Graduated Environments for KRS

[oakpalms]

It would be very nice to have changes in weather determined by elevation rather than just one type of weather for an entire route. Especially if KRS is going to allow for much longer routes than can be used with MSTS. For example, the Seligman Sub freeware route is almost 300 miles long-- starts at 500 feet in elevation and climbs to over 7000 feet. At the 500 foot level along the California-Arizona state line, they never get snow and very little rain. But, at the 7000 feet level around Flagstaff there can be a blizzard.

Is there any way to have up to six different weather conditions based upon changes of elevation, but which would be determined by the activity builder? Using the Seligman Sub as an example, Elevation between 0000 and 1000 feet would be clear, between 1000-2000 feet would be cloudy, between 2000-3000 would be light rain, between 3000-4000 would be light snow, between 4000-5000 would be heavy snow, between 5000-6000 would also be heavy snow, and 6000-7000 would be blizzard.


There are many American and European routes that would be similar since many of the routes climb over mountains and back down. Since much of America is concerned with mountainous terrain this should be a big feature. Some type of graduation of the weather effect according to elevation would be much more realistic. However, routes in eastern America are quite different. Eastern routes do not go much above 4000-5000 feet in elevation, but you can have a lot of snow at the top and even at sea level elevations in the northeast.

It would be great if the the Activity Builder had a means to determine the type of environment that would occur based upon know elevations and route characteristics.

Route builders should have a place where the total rise and fall in elevation of their route is included to make use with this system. I assume that the software would require some type of indicator for each 1000 foot change of elevation that would be required to be placed by the route builder. By allowing the Activity Builder to select the type of weather this would allow clear skies, rain, or snow to be falling over the entire route. However, the effect of changing weather conditions would be an awesome impact and something that no other train simulator has.

Bob Edwards
North Port, FL

[OTTODAD]

Hi Bob !

As has been said, very little is impossible to achieve with software, but the more complicated it is, the higher it's price.

Not easy to know where to draw the line to suit everybody's expectations and at the same time the amount of money they are willing to spend on it ! ;-)

O t t o

[jb17kx]

I would just be happy with a more advanced environment system, like MSFS. Eg, and activity creator could specify "Intermittant Rain" as an environmental condition. As you ran the act, you got patches of rain at different strenghts, and clouds changed.
I would also like it if the act builder could give weather control to the user. As in, for a scheduled train, you could change the environmental condition, so as the act did not become to repeditive in terms weather.

[muskokaandtahoe]

> Not easy to know where to draw the line to suit everybody's expectations and at the same time the amount of money they are willing to spend on it !

But Otto, for lots of these suggestions the cost is between zero and nominal. For instance, there is a nominal cost difference between coding four seasonality terrtex directories to include subdirectories of (1) snow and (2) rain as compared to the MSTS solution of two terrtexes -- dry and snow.

Unless of course you've already coded for rain in some completely obtuse manner as was done in MSTS.

Ditto for skinning water by the subtile vs the tile.

In fact, IMO, about the only difference between the original MSTS solution and doing it right is the 30-45 second effort to think about it first.

Despite the occasional warts, I think Kujo did a credible job on most of the MSTS code. Controlling 50 to 80 moving objects thru 3d space while operating under a set of complex performance rules is a real task. But when it came to the Route Editor and what a route developer needs to have, I'll argue that virtually no thought was put into the effort above and beyond what an unsupervised college aged greenhorn thought was spiffy. Pressing the letter Q to advance thru the terrtex window? The letter Y to raise terrain? End+numeral to slide thru raising track vs. simply letting the user type a number? Terrtex directory structure of only dry and snow as if autumn or spring are identical to summer -- for the saving of a couple of subdirectories? Come on, Otto, these topics are not rocket science that costs billions. It's called not letting your most junior coder run wild because you've spent a few minutes thinking about the real world and you've letting him/her know what you want them to do.

I'll grant you weather at varying elevations sounds like a handfull but isn't it just as likely to be only the difference between what functions are used globally and the identical functions being set on a tile by tile basis?

Arguably most routes probably do want weather -- and some other things -- assigned at a global level. But designing into the architecture the means to check global vs localized and then use the answer is a remarkably straight forward thing to do.

[b]Dave Nelson
SLW Route Design: The Cal-P, 1950.[b]
http://i3.photobucket.com/albums/y51/muskokaandtahoe/Avatars/Dancing_Genma.gif
http://i3.photobucket.com/albums/y51/muskokaandtahoe/Avatars/4ad3d633.jpg

[oakpalms]

I think the suggestion that the player have control over the route's weather would indeed be a great feature as long as it provides for graduated environments. Of course, for some this would be an experiment in the unknown. For example, a blizzard in the desert. Maybe they can allow something where the activity developer sets the weather and then the player can make adjustments if so inclined. I would like to see six, but four levels would be workable for 90% of the routes. Very few routes would have six types of weather even over a 500 mile run.

I think that trying to configure a train simulator to the weather being used with a flight simulator is totally off base. Where as a plane will fly in and out of weather cells very frequently which would permit intermittent rain, a train is going much slower and will travel in a weather cell for possibly long periods of time. Elevation is certainly the one factor that relates with weather changes along a train route far more than with an airplane. An airplane will not normally be involved with snow, and they can rise above most weather situations--a train can't.

Any one who has lived in the west can tell you that there is always an elevation where the rain changes over to snow and then back to rain. The weather people always tell where the snow level will descend to.

Bob

[OTTODAD]

Yes, the possibilities are seemingly inexhaustible, looking at what some of the latest versions of games are capable of, limited more by some of the hardware used than the expertise of it's programmers, KUJU's games coders should have plenty of !

How about randomly changing the weather from dry and sunny to a thunderstorm while running an activity, or a sandstorm in a dessert ? Or a Winter scene could also snow in places and not in others ! ;-)

I know next to nothing about what it takes to create graphics, animations and the physics needed for them and wonder what the new AGEIA PhysX processor can do for KRS, they intend to make use of ?

O t t o

[oakpalms]

Otto,
You could do all those things with good programming. Take a route where the total rise and fall is 2400 feet divide that by 6 for the number of recommended environmental zones. That comes out to a change of weather for every 400 feet of elevation. Apparently the software must be able to keep track of elevation where the train is located. If so, you could could have all of the weather changes based upon where placed in which zone.

Even on a route that is pretty flat you could still get 6 zones. For example if the rise and fall is only 100 feet and you divide that by 6 then you get a change in zones about every 15 feet in the rise and fall of elevation. If the software keeps track of elevation changes you could have multiple rechanges of the weather--you might have rain for a while and then it would be clear,then once you re-enter the elevation set for rain it would start raining again.

I am no programmer, but I really believe such a weather factor would immensely improve the simulator's appeal and affect. Weather had a big impact on flight sim.

Bob Edwards

[sgtbean]

You don't need to do all this to create realistic, but most of all interesting weather.

Dynamic weather is good enough, I'd say. You could of course incorporate some extra conditions (supposed time of year, geographic location etc.) to tweak the weather types the sim would choose between. But I would be happy enough if I started a 500 mile run in bright sunshine and as I am progressing down the route seeing the weather slowly turn into overcast and eventually rain. If the correct physics would be applied, it would also make the ride different with every so many miles, due to changes in track and weather conditions.

So for me, the most important aspect of the weather model would be it to be dynamic in nature - changing as you go along.

[Nscale1700]

Hello everyone,
There's another key weather issue that I'd like to see resolved. A while back, I was running a GP30 on Sandpatch in a downpour(the deafult rain is incredibly hard rain.) Watching this bombardment of water come down on everything around me, I began to realize how unrealistic it was to be running a metal-roofed locomotive in heavy rain and not have it be noisy in the cab!

If any real train crews read this, please clarify for me: Is it noisy in a locomotive cab (older or newer locos) when it rains really hard? If so, additional sound effects based on weather would be a nice addition to the next generation of Train Sims. You could also add the noise of an air conditioner in the summer sun or a heater in the winter!

And, being my first post in this forum, I want to wish the KRS team all the best in their efforts on this project! Thank you for listening to our comments/questions here!