smoke density and frame rates

[gwgardner]

Whenever I use '2' view near the engine, and within the path of the trailing smoke from the stack, my framerates drop to a crawl. Same occurs if I'm in the '4' or '8' key views and I'm in the path of the train - as soon as I hit the plume of smoke trailing off the stack, framerates plummet. Any way to reduce this impact of displaying the smoke?

[GSkid]

Not that I'm aware of. In RW 2012 you were able to adjust both the particle density of smoke and steam, as well as the pedestrian density. I always turned them to the lowest setting cuz I'd rather have the extra CPU cycles for the rest of the attributes. I also didn't care about water looking good either unless I was in the mood for 100% eye candy. I also turn off the shadows sometimes. I still get decent frame rates with everything on max. But I like even higher frame rates and don't care if a few effects I care little about are bottomed out or turned off. I'll even sometimes revert to TSX-OFF just to change things up visually with the day-glo lighting and more saturated color. And in the process I increase the frame rate substantially as a side benefit. Otherwise everything else is always at MAX including AA.

But with RW 2013, the particle effects and the pedestrian density are on max and can no longer be adjusted. So you won't be able to reduce the dragging framerate when the smoke hits your camera with each loco that passes. That will likely need a computer upgrade to do it. I have the same issues but I deal with it. It's not the end of the world and I just avoid that camera placement if I don't want any slow down.

[buzz456]

This gets me almost to geek speak but I changed from a GT520 video card to a GTX650 and all that went away. No more hiccups.
Buzz

[glenn68]

I get the same but not as bad. I wonder if there is a start option to limit the particle density?

Glenn

[gwgardner]

KCJones of Britkits informed me to go into the stack.bin file for a given locomotive and edit it to reduce density. This works great on my system. Example, the Britkits 2-6-2 starts out with this parameter in its stack.bin file(s)

C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\railworks\Assets\Britkits\Steam\Particles\262_stack.bin
C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\railworks\Assets\Britkits\Steam\Particles\262_Stack2.bin

<_iMaxParticles d:type="sInt32">500</_iMaxParticles>

Changing that to a lower value still looks good and causes no framerate loss on my system.

For anyone else needing to make this kind of change, get RWTools! In the 'file' menu you can edit and save a bin file easily. (Can't tell you how many times RWTools has come to the rescue.)