PlantFactory is a very powerful FREE tool to allow Trainz content creators to construct 3D Trees and Plants.
Using PlantFactory to build your trees is recommend, but not required.
Performance is key to allowing more dense environments. To achieve better performance, you need good "Level of Detail" or LODs with your foliage assets. PlantFactory provides everything you need to produce custom low poly models at every level.
In order to get maximum performance on the lowest LOD, Trainz is introducing a new billboarding system called "Imposters". Trainz automatically generates camera facing billboards for each asset's lowest LOD, in real-time! This helps improve performance, not just for trees but most other scenery and even rolling stock!
There are two new materials to choose from when creating your leaves on your trees and plants.
They are m.leafcard and m.leafcardbillboard.
Use m.leafcardbillboard when creating a tree with camera facing leaf cards. For all other leaves, use m.leafcard. The Trainz Wiki has more technical details.
Living Railroad is a totally new, automated approach to running your railroad.
Load up any route, and the Living Railroad Dispatch systems will dynamically query all available Industries, Passenger Stations, Train Vehicles and Drivers to create a list of potential Tasks.
Tasks are then prioritized based upon which Industries require goods, which Locomotives and Rolling Stock are suitable and then AI Commands are automatically created and issued to each available Driver.
The player can manage the Tasks and Drivers or choose to drive any train at any time.
TLR is also fully supported in multiplayer and MPS sessions.
To support the new TLR systems, we’ve created several new “Details” dialogs and introduced new Activity Logs, Status displays, a Location Map, and more.
Users can dynamically edit train cars and industries in real time in Driver mode. Adjust Industry inputs or outputs or add new loads to existing cars. You can also switch to Surveyor to add more rolling stock as demand requires.
Additional new interfaces will be developed to monitor and tweak all the complexities of Living Railroad. This will allow everything from a simple overview of the railroad, to fine-grained editing of Passenger Schedules.
Not all 2D thumbnails are made equally and for this reason we have added the option to switch to a 3D view of all your content so the preview is consistent when looking through content in the Assets Palette of S20.
HD terrain should go out to 30km regardless of your draw distance setting. You can set the master draw distance to 3km, it will still draw HD terrain out to 30km because the lowest LOD is super efficient!
Clutter Effects has changed the way routes look on a micro detail scale but this system is just at the beginning as we have big plans for clutter.
To start with we are moving clutter to the GPU to increase performance so any clutter in your routes should start to be a lot more responsive.
DX12 is key to more advanced Trainz engine features to come in the medium to long term. We also anticipate better game performance as our DirectX 12 implementation matures.
Advanced functionality helps find objects in your route by using clever filters like "Filter Selection" or "Filter Visibility" on the assets listed.