Telepole

[lemberg]

Hi there,
Although YC railway is good I thought I'd tweek it a bit and reduce poly's by using the low poly telephone poles, however if I change the ace file I find the poles run down the centre of the track. I've checked the sd files but there apears to be no difference. Anyone got idea's on this, Thanks.
Lemberg

[jbilton]

Hi
I can't answer your question...but Jimmylad did some work on low poly telegraph poles...for TMv3...and found they actually didn't make a lot of difference.
Cheers
Jon

[dkightley]

You need to have the centre of the graphic object offset by the distance you want the pole from the centre of the track.

I'm not sure how you can do this without using the graphics package the object was built with.......unless someone knows how to delve into the .s file.

[mikesimpson]

The trackside telephone poles in the YCR have been laid automatically as Gantries (listed in the Gantry.dat file). If you want to replace them, then you need to build the new poles as gantries as well so that they are offset from the centre of the track.

Hardly worth the effort to save a very few FPS.

[BrianB]

Hi
I can't answer your question...but Jimmylad did some work on low poly telegraph poles...for TMv3...and found they actually didn't make a lot of difference.
Cheers
Jon

Hello Jon,

When Dave created the original Crewe-Liverpool route, he used my full 3D original telephone poles from the Autoplace fences and poles pack, I did some time ago (you can find them in the file library, search for 'autoplace'). Not long after this, Dave brought me on-board as Chief Tester and Model Maker for C-L V2 and for what became Thames-Mersey V3 (prior to that it was still known as Crewe to Liverpool). For T-M V3, my original poles were updated with different texture colouring, and I replaced the pointy conical insulators with proper cylindrical ones.

At some time during the development of V3 Dave asked me to have a look at low poly telephone poles (and there was some discussion in one of the forum posts) - I modified some of my models and reported my findings back to Dave - with the report that I didn't see a lot of difference in FPS rates, and there was a problem with transparencies. I think it was Jimmylad (I think by memory!!!) who pointed me to the correction for those transparencies.

However, my experimental low poly poles were not used in T-M V3 - some time later during the development of T-M V4, I modified the low poly poles again, with a slight improvement, sent them to Dave, and they were put into T-M V4, on the basis of 'every little bit helps' - they don't have a massive effect on FPS rates in V4, but at least they help, even if only a tiny bit, to ease the load on the MSTS system when running T-M V4.

To answer dkightley's question - yes the shape files for the original poles were off-set from the centre of the track, so the auto-place feature put them at a defined distance from the centre of 1/2/3/4 track lines without clashes. The modified low poly poles used in T-M V4 are direct replacements for the original .s files in previous versions.

I am not sure who's poles John used on YCR, but I would suggest that if the replacement texture file now places them in the middle of the track, they may have been originally 'generic' poles, that were manually placed off-centre from the track in RE, and the new texture file is putting the centre of origin of the .s file back to the centre of the track - John could confirm this, if asked!!

Hope this clears up some of the questions about low poly telephone poles.

Regards, Brian Bere-Streeter

[lemberg]

Thanks for the replys chaps, I'll give this a miss for the moment, might delve into RE and tweek from there in the future.
Lemberg

[Bigant]

There are 6 different types of poles used on the Burton-Derby route, so auto positioning was'nt possible. I found the low poly poles gave an increase of up to 20 fps in some places.

Regards
Don