I've posted some new screenshots, with rambling commentary, over at the Elvas-Tower board. Images are all 1280x1024. They can be viewed here: http://www.elvastower.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=1817



Guests are welcome.

All those buildings are a nightmare...

Very cool. Must be a framerate hog with all the buildings/track/other scenery?

Hard for me to answer directly as my own PC video system is quite high end and I keep my disks well defragged so my fps is in the high teens to low 20's here. In completely open, unfinished areas the fps is 58-60. I do not get complants from the testers but I have to say they've not mentioned anything recently.

I think it remains ok as so much of the terrain here is covered -- take a 200 x 400 ft building... that's covering ~762 polys of terrain and they're not displayed anymore.

The pictures are very brilliant!!

Its progressing very nicely.

Eabound out of Emeryville.

Bravo Dave and Erik This route is really taking shape. The Emeryville area is as dense as downtown LA--how are the framerates? Nonetheless, real good (just need to upgrade to Alienware...). Also, need 3DTrainStuff to bring the Cadillacs out in Black Widow so we can run Train 21/22 or a Christmas Special!

Keep sluggin'

Dave

Another E/b

Cab view seems consistantly in the low 30's thru this dense area. Outside view varys considerably, depending on where you place the camera and what is in the consist. I had a 50 car consist behind 4 of Marc's F-7's, pulling a bunch of Tim Muir's highly detailed freight cars, with the camera out in front, up a bit to take in the long view, and looking back at all of Tim's moving cars. FPS were down quite a bit... 11-12 IIRC. Change out that consist, put in passenger cars, the rest about the same, and it was up to 18-21. So I guess the complete answer is... it all depends.

One thing I have done is to experiment in managing the load point studder by preloading into memory a lot of these structures. See once loaded, the game doesn't need to go back to the disk again just because you move over a new load point. What this means is if your activity starts at the Oakland Yards, most of the Emeryville buildings get pre-loaded... they're all hidden underneath the yard. Then when you move into Emeryville, the game already has most of what it needs. Elesewhere I start preloading objects in the rural areas and spead the preloading out over several tiles. Pull into town and most of the disk work is already done. It seems to help.