June with the intriguing header:

Oh No! Its raining.....

I've got a strange effect happening, which I'd be grateful for any comments on...
When running in the rain, I'm getting a peculiar rhythmic slowing down and speeding up of the simulation when driving, it's emphasised at higher speed and in external view. Frame rates are excellent and don't fluctuate (not outside the norm, that is). The effect in snow is still there, but greatly reduced, and is liveable with. Clear weather is fine (all default 'weather')
... How can I drive in NWE and it not rain!
Any clues?
Terry

I gave it the title `cakewalk syndrome` during the course of the discussion.

Hi Ray

I get a 'surging' effect in the trains motion when in trackside camera only. Nowhere else, and not in the rain or snow to any greater or lesser degree. The train, rather than smoothly passing across my view seems to momentarily slow and speed up. It's quite noticeable, others have commented on it and I have never seen it on any other PC.

Have you heard of this effect? And was there a resolution to Terry's rain problem?

[alan2]

The terry problem.

I think that might be an effect of the extra "Alpha" textures that are used while snow / rain is in effect.

(rename one of your rain .env files to editor.env) *makes it snow / rain in route editor. * Now move about as fast as you can. Or edit the Precipitation speed to a low figure. (you can move about and see how the rain is actually lots of "Blocks" of rain moving and rotating at once. ) Which is most likely why it seems to jump and slow.

Wind and Sky movements also effect this too. (I think wind has an effect on some of the scenery Items with the correct properties. (tree's and their crucifix forms...)

also during rain and snow more textures are loaded. (I want to try my copy of Highworth now to see how much the frame rates have improoved by upgrading my system.

[rlmathers]

[rlmathers]

[daveannjon]

Just to throw a couple of things into this interesting debate, I've had two things over the years that have caused a cakewalk effect.
The first was when my printer was connected to the parallel port - the system was checking every few seconds to monitor it, causing a regular stutter, using the usb cured the problem.
The second, more recently, was a similar effect although not so pronounced that I traced to my Kerio firewall - switched that off (not connected to the net at the time) and all was well.

Cheers
DaveW

[alan2]

also Virus scan in the background does not help.

Firewalls and system processes will cause system slowdown.

I (when not connected to internet) Disable my firewall / virus scanners etc also several Windows componants / .dll's This increases performance of the system greatly. but lowers the security.

I have taken it to the limits and nearly shutdown the system via this method. (using the shutdown -a to stop it).

Then start Msts without Explorer.exe running. Ie windows and Msts were only thing running.

[felixbicycle]

Ive got a modest old 2600 Athlon with 256mb ram it was very glitchy on MSTS until I found that the "DMA" box wasnt ticked (in device manager)
It made a huge difference to performance. (Win98se)

[Mole259]

having a LCD as mentioned earlier or a TFT isn't recommended unless it is really upto date with fps rates. The technology in these new screens hasn't become generally popular at the moment because the technology isn't there.

When TFT's are as up to date with fps then crt then prices will drop and tft's and lcds more popular.

[166Driver]

Where did you guys get your system temperature monitors from, and how do they work?

[Tonysmedley]

Modern motherboards and operating systems tend to have temperature sensing at least of the CPU and motherboard built in.

If you look in Google for AIDA 32 and download it (for free) you will be able to monitor all sorts of things on your PC