Atomic Systems

Bit of an odd one - this has happened with both my current PC and my previous ones.

I have a fairly good PC, capable of most sliders at max without any problems except in densely sceneried areas. However one problem still presents itself and practically brings my system to it's knees - smoke effects.

I was trying to make a scenario using Tornado, but on loading, if the camera goes anywhere near the steam emissions the frame rate drops to about 2 and TS grinds to a halt - and actually slows down the clock it is struggling so much. It also causes subsequent issues with sounds going out of sync. Short of driving from the passenger view, or an external view from about 200m away, it is impractical to use steam locos in my installation.

I can't find any option to turn down the effects; are there perhaps some alternative particle files I could make use of?

In the PlayerProfile.bin file which you can find in Railworks/Content there is an entry for DetailParticles, but I just tested setting it at values between 0 and 3 and it had no effect on a scene over Loughborough depot on the GCR which stubbornly stuck at 15fps.

I have noticed that if I use the zoom of the camera sometimes it can become a particularly bad slideshow.

I don't have Tornado, but if it shares the same particles with 4472 then they're awful for performance unfortunately, and don't look particularly good. Here's what you can try:

Open Tornado's engine.bin (RWTools or drop into serz.exe) and go down to the child objects section. Look for Main Smoke Stack or similar. Make a note of the particle file being referenced and find this file.

Open the particle blueprint.bin in the same way as the engine.bin and scroll down to line 70, where you should get the emitter rate field:
Try multiplying this by 2 to decrease the rate by half (inversely proportional), and save the changes, then try Tornado again and see if that improves your performance.

Chris

All steam engines are like that if you are in the smoke. I drive my steam locos from outside the cab as the forward view from inside is not that great. I usually drive them with my position being on the right hand side back from the cab to keep out of the smoke. Diesels can be the same if they produce a lot of smoke but I tend to drive them from inside the cab as you mostly have a good forward view.

Hi,

I beleive I have found a way to completely reduce the amount of smoke produced for those with systems that cannot cope with it (I have already modified rather a few DT products with this method to reduce the massive amounts of steam exhaled from chimneys.

Basically, whichever locomotive you want to edit, you must go to the corresponding "Particules" folder for that locomotive, for example:

C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\SteamApps\common\RailWorks\Assets\RSC\TornadoPack01\Particles

and there will be several bin files. Using Serz, convert the ones that may be giving you trouble (such as "Tornado_SmokeStack.bin" in this example) into an .XML file (or use RWTools to edit the .bin file directly, if you like), and look for this line (should be near the top)

<_iMaxParticles d:type="sInt32">850</_iMaxParticles>

850 is rather alot of particles, so I have modified this line to be:

<_iMaxParticles d:type="sInt32">150</_iMaxParticles>

Once changed, save/convert the file, and load up the game. This *should* drastically reduce the amount of particles being emitted, as it says.

This is the method I use anyway, I hope it is of some help. If you would like any more help give me a PM.