SweetFX and ReShade

[advut]

So, what's happening? Is there no other preset to try? I checked the sweetfx presets site at sfx.thelazy.net but it doesn't have a database for ORTS.

[haverfordwest]

You can use any preset. For OR i am using a preset that i originally downloaded for IL-2 Sturmovik 1946. Which i then tweaked to use in TS2018 and i am now using with OR with slight changes to settings.

[Erick_Cantu]

The game will never look good because like Trainz it is tied to the corpse of 2004ish assets and legacy equipment of the users.

That's the thing, it's not. People are just unwilling to shed the older content and build anew. With top-par content, OR looks breathtaking - see the shots here. The addition of better materials would only serve to push it over the edge. To be clear, when I talk about older content, I generally mean in routes. We have some great locomotive models being built today, but we have relatively few backdrops to run them on that don't bring us back to 2001. I think that part of this is that there are even fewer route builders than model builders.

Railworks never had that problem, running Railworks initially required an upgrade in equipment and believe most users did.

Nope. Still a DX9 program to this day. OR is DX9 as well. Everything Railworks does, graphically speaking, is within ORs capability - if/when the developers see fit to allow it (I have faith that it's coming).

the assets require finding an old copy of an abandoned game.

Nope. Just few people are willing to do standalone content. We could throw out everything MSTS tomorrow and OR would still run, so long as the route contained rolling stock and all necessary sounds, shapes, and textures.

I do agree to an extent, though. What's tying OR down is its backward-compatibility, but not because the formats are limited. The file formats are capable of doing anything a modern game requires, but backwards-compatibility means that few people are developing content that meets current standards because they have so much old content to fall back on instead. I mean, route builders are still using Kujurail, which ought to have been done away with in the 1.2 patch. XTracks, too. It's based on the french fry Kuju tracks and has no place in routes built in 2018.

The lack of reflection, bump, and specular mapping isn't going to draw new developers to the platform, either. All of those things are well within the capability of systems that ran MSTS. Other games that came out in that time period had that capability. KRS/RW/TS20xx didn't exactly usher in a new era of PC gaming, it's just more demanding on the hardware than MSTS was. And, even then, it runs faster than OR. I can't hardly get OR up to 30 FPS, with the view distance set to 1000m, even using the monogame version, and I can't hardly get RW below 50 FPS with everything maxed.

I don't mean to disparage anyone when I say all this, mind, but it's very frustrating to know that with better materials, the ability to do custom scripting, more animated parts, and new content, OR would be the rail simulator that finally has it all. It's still my favourite platform - even though I have TS2018 - and I don't mean to sound ungrateful. I'm sorry if I do.

I will concede that I was wrong about one thing - evidently the diesel exhaust was fixed at some point. The problem was the temporary dieselsmoke.ace I created during the period when colour parameters weren't working correctly. My bad.

[scottb613]

Hi Erick,

Very well stated - ORTS as I've said for years is an opportunity that doesn't come along very often - it's an Open Source project - by the community and for the community - we don't need to consider project deadlines or costs - it's a labor of love in it's truest sense - we have the power - - - LOL - - - and still there was great reluctance - many chose the shiny flash of the TSW franchise over substance - and it took eons for many to embrace ORTS... There are too few developers and too few modelers as well... Hopefully a new day is coming...

Regards,
Scott

[jkorchok]

I'm doing research for building a new Open Rails route for the Hackensack & New York Railway of 1860. What is the state of the art for route-building software?

[advut]

While colours, models etc. of those screenshots look very good, it's not modern looking. Look at those camouflage pattern ground textures. Nobody in their right mind would buy it if it was for TS 2018 or TSW assuming 3rd party content can be produced for TSW. For routes with like grasslands or just simply those grass textures beside rail tracks visible in most MSTS routes this could've been well hidden with relatively less pain if ORTS had automatic grass.

About older looking assets...there are some graphical cheats like bloom, depth of field, dirt maps etc. which can somewhat hide older, low quality texture models but ORTS by default has none of these effects.

About few route builders...I think this problem is because making routes for ORTS\MSTS is still difficult even with TSRE. I mean I can fill a map with roads, tracks, objects within an hour or two in map editors of Cities: Skylines, Tropico 5 etc. Doing so would probably take some months in MSTS RE or TSRE even for maybe just a 30 km route. Combine that with the relatively low player base of train simulators and you've got a problem. Why can't there be a route editor for ORTS where forests can be placed and resized simply by dragging, tracks can be drawn instead of this horrible MSTS way of placing each section one by one? If such a route editor existed I think there would be more route builders.

[conductorchris]

Well, Goku is working on procedural track for TSRE. So there is progress coming. (Thank, Goku)
Christopher

[muskokaandtahoe]

Why can't there be a route editor for ORTS where forests can be placed and resized simply by dragging, tracks can be drawn instead of this horrible MSTS way of placing each section one by one? If such a route editor existed I think there would be more route builders.

IMO because nobody is thinking 3d. Roads and tracks are NOT simply placed on a surface, they're positioned in 3d space and if you want to do the job quickly you have to provide an editable 3d template that is following the data present in a map -- think of a hanging curtain: The tangents and curves that curtain has follows the lateral directions seen in the map; the vertical quality represents where you define teh grade -- and the grade is NOT the point of intersection with the terrain, it's far less changing. The only way to pick a permanent grade is for the route builder to to assign start, end, and gradient on each section. IMO a simple drawn line would suffice. Transform the lateral changes AND the gradient line to procedural track and road shapes and you can generate miles upon miles of shape in one big step. Allow for specifying how many parallel paths there are, including the number of each side of the center line. It's all just 3d geometric data.

Anything short of that will be more time consuming because you'd be working with the shape itself, foot by foot, meter by meter (think dynamic track) instead of backing out to map distances and doing km and miles in a couple of steps.

It also has the benefit of separating the appearance of the shape from its path. In the ideal you'd come along after the road and track path is set and assign the appearance you want applied as you go -- mainline here, side track there, highway here, dirt road there. There is no particular reason why the task of defining the path must be based on the appearance of the shape. Sure, sometimes applying the appearance right away is useful... but you should be able to change your mind about that at any time and have that decision applied in a trivially easy manner. We don't have that today because everybody is s till thinking in terms of KUJU's and DTG's ideas of how to do things are the best -- and only -- way to do things. IMO neither are.

[advut]

There was a thread here at this site a while back where someone made a tool which could automatically place tracks based on map data. What's the progress on that?

Yes... I contacted Goku earlier about spine based track and automatic grass and he said TSRE will have both of these in future. That's great indeed. Meanwhile, ORTS equivalent of flight simulators called Flight Gear is supposed to have volumetric grass in the next release. Maybe ORTS devs can look into Flight Gear code to implement that in ORTS.