Railworks America

I've started adding scenery to my route, and am working on a heavily forested area at the moment. I'm trying to maintain a balance of FPS vs 'Tree Coverage', and am having some difficulty.

When test driving a train down the route, some of the more distant asset blocks of trees won't appear until the train is fairly close to it; definitely closer than my typical draw distance. Would this be because asset block itself is too dense to load right away, or because there is already too many trees/objects within the field of view for my system to handle?

Also, is there a rule of thumb for the 'density' setting for an asset block? I've been trying to keep them around 2-3000, but on steeper mountainsides this still looks far too sparse. Is it much more taxing on a system to draw a block with say 5000 density vs 3000?

Is there a way of scaling the density of an asset block based on the users video settings? ie: somebody running on the highest video settings can see a denser asset block than somebody running on medium video settings?

Is there a rule of thumb for a maximum number of objects per tile?

Thank you in advance for any help.

I believe your only solution to using asset blocks is to create trees that draw at shorter and longer distances. For example, new models would need to be made to draw at 1000m, 2000m, etc., and also to make the blocks relatively small, all of which would help prevent entire blocks from popping-in at once.

When you say relatively small do you have a suggestion about size?

When the block assets appear, when they are too large, they do not appear until you almost at the center of the block. I learned this using water. No water would be appearing until I was passed the dead spot, then it all would jump in. So I would suggest nothing bigger than half the view distance.

250m wide x 500m~1000m long should work, so that your main view is from the wide side.

The best way i found for making forrests look thick on my Canadian route was to match the ground textures as closely to the trees as possible.
By doing this you can give the illusion of thick forrest whilst keeping the density low.
It also means you don't notice the asset blocks loading as the ground is the same colour.

BoostedFridge wrote:Also, is there a rule of thumb for the 'density' setting for an asset block?

I don't think there's a rule of thumb, but I've been able to use fairly dense forests without impacting the frame rate badly. Generally, I'm creating about five asset blocks with five different trees, each with a 2-5000 density, and move the blocks to stack on top each of other. The rest is copy/paste work to fill the terrain with those stacked asset blocks. The only real important thing is that you use only 2D trees on the asset blocks, and keep the 3D trees exclusively for the first two or three "lines" of trackside vegetation.

Cheers
Michael

Thank you for the tips and help guys!