There has been some mostly acceptable screen shots posted recently using TSC add ons of trains next to rivers - but it is laughable to say this is how railways next to rivers actually look. I wonder where these rivers actually are – they must be the best maintained rivers in the whole of the world! (certainly next to railways) They are so terrible - no wild life (not even a duck or a swan), no litter or shopping trollies, no green algae, nothing going on in the skies above (airplanes / birds). Surely there should be some kind of reflections of the trains in the water or sun reflecting on train roofs. Most must be lockdown scenes, with little sign of any people - not even a fisherman, jogger dog walker or trainspotter. For any dudes creating these screen shots it must be so boring. It would be useful if any add on developers kept there websites up to date, showing rolling stock used, route, weather pattern, time of day for anyone who wishes to create them. For me, it would be great to have a river scene add on pack attached to say a weather pack to address the above. But until then, as they say on Dragons Den – I won’t be investing until at least version 1.4 is available! If you think this opinion is a negative then please just ignore me – it is the 1st April!
It's a good one, though. Except you forgot the canal boats. So unfair of you. I really like routes with scenery like that, little realistic details. Here, look at my river, my river is amazing. It was actually quite hard to find an acceptable scene of the river with such a short train.
Rivers are very hard to do with the current mesh size if they are anything much smaller than the Thames / Trent / Severn / Tyne. You should see my attempt to make a "typical" small upland stream of say 4 or 5ft width. People are limited in TSC unless one can build them oneself which is right up there at serious expert modeller level. Generally ( a bit like hedges for that matter ) organic element as opposed to inorganic like stone / brick etc are much much harder to model as the softness of organic forms needs vast polygon counts that mean that a route gets very large in processing power for little gain. Its why I continue to use the older 2D tree forms for any distant trees as vast numbers of dense 3D tree forests can grind most ordinary home computers to a jittery crawl.
I might be stating the obvious, but you could work around the issue by always placing foliage, rocks or stuff that looks like terrain (huge rocks usually, but even hillsides are sometimes modeled), on the side of the stream. Seems to be the trend with official routes. Except where they didn't, and it looks funny. I know it's not always prototypical, it might be muddy or sandy, but... options. In any event, your stream looks quite fine. (Says the guy without enhancement packs.)
triznya.andras - thanks for the comment. The thing I was trying to show is the problem of creating an asset for a small river. I agree that after placing the asset one can do much with careful placement of foliage and rocks etc but making a realistic stream loft asset that will lie on the landscape with little "disguising" so far escapes me. One could see a way of doing it by adding rocks to the loft asset in a way similar to bridge piers but even that turns out to be too regular and looks actually worse. Someone more clever than me might be able to something with lua scripting maybe ? That said the idea of mud banks that run along the asset does have potential perhaps.
This is a good idea. Myself and my friends make content for TS, I've asked them if we could be able to make a river pack.
