Just a thought, a lot of sims are employing this resource to create vibration and sensing in routes. I’m not sure how the process could work but how cool would it be for cab to perhaps tie in with vibration. granted you’d only benefit on pad but to feel the routes too……?
I know e.g. iRacing benefits a lot from laser-scanning circuits - their tracks are much more accurate than other sims, and have been noted as such by professional racing drivers - so it's something for enhanced accuracy for sure. Would be interesting to hear what benefits it would bring to TSW2 routes.
Yeah it's a weird one. I tell you why i thought of it. I was watching a video of an american crawling down a bumpy track and thought "that would be cool" . Then as soon as I was about to post this I thought - this is going to benefit a pad more than a keyboard
DTG can develop more realistic and realistic railway routes, mainly because of the cost and time of development.
Simply none. Do a research how this stuff works, what you can do with it and what it costs to do it. Apply that to a railroad. You will get the clear idea.
With something like iRacing the scanning of real world tracks is doable because of how small such a place is. Railroads are on a whole different level, a simple mile long terminal railroad would maybe be about the level of average racetrack in complexity. And that's assuming that the tech used by say iRacing is even useful on something like a railroad, and if TSW could even handle such fine data. Having every single tiny bump in a track doesn't matter so much in a train sim, especially at the level of simulation DTG does, they're miles behind racing and flight simulation in terms of replicating the real thing. Also with something like iRacing there's some pretty serious money invested into it and other racing games thanks to eSports. Keep in mind even real life racing legends like Dale Earnhardt Jr. are involved with it. So they and other places can afford to invest into scanning these areas, because not only is there more than enough demand resources being put into iRacing, they have all the connections with the real life sport they can get all the necessary permissions needed to do so. While DTG might have connections with a place like say Union Pacific, I don't believe they're anywhere near the level iRacing has.
Fair enough, but it doesn't have to be the entire route - scanning stations (ones you can have such access to), bridges, crossings and urban areas around stations would mean having everything there represented in detail. In TSW2 you often have a feeling there's more to these locations that couldn't be captured with the current tech approach. I remember complaints about the urban section around the St Pancras station being way off the RL counterpart when SEHS released, for example.
Laser scanning for TSW routes would be massively impractical at least. Lets "grab" a Faro Focus S150. I would say that is the minimum scanner size you could use for scanning stations and other railroad related areas without the need to scan for 20 years on one route. Lets set the resolution to 1/8, what means point spacing is about 12mm in 10m distance. That is quite inaccurate but usable for a game. The scan time for the full range on high quality is about 30-40mins. That's from only one spot. You need to scan from a lot of spots to get all details from such areas. For a normal size station i would plan in to scan for a week or so. Not impossible to do ....BUT ... First you need to get all the permissions from different authorities to do it, per spot (it is a Laser, don't forget that). Then you need permission from the railroad company and/or property owner and/or what ever other people could have any interest in what you are doing there. Imagine the cost only for that first part. And to get all permissions it will be years. Then you need good weather conditions, less people and trains (and other moving objects) in the scanned area. And beware of reflecting surfaces (windows for example), they will ruin your results. The last big NO is the amount of data that you have to work with. A single scan may be ok, a 3 point scan too, but a whole station, wow, i can't even imagine how much TB/PB of raw data this will be. Processing that data takes ages. Just a view on the things from a technical side EDIT: Forgot one aspect, the price of such a scanner. But i think that is the lowest weighted NO here with about 50k.
The issue isn't the tech, you can get incredible results from handcrafting stuff, even if it's stuff that could be tracked or scanned. For example Smokebox uses blueprints when modeling his engines, and while obviously things like light isn't as good in TS Classic, the actual modeling's dead on compared to the real thing, even though they're not scanned in anyway. If you have good reference material and time to put in but you can easily make stuff that's on par with scanned items. The biggest issues with DTG products are due to the very short development times, not because they can't get results with the current approach.
Interesting reading the above. Thanks for replies guys. I’ve actually learned a lot beyond my passing though. Thank you
