by AndiS » Sun Mar 18, 2018 9:33 pm
If I would ever build a real route it would come with a user agreement (or service level agreement) stating where the camera is supposed to be.
1) Cab view, headout view, passenger view. In TSW this will include all the legit stroles you can do on foot - I guess they will put up invisible barriers that keep you from entering town and fields.
2) Viewing the train from up to X m distance, from up to Y m above track level.
3) Train spotting from selected locations. This can be a list or a rule (like all bridges and platforms) or a strip along all track.
You easily spot the related issues:
1) All those who think that proper simulations means not leaving the cab hate to pay of the eye candy they don't see and they hate the loading time it causes. You ought to sell them separate versions, twice the length at the same development costs. But they cannot be the whole audience or TSW would not feature non-cab activity so much.
2) Taking a side view shot of a freight train takes you really far away from track with a valid purpose. In-game shots want to mimic train photography and the "engine with a bit of context" composition bores me to dead. But would you really want to have foreground details on the backside (as looking from the train) on scenery 100 m from track. And 100 m is not all that much when you want to show a long train. Even 50 m from track, the backside of building would be irrelevant without this use case of looking at the whole train. And enjoying the view is something you must give to any scenario author. So all I can see is some minimum flying height.
3) A bit less arbitrary than before, but no less bi-faced. You want some fine detail in the foreground, all the blurry textures really kill any illusion. But would you really argue for loading quality texture for all the clutter along every metre of open route where the train passes at speed.
For the latter case, I hope that the Unreal engine will permit conditional scenery loading. I say some examples where they computed the distance between object and camera as a trigger for something. You could them measure camera movement speed. If the camera is stationary, you bring in foreground versions. Such would be the theory.
In the Nottingham tunnel, I would put up a sign behind the flat scenery reading "you are supposed to be in the tunnel". At Derby it is different. The train runs through a cutting with lots of bridges crossing and all the way from the station to the river could be classed as iconic. So taking shots of that would be valid desire, though quite hard to satisfy.