Central Europe MP Route Project

    Quote from Slovak_Eagle

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sLr3M8KqmB4


    Hello there, pleased to see your recent activity. If I may, I would recommend supplementing the iron bridges visible in the movie above with additional railings. There was a group of spline-railings designed specifically for these railway bridge models (however you may use some other splines too), enabling a following effect:

    ...a tiny detail yet worth considering (the rusty ones presented on the upper right screen would be the first mentioned below):

    <kuid:173943:700718> EET Bridge Railing 01
    <kuid:173943:700719> EET Bridge Railing 02
    <kuid:173943:700728> EET Bridge Railing 06
    <kuid:173943:700720> EET Bridge Railing 03
    <kuid:173943:700721> EET Bridge Railing 04
    <kuid:173943:700722> EET Bridge Railing 05
    <kuid:173943:700723> EET Bridge Railing 07
    <kuid:173943:700724> EET Bridge Railing 08
    <kuid:173943:700725> EET Bridge Railing 09
    <kuid:173943:700726> EET Bridge Railing 10
    <kuid:173943:700727> EET Bridge Railing 11
    <kuid:173943:700729> EET Bridge Railing 12

    ...and a couple more specified for big city road bridges:


    <kuid:173943:700010> EET Steel Railing 01
    <kuid:173943:700011> EET Steel Railing 02
    <kuid:173943:700012> EET Steel Railing 03
    <kuid:173943:700013> EET Steel Railing 04
    <kuid:173943:700014> EET Steel Railing 05
    <kuid:173943:700015> EET Steel Railing 06

    Anyway, best luck on the project. What's been up with that lately? Is Central Europe Mini still developed? Maybe the big Central Europe...? Or a new Germany-focused map? What happened with Here Comes The Trainzes idea too? Best wishes and thumbs up on each and everyone of them.

    The second pic reminded me, instantly of a near identical bridge and location in Portland, Or. USA, where I lived for many years.
    Google Maps link. N.W. Naito Parkway & the Broadway Bridge.

    The street view is obscured by trees, which have grown to full size since I was last there. But at one time the view was nearly identical to your screenshot :):thumbs_up:
    Zooming to street view on the bridge itself, shows full railings and sidewalks, supporting your idea for Richard.


    Rico

    Thank you very much!

    I haven´t gone into the small details initially, as I wanted to finish the main bulk of the route and scenery - buildings, roads, rivers, bridges, textures, catenary and trees. The small details I was keeping for after the merge with the rest of CEM.

    This German module is being developed standalone, to allow work on the main CEM route and Germany at the same time. We were planning to do this with Hungary and Austria too, but lack of time forced us to focus only on one expansion, so we decided to go for the most popular choice, which is Germany. Germany has been in development for 2 years now, with two long breaks because of lack of time, assets and sometimes motivation.

    But I am happy to say that Germany is for the most part, finished. TheBrandtK is now working on the catenary for the U-Bahn. The U-Bahn system is styled after Frankfurt, but uses VTL catenary assets for overground sections, due to their higher quality and flexibility. The trains will stay original from the UF12 route, as I did not manage to get in contact with Alterr for reskin permission. However we have created custom destination boards for the trains.

    After the catenary is done, I plan to rework the open-pit coal mine a little, to make the top processing area more realistic, and allow transloading from mining trains to mainline trains, as opposed to the original idea where mainline hoppers would be taken down to the mine with mining locomotives. The original idea will still be possible, but the transloading will be added on top as a bonus for people who want a bit more realism in this operation.

    When that is finished, HansWasser will work on signs and signals on the network. Some signals are already in place, but not all of them. The idea is to use HL, HV and KS signals, but only HL are in place for now.

    When that is done, Germany will be merged with the rest of CEM. Obviously CEM needs to be reworked to allow for the connections to Germany, which is part of a bigger plan. Poland is getting a new northern expansion to the Baltic sea, same as Germany. Czechia will have it´s main city (Bažinov) reworked to accomodate the line from Germany, as well as a new connection to Austria. Slovakia will be reworked the most, it looks the most dated. It will have track layout adjustments, on top of a new line to Poland. Connections to Ukraine and Hungary (possibly Austria too) will be added.

    When all of this is done and Germany has been merged with the main CEM route, the vegetation detailing will begin. We plan to use the new Clutter 2.0 for it. Performance is better than TurfFX, and can run on all supported systems (Windows and MacOS).

    As for performance in general. It´s okay. Many parts of the route run smoothly, but big cities drop it. It´s why Niederburg is shaped like Wuppertal. Long and thin to minimise performance impact. Without shadows enabled, all parts of the route run smoothly. With shadows enabled, Niederburg drops down to 20FPS and below. It´s an effect seen across the route for all major cities. Mostly stems from the rather unoptimized procedural track generation and shadow rendering.


    "Here come the trainzes" idea is developed. For the old CEM, the session files are available on https://herecomethetrainzes.com/ . The original session for Niddertal and CEM have been in development for 5 or 6 years. The person responsible, Este , has made a new one for Swedaryn Island route as well.
    He is currently busy doing minor renovations to the old Central Europe project, the one we abandoned back in TRS19 due to it´s big size, inconsistency of work, no idea of what we want the route to be, etc. He is making a super session there now. So expect a small update to that route, to allow it to function relatively okay in TRS22. But that will be the final official update for that route, after 6 years of hiatus.

    I haven't posted here since 3 years but I decided to share some of my progress on CEM:PL. While being a freetime project, it still takes alot of time.

    CEM isn't only the map but also high quality content that is constantly needed. I have also updated almost the entire content of mine due to the fact that it was originally planned to be payware.

    There is still more to go but I can say that the majority of what was planned for CEM back in 2021 is already designed and developed. CEM 3.0 will also be focused more on immersion and details because that's what creates an unique identity for each of the countries and an unique gameplay experience.

    Hello cebar,
    This rolling stock on the DLS is faulty.
    <kuid2:448741:123019:3> PKPC Eaos 31 51 5353 039-1 412W
    <kuid2:448741:123020:3> PKPC Eaos 82 51 5312 033-2 408W
    <kuid2:448741:123021:3> PKPC Eaos 82 51 5328 642-2 408W
    <kuid2:448741:123018:3> PKPC Eaos CSD/E 31 51 5369 710-9

    Betriebssystem: Windows 11 Pro 64Bit
    12th Gen Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-12700F 4.9 GHz; Mainboard: Gigabyte B660M ; Arbeitsspeicher16GB ; Grafikkarte: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 Ti 8GB
    TS12 Build:61383;TMR2017 Build:85470;T:ANE SP4-Build:105766;TRS2019(PE)SP5 Build117009;Trainz+ Build:132284;TRS22(PE) Build132285;

    Thank you for btinging this to my attention. I am actively working on a fix now.

    Hi, I have already fixed everything. :grinning_squinting_face: Those cars will also contain new bogeys that I once made.

    Quote from Slovak_Eagle

    "Here come the trainzes" idea is developed. For the old CEM, the session files are available on https://herecomethetrainzes.com/ . The original session for Niddertal and CEM have been in development for 5 or 6 years. The person responsible, Este , has made a new one for Swedaryn Island route as well.
    He is currently busy doing minor renovations to the old Central Europe project, the one we abandoned back in TRS19 due to it´s big size, inconsistency of work, no idea of what we want the route to be, etc. He is making a super session there now. So expect a small update to that route, to allow it to function relatively okay in TRS22. But that will be the final official update for that route, after 6 years of hiatus.

    Thank you for all the info, explanations, graphics and maps about the current state of the project. It should be noted that one of the key advantages of your project on the background of most (sadly usually abandoned) Trainz projects would be... teamwork and more/less similar approach of most authors involved on the target idea and ways to implement it. The great advantage is undoubtedly the wide presentation of the possibilities of automated train traffic in a wider range (believe me, I am aware of how much pain in the *** it is to organize it and command it) - something which, combined with the interactivity of the building possibilities, is still one of the unrivaled advantages of Trainz as a railway simulator.


    Would you care to share a small comment about the idea of particular period specified for your project? The issue about Trainz is that the time and effort for constructing maps takes so much time, that real world railways rapidly changed during it, and what you had as "current" 5 years ago is no longer present "now" - a thing visible in particular on central European railways... This is not only related to the availability of models (slightly wider for some periods then other), but also... more interesting traffic management, combination of trains, consists etc. - with each passing year, the real railway becomes less and less interesting - hence the question: for what period do you plan to set it up? And of course, as a lover of historical railways and the author of many historical models, I am a big supporter of Este in all concepts for historic sessions. More videos and pictures please!

    I'd advise to check out DLS regularly, because various models from the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Poland, Germany, etc. are added from time to time, e.g. yesterday, a set of station hall roofs from Görlitz entered public space. Some time ago a set of midtown residential buildings from Trnava, Piešťany, Ostróda, Kwidzyn and Prague were released too... the abilities to build a reasonable central European railway model are quite decent these days :) And so... after many years of preprarations, I'm just getting started with a Big City Module.

    Quote from Big Bad Nonja

    The second pic reminded me, instantly of a near identical bridge and location in Portland, Or. USA, where I lived for many years.
    Google Maps link. N.W. Naito Parkway & the Broadway Bridge.

    The street view is obscured by trees, which have grown to full size since I was last there. But at one time the view was nearly identical to your screenshot :) :thumbs_up:
    Zooming to street view on the bridge itself, shows full railings and sidewalks, supporting your idea for Richard.

    Ahhh yes... the States and their enormous steel bridges, junctions on bridges, elevated bridges, swing bridges... and all that impressive scale, size and traffic. Got some good memories from my own time there back in the day. I'd say that Portland road bridge is quite massive for a road bridge, rather reminding us of the mass of railroad bridges there. Nevertheless however, the ones on my screen (and Richard's movie) are actually central European (just preety rusty and therefore reddish)... both originally still exist on railway lines around the town of Lwówek Śląski in Lower Silesia (Löwenberg in Schlesien) - currently undergoing overhauls before being put back to service (after a long period of decaying railways in the 1990s and 2000s we lived to a moment when Lower Silesia became the pioneer in the field of reactivation of local railway lines :) )

    Best regards and wish you luck on the project again.

    Quote from kilanziom

    Thank you for all the info, explanations, graphics and maps about the current state of the project. It should be noted that one of the key advantages of your project on the background of most (sadly usually abandoned) Trainz projects would be... teamwork and more/less similar approach of most authors involved on the target idea and ways to implement it. The great advantage is undoubtedly the wide presentation of the possibilities of automated train traffic in a wider range (believe me, I am aware of how much pain in the *** it is to organize it and command it) - something which, combined with the interactivity of the building possibilities, is still one of the unrivaled advantages of Trainz as a railway simulator.

    Yes, I agree. Our team is rather big, but still limited by many aspects (school, work, real life). We long struggled to define what we want CEM to be and where to go with it. One member even left after we finished the first iteration of CEM, saying it is a finished project. While I agree original CEM is good on it´s own, I do not like to abandon projects that I have released, or considered finished myself. There is always room to improve, and I want to keep doing that. It´s also the reason why we are still working on CEM. We truly love the route and want to make it the best it can be. We are developing a lot of stuff and need more people for it all haha.
    notimeindeed is making new ZSSK/ČD class 163, 363 and all affiliated variations. He also has a finished body for the class 210 and 130. There is still a lot of work to be done on the cabs and scripts, pantographs and bogeys. but the 363 is closest to be finished. He is also fixing the class 240 and 230. But he needs a lot more materials and photos to finish them all. Levi990e is fixing hungarian traincars, but is interested in the Nohab, might make a new Bzmot and wants to fix his Taurus locomotives. ZiuT is focusing on smaller things right now, like the new tree assets, new objects and expanding Poland on CEM. Este (on top of the super sessions) and Swedar focus on new scripts for anything we might need.

    I do create interactive sessions where you are the player. I try to provide a wide variety of sessions for this purpose. Simple driving form point A to B, shunting at one location, etc. So I do know how bad the game can be when it comes to handling the AI trains. It´s the reason why I use relatively simple commands and "forcefully control" every aspect of the AI trains through session rules and commands (junctions, stopping points, speeds, signal aspects).

    Quote from kilanziom

    Would you care to share a small comment about the idea of particular period specified for your project? The issue about Trainz is that the time and effort for constructing maps takes so much time, that real world railways rapidly changed during it, and what you had as "current" 5 years ago is no longer present "now" - a thing visible in particular on central European railways... This is not only related to the availability of models (slightly wider for some periods then other), but also... more interesting traffic management, combination of trains, consists etc. - with each passing year, the real railway becomes less and less interesting - hence the question: for what period do you plan to set it up? And of course, as a lover of historical railways and the author of many historical models, I am a big supporter of Este in all concepts for historic sessions. More videos and pictures please!

    The benefit to CEM is that it is fully fictional. This allows us to just go for a "generic" feeling of 2010s-20s. The route itself is meant to represent that time era at least. Of course railways keep on evolving, but you need to settle on something, hence why the "generic feeling", an amalgomation of the decade. And even though the route is aimed at 2010s, in many areas you can get away with going back to 90s or 80s, exactly because some routes have been left alone for that long, so we represented that as well.

    Personally I like the modern clean look more, but I am fascinated by the older times. Changing the route now from 2010s to 1980s would be too much work, but I have been long looking at a possibility of making something in that time period.

    Este makes his super sessions based in the 60s or older. I will let him know to post more videos and pictures haha.

    Quote from kilanziom

    I'd advise to check out DLS regularly, because various models from the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Poland, Germany, etc. are added from time to time, e.g. yesterday, a set of station hall roofs from Görlitz entered public space. Some time ago a set of midtown residential buildings from Trnava, Piešťany, Ostróda, Kwidzyn and Prague were released too... the abilities to build a reasonable central European railway model are quite decent these days :) And so... after many years of preprarations, I'm just getting started with a Big City Module.

    Will do, thank you! I already use some of the midtown buildings on CEM Germany, looking forward to the big city :grinning_squinting_face:

    Despite the fact that I would like to make a route based in the 1980s, I don´t think I will get to it in the next 10 years haha. CEM is a project we are proud of, and personally I would like to keep updating and epanding it. The idea of adding Switzerland, Austria and Hungary are still alive, but require a lot of new assets to be made, although Switzerland has the highest potential, as thanks to Euromodeller, we have a lot of assets to work with, enough to make a basic Swiss expansion. But, finishing Germany and bringing the whole route visually together is the important thing to do right now. We won´t overtake our capabilities with expectations and dreams. Keep it simple, one thing at a time.

    I have been thinking of uploading some pre-final versions, because the new CEM 3.0 needs at least one or two more years of work, but we will need some feedback before that, to fix up problems.

    Cheers,
    Richard (and the CEM team)