In ORTS not work Cloaked Island

[primula]

Good evening everyone. After a long time I resumed the magical SeaView5 and with ORTS I enjoyed its magic. However, I discovered that in ORTS the famous Cloaked Island hidden object trick no longer works. Is anyone aware of the problem or does it know the solution? Thanks in advance for every possible contribution. [ATTACH]83352

[R. Steele]

Please post complete log. You can zip up the log and attach it.

[dcarleton]

Many of the best tricks that were built into SeaView were so heavily customized to the capabilities of MSTS that they just aren't very effective in Open Rails. This is one case where - if you can keep one functional installation of MSTS - it will be most useful for running SeaView. I know, I know, many MSTS questions on this board receive the answer "use Open Rails instead". In this case, it's the other way around!

There have been some very interesting hacks that were introduced in the waning years of MSTS that really enhance the experience. That's in addition to MSTS-BIN. There was a hack that makes MSTS large-address aware, and another one to make it run on a wide screen monitor (as long as it doesn't exceed a certain size).

If you still have your MSTS disks, do some research on these hacks. If you love SeaView, the effort will be well worth it.

[primula]

This is the zipped log.
From a glance at the ORTS manual, I think the cause is the different coding of the density of objects compared to MSTS. I wonder if there isn't a different way around the problem. Even I had thought of still using MSTS for old programs to avoid disabling novelties. MSTS, however, on Windows 11 64bit with management under dgVoodooCpl is an ordeal and with heavy routes like SeaView5 practically unmanageable.
ORTS on the other hand, with hundreds and hundreds of FPS even with exceptional loads, undeniably is a great help not to trash all the powerful virtual library that began 20 years ago and that we are so passionate about.
Thank you to everyone who read and answered me and will answer me.

Luigi

[fleegle411]

The simple fact of the matter is the Cloaked Island relied entirely on a bug in which certain shader settings and/or two transparencies overtop each other in a shape file would result in most if not all other shapes becoming invisible when viewed through that shape's transparency. The coaches used on Chris Helfrick's Strasburg Railroad route had the same issue. In the case of SeaView, someone had the brilliant idea of using that bug as a "Cloak."

This is not an issue with OpenRails. This is the unusual case of a route that used a bug in MSTS to its advantage, and OpenRails fixing the bug. About the only solution I could think if would be to re-imagine the cloak. Perhaps huge dark panels surrounding the island with wording on them that says "NOTHING TO SEE HERE."

[primula]

I tried to remove the Alpha channel from the texture and color it in white or light blue in order to transform an invisible secret but under the eyes of all into an official secret and forbidden to external glances. The resulting huge cube (even for the exterior of the mysterious area) does not satisfy me and maybe I will keep SeaView as ORTS allows. Thank you all. Hello Luigi

[ftldave]

Amazing. Though I think, technically, maybe it should probably be called an "antibug" since there really is such a programming term as "antifeature".

From The Center for Digital Ethics & Policy, Loyola University
Antifeatures stand in contrast both to features and to bugs, the two sides of the usual software evaluation dichotomy. A feature is a functionality intended to be useful to the user. A bug is a behavior, usually the result of an error or sloppy programming, that gets in the way of the features. Antifeatures, unlike features, are not useful from the standpoint of the software user.

Hence, surely, the greatly loved Seaview route's Cloaked Island trick was the result of an ... antibug.