Atomic Systems

First let me begin by saying Happy New Year to everyone and welcome to another year of RailWorks, and I'm hoping that 2010 will be a good year for us all. So far it looks quite promising, especially with the planned updates and who knows what other goodies are planned (Adam if you're reading this finish the GWR stuff ) but I'm sure there will be some more great add-ons.
Now speaking of add-ons and patches I know there are quite a few people bashing the dev team for the bugs and not fixing things the way they want. I know personally I have slowly been developing a list of things I would like to see fixed, however over the holidays I had an experience that makes me really thankful about the simulator and the progress being made. Sure it's not perfect but it could be worse, EA could still be running the show.
First a little background. A few years back when my daughter got older we started playing the Sims together, it became a common interest. We played the Sims 3 and then got the latest add-on for her birthday in late November. It should be mentioned at this point I also upgraded the desktop with a new ATI 4890 video card. Wow you should see RailWorks run on this thing, but the sims crashed all the time during game play anywhere between 30 to 60 minutes into the game. Not being computer stupid I tried the obvious, drivers, cache, clean install, all the usual tests. Nothing helped, continued crashes. Finally I turned to EA tech support, WOW what a mistake. I know these guys get lots of stupid questions and answers and they need a way to start the troubleshooting progress, so I thought I would give them a hand and listed as much as I could in the email. I even stated that based on my reading of the crash file there appeared to be some memory issues. Then began the stupidity, first response was asking if I met the minimum requirements for the game. Guess they didn't read that part. Next question - did you try a clean install. DUH yeah (also mentioned). Drivers? Yeah. And so the stupidity went. Thanks to forum users I was able to install a FPS limiter, allow to EXE to use more than 2GB of memory and knock on wood I haven't had a crash since. None of this happened thanks to EA or EA Tech Support.
At this point I realized how grateful I was for the way the RailWorks team are supporting the game. Derek, Adam, Sly and so on are all in these forums posting on a regular basis. They're taking feedback and applying it. While they will never be able to fix everything to everyone's standard they have definitely shown an interest in trying to do what they can. It'll never be perfect and give us all what we want but at least they're there for us and are regularly active in the forums. EA could learn from this.
Anyway having said all that the point is we should be glad for what we have and where things are going. If EA was still in charge there would be no hope. There's nothing wrong with proposing improvements, but bashing the team and the sim because you're frustrated doesn't help. As I said we may not get the perfect solution but at least we'll stay on track.

Just my thoughts based on a horrible EA experience.

James.

P.S. Computer Specs: Intel Dual Core E8400 3Ghz, 4GB RAM, 1TB HD, ATI 4890 Video, XFI Gamer. More than enough to run the damn program.

James,
>Thanks to forum users I was able to install a FPS limiter
Yes, I have had problems with people not reading the details of my problems text and sending "rubbish" in reply.

Could you "tell" me what an FPS limiter is and where I could get it please, it looks to
me that it could be one of those things that could prove to be very usefull.

Thanks lots.

It sounds like a similar crash to what i was getting? Do you know what the actual problem was?

I would also be interested in a link to the limiter.

Many thanks,
Mark

FPS Limiter - presume it limits the "Frames Per Second"

(or alternatively limits First Person Shooters?)

This seems to be a general problem with company support desks - they never read your email properly and just run through their "script" of issues/solutions. BT are quite poor at doing this in my experience.

almark wrote:It sounds like a similar crash to what i was getting? Do you know what the actual problem was?

I would also be interested in a link to the limiter.

Many thanks,
Mark

Most probably the most simple one "V-Sync", it'll limit the amount of frames rendered to your monitor sync. So if your monitor display is at 60hz then you're limited to 60fps, 75hz 75fps, etc..

Can be activated via your driver control panel (ATi CCC or nVidia control panel), or within the game settings.

V-Sync reduces the "Tearing" effect that you can get with fast movements.

So with my Nvidea card for example i need to "Force off"?

almark wrote:So with my Nvidea card for example i need to "Force off"?

If you want to use V sync to limit your fps to the screen update limit you need to force it on..

gswindale wrote:FPS Limiter - presume it limits the "Frames Per Second"

(or alternatively limits First Person Shooters?)

This seems to be a general problem with company support desks - they never read your email properly and just run through their "script" of issues/solutions. BT are quite poor at doing this in my experience.

Yes, the particular program I installed was to limit the Frames Per Second the video card renders, much the same way Railworks does. You can tell what your FPS are by pressing Shift + Z. In RW i generally get about 50-60 FPS which makes for a pretty smooth picture being rendered without any choppyness. Typically anything over 30 is going to be good and you won't see a choppy game. With the SIMS I was getting 100-150 FPS the problem with this is that such perfomance also runs your video card at max and done for a prolonged time you can overheat it. Using the utility (Frame Rate Limiter) I was able to limit the FPS to 40 which now means the video card now isn't running at max all the time. Now the load seems to hover between 20-50%.

Hope this helps.

James.

jamesh wrote:[With the SIMS I was getting 100-150 FPS the problem with this is that such perfomance also runs your video card at max and done for a prolonged time you can overheat it. Using the utility (Frame Rate Limiter) I was able to limit the FPS to 40 which now means the video card now isn't running at max all the time.

Hope this helps.

James.

I think a little more research on that subject is in order. A GPU isn’t going to overheat any faster without a frame rate limit on the program than it would with it.