Forum Replies Created
-
Posts
-
It should be fine, although I personally ditched Radeon a few years back after being an avid fan for years… I came across one too many glitches that didn’t seem to aflict nVidia users nearly as often. I’m on my 2nd nVidia card since switching, and I’ve not found anything to make me want to switch back 🙂
Still, you’re right, it’s a powerful card, and there really shouldn’t be any performance issues with it.
Didn’t realise such cards existed. It seems odd that it would have 3, as that card has a 256-bit bus-width, so it’d usually either be 1, 2, 4, 8, etc… Couldn’t find any info on what they changed to allow an odd number.
Well, the 6950 is about 4x more processing power and 5x the memory bandwidth of my cruddy laptop card, so you really shouldn’t be having any major issues.
I get the feeling the stalling thing may happen regardless of system spec, simply because the game is trying to bulk-load too much at once when you have the LOD set to high, and point the camera towards the horizon.
I get the feeling the devs will be tuning those settings sooner or later to be a tad more conservative, and hopefully if there is any Radeon-specific issues, they’ll get ironed out too.
Hmm, as far as I know, there’s no such thing as an HD 6900, and none of the HD 6000 range come with 3GB… and it’s usually either DDR3 for low-end cards, or GDDR5 for the rest. What’s your device manager say it is?
I wonder if there isn’t some AMD incompatibility with this game. I get the feeling I’ve seen more support issues come up regarding AMD cards than nVidia ones, and my personal experience with an Intel CPU/nVidia GPU has been fine.
I’m surprised that you reckon even on “Low” geometry, you still get slowdown when zoomed out. My laptop’s GT650M has 2GB of DDR3 memory, which is horribly slow and low bandwidth compared to a “proper” GPU with GDDR5, and with geometry set to Low, the game runs pretty well, even fully zoomed out. It almost entirely stops those sudden stalls when the game seems to be loading in geometry and/or textures.
Have you tried setting all settings to Low/Off, including the ones you can only access in the main menu before loading a game? Try having everything set to minimum, and turn each one up in turn until you find the one that’s causing the problems.
What’s your actual machine spec and GPU?
I think at least for buses/trucks/trams, an ideal tool would let you set the type of vehicle allocated to the route, and the number of them, plus a “replace after x years old” field. If you want to refit a fleet of horse-and-carts with the latest trucks, you don’t necessarily want the same number, as the new vehicles will be far more effective. A fleet refit could just ask you to update the vehicle type and quantity for the line, and once you hit “okay”, it would handle the selling and buying.
You could even give the refit a priority, so you could order several refits at once, and it’ll buy the highest priority vehicles first as funds become available.
I’m not so sure about trains… there are a lot more complications. I suppose it could still be given as an option, and then it’s up to you whether you want to use it, or handle replacement manually.
I’ve been playing on Hard difficulty, and when it comes to replacing trains, or even refitting with extra carriages, I have to be incredibly careful that I don’t take them out of commision at the wrong moment, or I risk setting myself back a couple of years in lost revenue! Hard mode is brutal 😛
Over time, old vehicles will cost more and more to keep running… that’s why it’s important to replace them eventually. Otherwise they’ll get to a point where they’re costing more to run than they’re earning.
Also, go back and check your bus routes every 20 years or so. As a town expands, your old route will end up needing to be re-planned to better cover the town. I often find it’s better to run two different smaller loops around a town rather than one huge one, so people don’t end up stuck on a 15-minute bus ride to the train station, and end up giving up instead of taking the train!
As a town grows to huge sizes, I presume you’ll need to add more than two routes to keep it well covered. I haven’t got that far yet though… I’m slowly wrestling my way through a game on Hard difficulty 😛
The time spacing definitely works on bus routes and tram routes. They don’t use it on cargo or on trains though.
I suppose as trains tend to be rather more “sensitive” to changes than road vehicles, and routes can be potentially rather more complex and specialized, perhaps they decided to disable it. I think it would be rather a good idea to have it as an option you can toggle per-line, for all types of transport. That way you can make use of it to keep a well-designed route working with a balanced timetable, and disable if for any route where an even spacing is going to cause issues.
From what I’ve experienced so far, the biggest contributor to stuttering is the “Geometry” setting. Basically, it doesn’t matter how powerful your machine is, if you set it to “High”, it’s going to attempt to load every object and texture simultaneously, every time you pan up to look at the horizon, because it sets the LOD to be stupidly far away.
The good news is, even setting it to “Low” leaves things looking the same level of detail close up to camera… you’ll just notice that it drops the vehicle models when you zoom out to a fair distance, and the detail on the trees will fall off pretty close. “Medium” is a decent compromise – it runs better, but looks very similar to High, unless you’re staring at fine details on the horizon.
I find that even Low is absolutely fine though, and the game runs almost completely stutter-free, and at smooth framerate, even on my laptop with a GT650M graphics card.
The geometry setting is the killer. If you’ve got a decent GPU, you can turn everything else on and it’ll run fine… just be sure to knock geometry down to at least Medium. If you particularly want to take a screenshot, you can crank it up to High using the ingame settings window.
Yeah, that’s one that *really* isn’t clear, and mightily useful. I had no idea this existed until I read it here 🙂
What I think could be even more useful is the option to pick S-bend inclines, so you can pick to build a road/track that goes from flat, curves up, then levels off to flat at a higher level, ready to build a bridge. The m/n road bridges are good, but if you do them over any significant distance with any significant incline, they end up becoming huge arches towering in the air. I just want a steep incline that levels off flat for the actual bridge.
Well, to answer my own question, yes I does make a big difference!
I tried it out restarting the same save file a few times and building different stations.
In this case, it was costing:
1-platform, 160m – 0.9k per month maintenance
2-platform, 160m – 1.3k per month
2-platform, 240m – 2.2k per month
…so it seems longer stations may increase the maintenance more than having extra platforms. Not sure if this is across the board, but in this case it certainly seems to be.
“i don’t even think that costs and revenue needs to be adjusted that much. all the flow of time accounts for is availability of trains and stuff really. gameplay isn’t really affected by that, except for the cost due to ageing of trains.”
The problem with that is, you’ll just end up making the same amount of money in half the time, so it would ultimately be like a cheat that doubled all your income.
It wouldn’t need to be that complex… everything would just need to be scaled by that same factor, whether it was expenses or income, and it should ultimately balance out. In fact it should be more noticably balanced, because you would have less jittery annual accounts, as the overall income and outgoings would smooth out over time.
Of course you can pause, but that means everything stops moving. The OP’s point is that everything should move at the same speed it currently does, but days should pass less quickly, so a year takes longer, and each train fits in more journeys in the same span of time.
As the economy is fairly finely balanced around the current speeds, I think this could work if you not only doubled the length of days, but correspondingly halved the revenues, running costs, maintenance costs, etc, so that at the end of a year, everything had completed twice the number of journeys, but had made/lost the same relative amount of money in the process.
It could then do with an 8x time speedup option, so that you can accelerate time to the same degree as before.
Maybe go a step further, and have an option to quarter everything, have 4x longer years, and have an additional 16x speedup option.
The problem with the speedup stuff is that it could push the game beyond what most people’s CPU’s can handle… but then again, this would all only be an optional choice when you start a new game. It could be labelled “requires a powerful CPU to use faster time speedup”.
The graphics coding is damned impressive… for a game with 16x16km maps and multiple entire simulated towns, where you can zoom right down to see individual people walking around, I’m amazed how smoothly they’ve managed to make it run even on my laptop’s GT650M
Just because you’re unrealistically expecting miracles out of a bottom-end graphics card doesn’t mean the thing you’re trying to run is badly coded.
You wouldn’t expect to run a modern FPS on a GT630M… what makes you think there’s so much less going on in a game like this?
If the game ran badly on a GTX 780, then I’d understand people calling out poor coding… but it doesn’t.
I’ve actually found Train Fever runs surprisingly smoothly on my thoroughly mid/low-range laptop GeForce GT 650M card, even with medium settings… so it seems it’s not quite the system-hog I thought it would be.
But I get the feeling that even then, you’ll be lucky to even get the game to load on integrated Intel graphics. I’d imagine you could conceivably get it to limp by if you have a chip with Iris Pro.
I’d strongly suggest getting a graphics card if you want to play games :-S
This is a vital element of the game. If you want your trains to run as fast and smooth as possible, you need to keep a consistent, flat gradient, so you’ll need more embankments and cuttings. If you want to keep costs down, you can have the track rise and fall over the hills and dips, but they’ll lose speed when climbing even a relatively shallow incline, and will have even more trouble if they happen to stop at a signal or station and have to accelerate from standing uphill.
That’s how real trains work… especially the earliest trains – I’ve heard that older trains could have trouble with anything beyond a 1 or 2% gradient (to the point where they could literally grind to a halt and slide backwards if it was too steep). Hence why real world train lines are usually far flatter than roads, and tend to run along a lot of embankments and cuttings.
