Monday, February 13, 2012

Railworks, TS2012 graphics performance and bugs

I'm not pleased with the updates too. Actually because i don't use anti-aliasing (railworks runs badly enough without that...), i didn't noticed ANY performance improvement under TSX mode (i do in legacy mode, but that's too retro looking), nor quality improvement.

I use medium shadows because as i said railwors don't runs like a dream on my machine, however games with much better graphics running on it with very nice frame rates (Skyrim at high settings with high res texture pack, BF3 at high, tropico4 at highest settings).
This medium shadow mode (and even high or highest) have very annoying problems. For example the flickering, and shimmering.
See this video about the shadow flickering: Youtube video

Also in TSX mode since the TS2012 update i notice flickering, z fighting on places where it wasn't in legacy mode, and not just on shadows, main geometry is flickering too! For example on german HL signal main/distant plates (red white or yellow white striped plates on signal post).

Also i've noticing (and not just me) a problem, when i switch to cab view from external, then the frame rate drops permanently, and isn't rise if i switch back to external view, only when i restart the scenario. This happens not just with br101, but with class47 cab too, and probably with every cab views.
The only improvements i see, is: faster load times, little less stuttering at tile loads (but still noticeable), plus the FXAA "hack" made official. But on the core graphics of TSX i do not notice any change.

Thursday, February 9, 2012

Failworks, aka DLCworks

Yesterday i get the update for TS2012 from steam. I wasn't so disappointed, because i got used to get nothing at these big long awaited patches.
This time (again) they promised performance updates, but nothing was improved except they built in to game the FXAA antialiasing (which was available separately as and external dll injector), and some performance improvements on "retro" legacy mode. But the shadowing and lightening performance and quality issues haven't fixed.
Since 2007 (release of rail simulator):
-loco physics is broken, and never touched since RS
-AI dispatcher haven't improved significantly
-brakes are unrealistic (worse than MSTS!) a 2km long train can release all wagon brakes in no time, while in reality it could take MINUTES, or at least tens of seconds.
-every patch caused at least a new bug which are mostly haven't fixed (for example brake notching in loco controls (it seems it works, on some locos, but it's just a workaround with lua scripting), broken lua script debugging, etc)
-endless stream of promises

Improvements? Let's see:
-career mode? Is it? I think it's just a mission scoring thing. it's not like a carreer.
-super-elevation? Not bad but far from reality. (irl the angle depends not only on curvature, but on permitted speed too)
-new graphics engine? Yeah, a very old directx9 engine replaced to a simply old directx9 engine (aka TSX) in !2011! (when even directx 11.1 came out), which have awful performance, and quality with shadows. Do i have a "junk pc"? Maybe, but i don't know why are all other games running at high graphics settings on my pc (including BF3, TES V Skyrim) without problems, and with MUCH nicer visual quality. Or maybe TSX engine is the junk, and not my pc?
- others... erm... i can't remember other improvements

Obviously the TS2012 game core, have a lot of flaws, bugs, and it's very inefficient too, and have serious limitations. But instead of hiring new coders to make it better, what RSC does? They hire MORE DLC, marketing people, but no any core coder.
While they keep saying that bullshit, that they "need solid financial foundations to improve the game". No they won't do this, they have solid financial state, but they use it to make more DLC. They never really though about really improving the simulation, they just say thing that the community likes to keep the hope alive in them, but those promises never will be fulfilled.

I've bought Railworks 1 in 2010, because i've believed in their promises, but nothing happened since that. Every time they say they will improve and fix this and that in next patch, and when the patch comes out (with at least 5 months of delay) we get the 10% of those that they promised for that patch.
At the last year i knew all of this, but i hoped they can change, but they can't.
Railworks 1, 2 ,3, TS2012 or whatever they call their patched Rail Simulator, will remain to be Failworks, or DLCworks.

But i still hope it will be better... which means there are too few train sims out there to choose from :(