Distant mountains again

[miglietto]

Sorry to bother but it seems to me that this topic has been forgotten since long time nobody talks about it anymore.
Just for fun I spent some time to compare the real life to what the simulator offers right now.

A early '900 postcard showing the area where my route is located. The numbers are the distance in Km from the viewing point.


What I get with google earth


and finally what RW is capable to show . Amazing isn't it ? The mountain in the mist is that one at 3.6 Km far away.


Funny enough, even if the fog is present, the sky looks bright and clear up to the horizon !
I'm still waiting a word from RS guys to know if I can still hope to see someday the DM , at least like Train Simulator did. Just to refresh memories of old TS times I took the liberty of posting below an old screenshot of the same route.
Nothing to do with the stunning graphics capabilities of RW but please look at the mountains.
Thanks for reading as far as here.

[smarty2]

Hi Ric, i too would like to see this fixed, it has been awaiting it for a looooong time

[booblessed]

It's not exactly an issue which needs to be 'fixed', as it isn't a bug. It would certainly be fantastic if the RW team added the option for the user to change the maximum view distance in accordance to their own PCs abilities. The fog, also.

Perhaps though there's some way to 'hack' (I hate that word in this context, but eh, it works) RW or RS into doing the same thing, such as the utility for Trainz called Trainz Tuner, which adjusts a config file enabling you to extend the view distance much further than the normal options allow.

[miglietto]

Perhaps though there's some way to 'hack' (I hate that word in this context, but eh, it works) RW or RS into doing the same thing, such as the utility for Trainz called Trainz Tuner, which adjusts a config file enabling you to extend the view distance much further than the normal options allow.

Good to know! Can you post more details on this "workaround" for RW ? Do you know where to puts the hand to change this distance ? As far I knew, this limit (5km for terrain drawing ) was hardwired in the code. Please correct me if I'm wrong.

Nevertheless, I never said that this is a a bug. Simply I don't understand, why RS (and RW) left behind such a "nice feature".
To be clear, I don't want to appear like a baby crying loud to have it. I'd just like to know WHEN or IF this feature will be implemented. This is important for me to answer if worth it or not to keep working on my route.

As a side note I would point out that extending the drawing distance (if possible), at the regular resolution, will probably kill the performances.
In TS, DM was implemented in another way. It was a separate terrain mesh drawn with a fraction of the regular resolution (1/16 I think)

Looking forward for a RS.com comment.
Thanks !

[zlindku]

The problem with distant mountains is that the triangle count that the graphics has to draw goes up by the square of the viewing depth and in an application that is already pushing the triangle count therefore runs into trouble. So if you wish to have distant terrain you MUST be able to drop the detail somewhere else.
I have found in my own 3d programing work that you can throw a massive amount of processing and GPU power at the terrain and still only get a passable result because of the above.

[AndiS]

It is easy to get rid of the grey colour of the mountain in the distance. Just reduce the fog in the weather blueprint to nothing or next to nothing and maybe make it a little greenish instead of the default white or pale grey. Of course, you need to play around a bit with it, as always when it comes down to artistic judgement.

How far is the other shore of the lake? Mountains should look good there once you corrected the fog, which is not a bug but a unsuitable route setup. UK weather in Italy just does not work.

[bremen]

Just reduce the fog in the weather blueprint to nothing or next to nothing and maybe make it a little greenish instead of the default white or pale grey.

By default the fog is between 1500 and 2500m away from the "camera" to hide the passage between the textured terrain and the monocolor terrain; in the screen below i have set the fog to be over 5000m and this is the result.

With a value over 6000 the result is a perfet cut between the terrain an the void.
The latest screen on my small page is an example of the above statement.
http://utenti.lycos.it/brerepos/

The problem with distant mountains is that the triangle count that the graphics has to draw goes up by the square of the viewing depth and in an application that is already pushing the triangle count therefore runs into trouble. So if you wish to have distant terrain you MUST be able to drop the detail somewhere else.

The game FUEL has 40kms of visual, is the first game to reach such a distance and the result is good.

[AndiS]

So you are saying that the monocolor terrain in the far distance is always grey? I vaguely remember a value in some of the blueprints for that, if not weather blueprint, maybe route blueprint, cannot remember. If they would be fixed to grey, that would, of course, be a pity.

[AndyM77]

The game FUEL has 40kms of visual, is the first game to reach such a distance and the result is good.

I haven't got that game, but technically you'll find that the "distance" is a mixture of bitmaps and polygons, whereas the "distance" in Railworks is new tiles with polygons.

Now, if this doens't make sense I'll rephrase it this way - most of the polygons in FUEL will be concentrated around the track area, the distance can be mainly flat backdrops with some trickery here and there, as I believe there is no 'free roaming' camera to go wandering off into the distance. Whereas Railworks is fully 3D, i.e no flat backgrounds, and what you see in the distance is contained on the next tile. So big view distances will always hinder game performance and increase polygon count.

I'm sure someone more technical can explain my explaination in greater detail..

[miglietto]

One things is puzzling me then:
If the implementation is technycally so hard, I really wonder how Train Simulator could have made it almost 10 year ago with the HW resources available at that time

[RailX]

hi

you can fix this by creating a new "TimeOfDay" blueprint. for this you must create a completely new route to use your own "TimeOfDay" settings.
there is a section in the blueprint called "fog start, fog end...., there you can change the fog distance settings. i played with this blueprint
many times in railsimulator, and had some interesting and good results. for a much better result you can also create a new "weather" blueprint.
play with the different settings.

greetz

Rail-X

[booblessed]

I think someone quoted me on saying that it was possible to adjust certain settings to increase the draw distance for the terrain. I am guessing that it may be possible with RS/RW, but the tool I mentioned was for Aurans Trainz sims. Sorry for any misinterpretaion. I was rather tired when I posted that.

The problem though with such a thing in RW/RS is where the textures are drawn only as white.

[TylerEaves7]

The game FUEL has 40kms of visual, is the first game to reach such a distance and the result is good.

I haven't got that game, but technically you'll find that the "distance" is a mixture of bitmaps and polygons, whereas the "distance" in Railworks is new tiles with polygons.

Now, if this doens't make sense I'll rephrase it this way - most of the polygons in FUEL will be concentrated around the track area, the distance can be mainly flat backdrops with some trickery here and there, as I believe there is no 'free roaming' camera to go wandering off into the distance. Whereas Railworks is fully 3D, i.e no flat backgrounds, and what you see in the distance is contained on the next tile. So big view distances will always hinder game performance and increase polygon count.

I'm sure someone more technical can explain my explaination in greater detail..

Actually, Fuel has full free roam over the ~10,000 km2 game area.

[PaulH2]

The problem with distant mountains is that the triangle count that the graphics has to draw goes up by the square of the viewing depth and in an application that is already pushing the triangle count therefore runs into trouble. So if you wish to have distant terrain you MUST be able to drop the detail somewhere else.
I have found in my own 3d programing work that you can throw a massive amount of processing and GPU power at the terrain and still only get a passable result because of the above.

That's a trivial problem to solve - flight simulators have done it for many years, lower resolution terrain at increasing distance. Using a lower resolution terrain mesh with distance (either via multiple terrain meshes at different resolutions, as MSFS handles it, or by simply interpolating to a lower resolution form a single map, a trivial mathematical operation with a very low overhead) makes the problem of polygon count irrelevant (and as far as I know, RS/RW is far from polygon bound anyway, although MSTS certainly was).

The game FUEL has 40kms of visual, is the first game to reach such a distance and the result is good

I suppose it depends on how you define a "game" but again, flight simulators have displayed terrain well beyond 40km for a long time.

I suspect the limitation is that this capability just isn't built into RW, but it shouldn't be too hard too add, so fingers crossed for the future (but simply increasing the terrain draw distance probably ins't a viable solution).

Paul

[Dataman]

The problem with doing nothing but extending the view distance (i.e. distance between the far and near plane of the camera frustrum) is that you start to run into problems with the depth buffer resolution on the video cards. Basically it means less depth resolution for the areas close to the camera and this is likely to result in z-fighting.

There must be ways around it though. MSFS has distant mountains and objects up close doesn't it.

The extra polygons of distance mountains are unlikely to cause significant overhead.