Consist lenght and same/different cars

[michelouim]

I hope i am posting at the right place.

I would like to know if there is a difference if a long consist, over 100 cars (like the intermodal or grain trains) is using a repetition of the same car or if all the cars are different. Specifically, if the player has a 125 intermodal cars, and if like 2-3 or more AI have the same lenght, is OR performing better with the same car or it doesnt matter.

Michel

[ossie]

Hi Michel,

My gut feeling would be if the same 6 wagons are being used over and over it would probably require less from the sim, graphics card etc than 500 different wagons would but someone with a better tech knowledge and/or understanding of ORTS might need to correct me on that. That said, one of my "hang ups" with the game is not to repeat the same locos or freight cars across an activity so there's some I use with 1000(ish) different freight cars on AI traffic and my framerates and sim performance are fine (other than occasional glitches if you cross another big train in an area with a lot of buildings/scenery etc).

If you started to have performance issues when running a lot of individual wagons then it would probably be an interesting experiment to try re-running it with just a few wagons repeated through each consist and see if it made a difference to performance. Touch wood, it's not a problem I've run into so far though.

[michelouim]

Thanks for the reply Pete. I have a HP laptop, 2 years old, and I was wondering if OR or my graphic card, seems to be Intel ARC (with 128Mb) would make it difficult to run those long trains.

Michel

[pschlik]

Duplicate rail vehicles will save on some memory, as the texture and sound files will only need to be loaded one time (OR re-uses memory whenever feasible). That also means loading time will be shorter as there are fewer files to process. But it won't save on anything else. Physics calculations are going to be the same amount of work regardless of the variety of the train cars, graphics load will still increase as more train cars show up on screen even if they are all the same, sounds are still played from each car individually. Assuming all the train cars have a similar level of detail, that means framerate won't change much with the exact composition of the consist unless you are very memory constrained. The difference will be negligible in most cases.