Home Tutorials Kuju Rail Simulator - Planting Trees

Rail Simulator - Planting Trees

by Jim "Sniper" Ward

RS has supplied only one "bank" of forest trees designed for a given slope: it occurs to me that forestation this will have to be done with individual trees. How much impact will this have on framerates? (Only way to find out is try it and see.)

This is a tedious task - let's see if we can speed it up.

Plant a bunch of trees in a more or less square pattern. Make it a "monk's forest", ie leave a bald spot in the middle so you can click on bare terrain to drag a circle. Release the circle when all the trees are surrounded and they're all selected, CTRL C to copy.

Now press Ctrl-V to paste all over the landscape. Here's the sucky part, the J key doesn't work until you let go of the selection and reselect it, so I just pasted all over the place then went back and dragged big circles to reselect and hit the J key to pop the trees to the terrain.

And here I discovered that you need to keep the size of the selection circles small: if you don't, the terrain comes up and buries the tracks and when you go over them with the "Snap-terrain-to-Track" magnet to unbury them again, the switches will be all screwed up - some of the track had changed elevation.

I'm still experimenting with this, but it seems that

  1. Take it in smaller bites;
  2. don't overlap track with the selection circle;
  3. Save periodically so you don't lose the whole smash when the track gets screwed up;
  4. Save and exit occasionally cuz I think I'm hitting a memory overflow.

I now select smaller circles, hit the J key and move to the next, after leveling what I have, Ctrl-V again to paste a few more and stop to level those. I still get some individual floating trees near the track from trying to stay away from the tracks, haven't discovered how close is too close yet, or if the screwed up tracks are actually a memory overflow problem and nothing to do with the circle select J routine.

That took about 20 minutes, not half bad, still gotta fill in a few bare spots then test drive to see what all that does to the framerates.

Several hundred individual trees does drop the framerates to around 15-20 FPS, but for some reason it still flows smoothly. FPS ain't the whole story with these things though, depending on the game 15 can be smooth as silk while 50 can look like a warped oily clutch, depends on how often it samples the frames. For comparison: this picture - standard forest blocks here: 15 FPS........

whereas 25 FPS here with forest blocks and treeline objects. The eye is naturally drawn to closer objects, so the most efficient way is to heavily detail closer to the tracks and skimp a little on the vistas.

12 Nov 2007