ORTS Specific Content?

[dcarleton]

Look at some of the OR specific steam locomotives found at Elvas Tower. They have tens of thousands of polys, all one piece shapes for the entire locomotive, and superb detailing, all valve gear and rods animated including the lubricators! If these models were arranged in small enough sub-objects then technically they should load in MSTS. And then MSTS will crash. The way MSTS handles data and memory it is just too limited to actually run such a model, at least not for long. So I submit that there is in fact such a thing as OR only shape files.

[kraus]

If only .dds files were in the product... That would be Open Rails ONLY Designed Content.
If only .ace files were in the product... It would be able to be used in Both SIM Engines.

Thank you for describing this compatibility issue. I ran a test with the Streamlines Adirondack set. When the .ace texture was not present MSTS presented an error of Failed to open texture file: Trains\Trainset\SLI_AMTRAK_ADIRONDACK\Amfleet_I_Co ach.ace.

If the .ace texture is missing but the .dds texture is present then Open Rails uses a uniform gray texture as shown in the picture below.

missing texture Amfleet_I_Coach.jpg

I did not notice a warning message in the log for a missing texture of Amfleet_I_Coach.ace. I will look into creating a patch for this issue.

[kraus]

MSTS is now approaching 14 Years Old! The SIM Engine Itself is severly outdated, when compared to newer Sims, in Graphics Quality and Resolution Sizes and it only runs in FULLSCREEN mode, & Memory Management is poor. It is VERY outdated. Microsoft now longer supports it. MSTSBin Updates are no longer be created. Newer Microsoft Windows Operating Systems with Certain Graphic Cards are no longer able to run the MSTS SIM ENGINE.

The MSTS sim engine does support window mode.

"G:\Program Files\Microsoft Games\Train Simulator\train.exe" -vm:w -mem:1024 /fullderailments

[MCDemuth]

Isn't Open Rails supposed to use the .dds files, whether or not the matching .ace files are present?

(SEE BELOW)



I don't have that set, but i have the International Set... They only included shape files referencing .ace files only.

They work as expected with the MSTS SIM Engine. If the .dds file are there in the folder or not, they they still work the same.



As an experiment, I took one of the International Amtrak PHIII Amfleet I coaches, and I took the shape and replaced the .ace texture names with the .dds texture names.

The shape did not seem to load in Shape Viewer. It was invisible.

I made a consist with it. I started the MSTS SIM ENGINE, and it loaded to the Menu Screen. I tried to run the Consist in Explore Mode...

After I pushed Start, and then I received this error message:

Error: continue?
Failed to open texture file
...\file.dds

I clicked on "YES"

Then I received this message: "Can't Add Car" "to world".

Proceeding further cause the MSTS SIM ENGINE to crash.


.ace files and .dds files, therefore can not be the same. They must be TWO different file formats.

That difference had been explained to me before. .dds files have higher quality textures than .ace files. The MSTS SIM Engine was never designed to use these higher quality texture files. Therefore, .dds file formats are OPEN RAILS ONLY DESIGNED CONTENT.

According to your earlier proposal, if it won't load/work in the MSTS SIM ENGINE, it should not load/work in the OPEN RAILS SIM ENGINE either.

So why should developers be trying to use these .dds files now, if they are not supposed to work? They might as well be scrapped...

And as someone pointed out... For How Long? Five more years?

I thought the goal of the OPEN RAILS SIM ENGINE was to use the Older MSTS DESIGN CONTENT with .ace files, while at the same time, be able to use OPEN RAILS ONLY DESIGNED CONTENT with .dds files.

If this will not be the case for Five more years, a lot of developers will not be happy with this...

I have been told, that the OPEN RAILS SIM ENGINE is supposed to try and use .dds textures files, and if none are found, then it will use .ace files.

If that is not the case, then why were shape files not included with SLI's Products that referenced the .dds files, instead of the .ace files. It was marketed as being "Open Rails Compatible". I don't see how... How are these .dds files supposed to be used then?



So why did your Open Rails test fail to display the textures? The .dds files were there...

Is that the patch you are planning to work on?

[MCDemuth]

The MSTS sim engine does support window mode.

Sorry, I should have been more clear...

The MSTS SIM ENGINE engine only runs in 4x3 (FULLSCREEN) aspect ratio. Whether in be in Full Screen Mode or Windows Mode. It may be possible to Maintain the 4x3 Aspect Ratio on 16x9 (WIDESCREEN) Monitors by using the Scaling/Maintain Aspect Ratio setting in the Video Display Software. Otherwise the 4x3 Aspect Ratio output may be stretched to fill the entire 16x9 (WIDESCREEN) Monitor Screen.

Open Rails is supposed to be able to Run in 4x3 (FULLSCREEN) aspect ratio and in 16x9 (WIDESCREEN) aspect ratio depending on the monitor you are using.

[kraus]

So why did your Open Rails test fail to display the textures? The .dds files were there...

Is that the patch you are planning to work on?

I am not sure why Open Rails added support for .dds texture files. How are .dds texture files technically better than .ace texture files?

My patch is to add to the log a message when texture files are missing.

[baldwin]

I am not sure why Open Rails added support for .dds texture files. How are .dds texture files technically better than .ace texture files?

My patch is to add to the log a message when texture files are missing.

Perhaps https://www.trainsim.com/vbts/showth...S-vs-Ace/page3 post #23 will answer the question.

[eric]

I am not sure why Open Rails added support for .dds texture files. How are .dds texture files technically better than .ace texture files?

My patch is to add to the log a message when texture files are missing.

IIRC, missing textures already generate a log message in ORTS. Why do you need a patch?

Support for DDS was a user request, and it's pretty well spelled out why in the thread that Baldwin referenced. It's not a proprietary format like ACE is for MSFT, and it supports advanced functionality like bump maps.

I see this whole issue as being no different from trying to open up a SKP done in Sketchup 2014 with Sketchup v6.

You can usually open older files with the newer tool, but there's no expectation of being able to open newer files with the older editor.

[kraus]

Can you copy a portion of the ORTS log that shows a missing texture? I looked in the log and did not see any message for the missing texture in my test.

While DDS may support bump maps, do shape files (.s) also support them?

The only present benefit seems to be in tools that support creating DDS.

When you get down to it, if you're using a format supported by both ACE and DDS (so RGBA, DXT1/3/5), they are basically just two different wrappers around the exact same data. All they're doing is saying things like "Hi, I'm a DXT3 texture that is 1024x1024 with 7 mipmaps" - both ACE and DDS do this. Once loaded onto the GPU, they'd be identical (if the same data went in and the same format options applied). They both support mipmaps, so there's no difference there either.

At the moment, I'd say the only real advantage of DDS is tooling support. Open Rails supports the exact same formats (RGBA, DXT1/3/5) in both ACE and DDS, both with and without mipmaps, so you don't gain any great new way to store your images or better quality compression. In fact, ACE files using RGBA format can be compressed in a way that DDS files cannot, so you might argue that ACE is better than DDS in that respect. But the tooling really wins in my book. You can't go in to your favourite image editor, be it Paint.NET, Gimp or many others and save an image as ACE. But you can save as DDS.

[dekosoft]

Thanks for your feedback. Our release of the GP30 Pro Edition set is intended for Open Rails only. Our aim is to develop and support Open Rails as a separate platform. From our point-of-view, MSTS standards don't apply to ORTS any more than they do to TS2015, Run8 or any other simulation -- they are different platforms. We'll be releasing fewer items with MSTS backwards-compatibility, as MSTS is no longer developed and cannot run on many contemporary systems.

[kraus]

In what way is the GP30 Pro Edition intended for Open Rails only? It was designed as a shape file and exported using tools intended to create Microsoft shape files. It is only due to a limitation in current Open Rails shape reading code that it renders in Open Rails and not MSTS. The current shape reading code is not completely compatible with shape files because portions of the file are ignored. The release version will validate the entire .s file and not show invalid shapes. It is almost certain that the release version of Open Rails will not render the current shape file in the GP30 Pro Edition set so it will then need to be patched for both MSTS and Open Rails.

What tools were used to produce the shape files in the GP30 Pro Edition? They wrote invalid values for hierarchy and need to be patched, see https://www.trainsim.com/vbts/showth...22#post1858522

[MP36PH3S]

In what way is the GP30 Pro Edition intended for Open Rails only? It was designed as a shape file and exported using tools intended to create Microsoft shape files. It is only due to a limitation in current Open Rails shape reading code that it renders in Open Rails and not MSTS. The current shape reading code is not completely compatible with shape files because portions of the file are ignored. The release version will validate the entire .s file and not show invalid shapes. It is almost certain that the release version of Open Rails will not render the current shape file in the GP30 Pro Edition set so it will then need to be patched for both MSTS and Open Rails.

What tools were used to produce the shape files in the GP30 Pro Edition? They wrote invalid values for hierarchy and need to be patched, see https://www.trainsim.com/vbts/showth...22#post1858522

Going off of what dcarleton said on the previous page, there are limits to what MSTS can render. Theoretically those same limits do not need to apply to OR; i.e. "OR only" shape files could be of the same format as those of MSTS but could have more polys than what MSTS can handle. Those technically only work in OR...

[EricF]

ORTS-specific content comes into being because OR can, quite simply, handle models which are far more complex than MSTS can manage the resources for.

The (evolving) ORTS modeling conventions use MSTS formats as the basic building block. Since OR can do more than MSTS, the next step is to simply add more on top of the MSTS foundation. More polygons, more complex freight animations, higher-resolution textures, texture formats (.dds) that MSTS doesn't recognize but can still be specified in standard MSTS files, even additional new features that can be specified in .eng and .wag files for features that don't exist in MSTS but might be necessary for the model to work correctly in a sim environment.

MSTS-compatible models can still function in MSTS; the poly count is low enough, .ACE textures are available even though .dds ones are present, and ORTS-specific features called out in .eng or .wag files are extras, not dependencies.

ORTS-only models will probably have too many polys straight off. That alone can be enough to take a model straight out of the realm of MSTS. Add to that textures that might be .dds format only, no .ace textures. The model might be dependent on new features in an .eng or.wag file that MSTS doesn't read and therefore can't use. There are multiple ways a model can be built-up beyond the capabilities of MSTS.

The difference is in what's added beyond the well-known limits of MSTS.

[kraus]

Why would the tools used to produce a defective shape file be none of my business? Since it is unlikely the damage to the shape file was created with a text editor then there is a shape creation tool that is producing damaged content. Knowing which tool created this content could lead to that tool being patched to produce valid content.

[dcarleton]

Why would the tools used to produce a defective shape file be none of my business?

Because the shapes are the privately owned intellectual property of Dekosoft. If used per label instructions, which clearly indicate their intended use is in OR, then they work as expected. Dekosoft is under no obligation to tell you how they arrived at that result.

You're just incensed that you dropped twelve bucks on a set that doesn't function straight out of the box in MSTS. Caveat emptor.