Hi all On the Feather River Canyon II route I get a lot of flickering. Any ideas on what causes this ? Screen ? GPU ? CPU ? Videocard Settings ? Windows Settingd ? Game Settings ? . . . . ? Below a videos that illustrate the effect I see when playing the game. (12 second movie) https://1drv.ms/v/s!Aj8hm7Xwo3lygauXR-sKfaTL9A6SC08?e=PhINNl And another one. I zoom out to the max (after 15 seconds or so) and you can still see the tracks flickering big time, and a door in the distance. But when I click on the Global Camera it stops. (60 second movie) https://1drv.ms/v/s!Aj8hm7Xwo3lygauaM9loz5I1cOZFN1A?e=16w6uV
Cause 1: Overlapping assets. It's called Z-fighting or so. I suppose it's similar to antialiasing. Depending on your viewpoint, you see either of the textures. Cause 2: TSC physics. Most trains dance around one way or another. Easiest to notice if you stay in cab and use camera 8. The most common effect is the loco moving one direction very slowly, while the other is the loco turning left and right which is in essence the snaking effect. Both are caused by the "dynamic" physics which make it absolutely impossible for anything to be stationary. As the train stops, the last bit of movement energy and the braking force bounce back and forth forever. Couplers add to it (perpetuum mobile), but even without. That's the cause of forever sliding, too. Instead of the brakes and grip overpowering gravity and the last bit of movement, eventually reaching zero speed, upon (nearly) stopping the brakes reduce speed even to zero but then there is no more force (doh) and gravity does its job. In yet other words, in school we've learned about Resultant Force but also Force-Counterforce. It's a bit of a paradox.
Thanks Andras. I happy with my Laptop, but just to be clear,...... $$$$$ could not stop this flickering ? Is these severe overlapping flickering also influenced by the route builder way of doing things? It only seems so extreme on this route (of the routes that I own). Last but not least . . . why does it stop when I click the Global Cam ?
Money doesn't stop it because it's a route building error and you'll always have some number rounding. When you click the global camera (8) then your viewpoint is fixed. So the rounding is stabilized. I don't understand why flickering occurs a short while after moving with camera 8, but it stops anyway. Beside flickering, the effect that actually annoys me is antialiasing of the trees. As the train slowly creeps, the trees themselves flicker. Plus of course distant scenery (Tehachapi) but I don't really play such routes. To observe it yourself, run a night scenario in a city. You'll see that the bright windows are actually outside and ahead of the house. Just a little. The closer they are, the likelier it is for said window to flicker from the distance. It's the same with track bed. I compare it to antialiasing because the main idea in both cases is that the rendering engine decides which object is visible in that given pixel. There is a chance that MS-SSAA combination can reduce this flickering since the this-or-that decision will happen per subpixel and the game ends up averaging it. But chances are it will look like a dying lightbulb, slight random pulses, not entirely halfway. Same as tree AA, really. Example pics for further understanding:
So only way to reduce the effect is to change View Angle and to increase AA Settings, and not to get different hard ware, correct ?
