Railworks Technical Update

[KeithThomson]

http://www.facebook.com/pages/RailSimul ... 0339498918

RailSimulator.com strives to bring ongoing technical advances to trainsimming, not only to reward our loyal fans for their on-going support but to push train-simming forward in terms of realism and enjoyment. With this in mind we have prepared this short technical briefing to let you all know about the technical developmentswe are currently working on. We are very excited about what lays ahead for us and our fans, and we hope you are too. Best wishes, Paul Jackson.

Lighting:

In the current version of RailWorks we use a very simple 3 point lighting system. We have a sun (or moon at night) light, a back light which mirrors this and an up-light which simulates reflection of light back from the ground; these lights move slowly around the world with the change in time of day.

One of the main visual goals is to implement a dynamic lighting system. This will allow us to have many more lights in the world, e.g. train lights, platform lighting and internal lighting.

The first step towards this has been the reworking of the terrain system. This is required because illumination of the terrain has always been done using the CPU. This works in RailWorks2 because the lighting is not changing every frame and so this can be calculated infrequently. The development work done so far allows this to be moved to the GPU (Graphics Processing Unit) so that lighting can be updated in real time. This is what can be seen in our speeded-up demo (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lBF0pnookwk) .It also allows the lighting to update ‘on the fly’ when using the terrain editor, and this also improves the response to changes in the weather in-game. Additionally with the terrain GPU lit we are improving the shadowing.


Draw Distance:
RailWorks currently renders 4km x 4km of high resolution textured terrain plus a further 6km of lower resolution 'distant mountain' terrain. In other words, when exploring your surroundings at the moment, only the nearest 4km are recreated in high detail which moves along continuously with you. By utilizing improvements in PC specs and refining the underlying code, we will be extending the draw distance further so that a much greater amount of the surrounding area is highly detailed, increasing the visual realism of the simulator.


Block Assets:

This development is intended both as a way to improve your ability to create routes quickly, and also as an efficient way of rendering large blocks of identical assets. With the new block assets, when creating a route you simply place down and drag out a rectangle on the landscape which defines an area of identical scenic assets. These assets are then placed automatically, following the terrain, and are rendered very efficiently. The main and most obvious use for block assets is laying out blocks of trees and undergrowth, or potentially city and town terraces and other uniform sets of buildings.


Online Play:

We are please to announce the RailSimultor.com boffins have started work on online multiplayer technology. While still in its early stages multiplayer game elements are likely to include Driver, Fireman, Signalling operations with up to 6 players and VOIP. We expect to go to BETA testing at the end April.

[msey0002]

Glad about the online play and block assets, but about the rest, how will this affect people with relatively low system specifications?

[Tankski]

This will make things *ahem* interesting...

did anyone say a horn battle?

[gnash]

Hallelujah!

Finally ... Dynamic Lighting and improved shadowing .

[phat2003uk]

Great news. Very interested in the new lighting system. Hopefully this will finally allow the sun not to be out when it's raining .

[malkymackay]

Very interesting stuff there. Nice to see that RS.com are working away trying to improve the core sim, as well as all the routes & stock they keep giving us.

[Kariban]

Heh, the other day when I knocked that EPB pic out I thought "if there's one fairly easy thing I'd add, it'd be moving shadows".. and lo and behold. You can easily cheat with assets by having a static shadow you just map on the ground and skew around depending on the angle of your main light, but we've not even got that.

Offloading work to the GPU should make life a bit easier for older systems ( unless you're talking prehistoric, but I doubt you'd get RW running at all on something that old ). Maybe some more dynamic procedural assets like foliage sometime? and mebbe while you're doing GPU stuff a few easy things like depth of field saturation/focus and bloom?

Good stuff anyway!

[msey0002]

Thing is, my CPU is relatively good, while my GPU is not hehe .

Although, RSC addressed my concerns on Facebook...phew!

#
RailSimulator.com People with lower spec need not worry, these will likely be options that you can turn on and off
2 minutes ago · UnlikeLike · 1 personYou like this. ·

I must admit, I was quite worried.

[ihavenonamenoreallyidont]

I just hope something is being done to alleviate the rubber banding that is a constant source of annoyance and befuddlement for some of us.

[gnash]

I just hope something is being done to alleviate the rubber banding that is a constant source of annoyance and befuddlement for some of us.

Would depend on what's going on with the block assets bit , good instancing may help somewhat . Bit early to tell of course , and since they rarely give any usefull info we'll have to wait and peek later .

[nobkins]

Great news RS.com. Looking forward to getting my hands on theses new features. For those asking about a fix to the "rubber banding" effect. Not much to go on but when you watch the section about the multiplayer towards the end, I was not able to see any evindence of "rubber banding". Fingers crossed this will be removed or improved upon.

Thanks for your efforts all at RS.com and a merry Xmas to you all.

Jim

[scorpion71]

Excellent news, good to know they're biting into the core code and making such changes for the better - lighting has always been one my gripes so I'm very much looking forward to the improvements.

Online play doesn't interest me in the slightest but I guess the 'gamers' out there who dabble with the sim may find this great, may also appeal to new buyers of the sim.

Overall, great stuff all round, 2011 is looking good!

[karma99]

Online play doesn't interest me in the slightest but I guess the 'gamers' out there who dabble with the sim may find this great, may also appeal to new buyers of the sim.

I would have thought the exact opposite. If you're a "gamer" (seeing as we're using that tag as meaning IQ < 50 and thumbs glued to an XBox controller here) the only reason for online play would be to organise enormous crashes.
Surely the opportunity to run a railway accurately with a signalman setting roads and drivers and firemen working together and following instructions is the nerdy preserve of us "simmers"?

[Acorncomputer]

Hi

Some very nice things to look forward to there

[KeithThomson]

Online play doesn't interest me in the slightest but I guess the 'gamers' out there who dabble with the sim may find this great, may also appeal to new buyers of the sim.

I would have thought the exact opposite. If you're a "gamer" (seeing as we're using that tag as meaning IQ < 50 and thumbs glued to an XBox controller here) the only reason for online play would be to organise enormous crashes.
Surely the opportunity to run a railway accurately with a signalman setting roads and drivers and firemen working together and following instructions is the nerdy preserve of us "simmers"?

I agree, I would love to combine the signalling experience of online SimSig with the driving experience of Railworks. I hope it will be possible to get together with a few like-minded people and do stuff like running the Falmouth branch for an "afternoon", designing a timetable, trying to arrange the stock for it, running the trains, maybe a few "failures" along the way. Could be great fun and very rewarding!