Railworks America

Continuing work on the Mt. Hood RR, I've begun using RWdecal for alignment and building placement. During a test drive to examine the work completed, I discovered that the Google Earth decals make a wonderful far scenery item that would lower the item count and scenic work a lot.

So, the question for those who know; Is there a limit to the number of decals one can use?

I don't know, but honestly I woouldn't leave the decals in. Mainly because you don't have a decal for every season out there for that particular on the route. Also the Google Earth Decal seems to change season at a blink of an eye. In one section it's Summer, and the next, it's Winter. etc.

Hi, the decals use a lot of memory, resulting in some not appearing or half appearing sometimes. (on my route anyway)

On my test runs the always popped out suddenly far away and started flickering until you got closer. So maybe in city areas it is ok to use them in backgrounds, but I wouldn't do it for real scenary. You can do a lot with terrain painting of different brush sizes and styles there and it will still look good. Some trees here and there, darker and brighter spots instead of flat green. Use the noise tool to rough up everything a bit. And it looks strange if you have a decal but behind the standard green floor starts again and you can't place them all over the route for performance reasons.
Remember that you will reach a wide range of audience, some who drive only in cabs and won't care about a tree or not further than a mile from the tracks, some on the outside view watching every little piece of landscape and whole different technical aspects. Everything between low standard pcs and details turned down up to the high performance gaming monster specs. You can't satisfy all of them, no matter how hard you try.

Toldrabald wrote:On my test runs the always popped out suddenly far away and started flickering until you got closer. So maybe in city areas it is ok to use them in backgrounds, but I wouldn't do it for real scenary. You can do a lot with terrain painting of different brush sizes and styles there and it will still look good. Some trees here and there, darker and brighter spots instead of flat green. Use the noise tool to rough up everything a bit. And it looks strange if you have a decal but behind the standard green floor starts again and you can't place them all over the route for performance reasons.
Remember that you will reach a wide range of audience, some who drive only in cabs and won't care about a tree or not further than a mile from the tracks, some on the outside view watching every little piece of landscape and whole different technical aspects. Everything between low standard pcs and details turned down up to the high performance gaming monster specs. You can't satisfy all of them, no matter how hard you try.

Thanks! I never thought of using the noise tool to generate trees/texture in the distance... I'll try that. One of the issues I have of course is that the terrain is quite hilly. The route runs from 47 Ft. to over a 1000 Ft. in 22 miles.

I re-ran the sim and did notice a lot of flickering and noise in the decals, so it doesn't appear to be as good an idea as it was at first blush.

It just shows what could be done if we had a variety of paint stuff.

I believe there are copyright issues with leaving GE imagery in a route, covered in the RW Decal instructions and discussed on UKTS. Should be regarded purely as a guide to scenery placement and deleted afterwards.

kin3 wrote:It just shows what could be done if we had a variety of paint stuff.

Derek did a tutorial for how to do it your self.