Southern Railways "Schools" V class [WIP]

[RulerofRails]

Good call. IMO, generally looks at day have higher preference than at night. I have my nights on the brightest possible setting. It's nice when doing a sandbox. But it also feels wrong to do some industrial scouting or a large track build in the middle of the night.

Hope all goes well for finishing this one up. It's looking better and better in the shots.

[Gumboots]

Y'know what I could do, just for the heck of it, is add a couple of files for small lights but without bothering with the mesh for running lamps. So it'd have the white discs all the time, but could have a couple of "lamps" up front at night too. If I use a small glow radius and set them forward a bit, they wouldn't illuminate the white discs but would still give the general effect. At least if you weren't looking too closely and weren't too persnickety. Can always try it with and without, since a couple of light files are a no-brainer and don't affect anything else.

Anyway yes, it's going well. I've done more repacking of course, since I thought of a couple more details I'd missed earlier and it might as well have. It's now sorted and is sitting on 1,798 tris. That's 121 less than the existing beta, but with better detailing. I've decided to call it done at that point, since trying to go further would be bonkers even for me, but it was a good exercise in figuring out what could be cut without making things look worse.

Only things left to do now are sort out enough eye candy to make the thing satisfying, then pack it up. I expect that will take another week, what with one thing and another, but the end is in sight.

[bombardiere]

You are tempting me. I have been bitten by Train Fever, but when you get this one ready, I need to fire up good old RailRoad Tycoon again.

Funny thing that you say about 1798 tris. I have checked Transport Fever locomotives and models and even the simple ones start with 5000 plus tris. And some modders do not even provide LODs. Times has changed a lot since RTT3 was introduced. And I am not talking about my greying hair.

[Gumboots]

I don't think RT3 would handle 5,000 tris on locos. It would be easy enough to test it and see what happened, but I think the frame rate hit would be too much. We were noticing some difference even with 2,000 tris, although it wasn't a huge difference. I do have a 4,000 tri model sitting in Blender. I could get that running as a test model, just for the heck of it. Although frankly I'm not sure there would be any point given that I can do just about any locomotive to a pretty good standard without going over 2,000 tris.

The real restriction in RT3 is the 1024x1024 limit on textures. Even if it allowed 2048x1024 it would allow heaps more scope for nifty things. I'd love to hack the .exe to allow that. Not only would it allow using fewer images overall, it would even allow cutting mesh without sacrificing visual quality, because the extra space would allow more scope for using alpha instead of mesh. So, weird as it may seem, allowing bigger textures could (providing you didn't go nuts) allow a performance advantage.

Anyway the Schools is now down to 1,780 tris. After saying I wouldn't take it further I went and took it further anyway. I sort of got on a roll and started seeing more opportunities to cut the tris, to the point where I then got into adding back in some extra detail for missing bits that weren't there before. For example, the firebox door on these things is a shallow cone, and although just using a flat plane with graphics worked well on the Pennsy H3 it didn't work so well for the Schools. The Pennsy has the large red numberplate (separate mesh) and a large headlight, which I think tend to draw attention away from the flat plane behind them. The Schools doesn't have those, so looks better with some extra mesh in the firebox door on the top LOD. Obviously it'll drop back to a flat plane by the third LOD.

Naturally all this did involve repacking most of the UV's again, but that's not as big a deal as it sounds. I'm now convinced that doing any loco from scratch is going to involve a complete repack at least 3 times, and you might as well accept it and just do it. Mesh really is close to finalised now. No, really. I mean it this time. Really. It's literally to the point where one or two tris might change, but apart from that it's just eye candy.

[Grandma Ruth]

I just got a "Schools" class in the Latvia map - I thought they were still under development? (I know we had a conversation about it because there is one IRL near where I live, which I intend to go see when and if we ever get released from this blinking lockdown!) Is this the finished article?

[Gumboots]

No the "finished" one is still sitting in Blender. I could pack it up pretty quickly. I just haven't bothered so far because a/ there's a bit more graphics detailing to do and b/ I haven't been playing any scenarios that could use it. But if you want to give it a go I'll sort out a PK4. It's a lot better than the beta in this thread.

[sbaros]

...the head code (as it was called) was done by those white discs you see on old UK locos. These replaced the running lamps during daylight hours. This means that for RT3 purposes it can't be correct all the time. It has to have either the daylight head code (white discs) or the night head code (running lamps). It can't have both

Having seen these "animations" on various RT3 models, could there be an animation where, say every 12 hours, the head code discs disappear and are replaced by running lamps?

[Gumboots]

Possibly, in theory, if anyone knew how the animation files worked in detail.

[sbaros]

Sadly no, I just ran some tests with locomotives. They won't load animations at all, only buildings can call them.

[Gumboots]

That doesn't surprise me. It's not a big deal anyway.