Posts by Slovak_Eagle

  • Central Europe MP Route Project

    Germany has been shunted off to TheBrandtK for catenary work. My job now continues in Czechia, making preparations to connect it with Germany and Austria. Here is some early work. I will slowly reveal more information as work progresses.


    And a little extra.

    Trainz 22 - CEM Germany / Along The Highway
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  • Central Europe MP Route Project

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  • Central Europe MP Route Project

    Quote from kilanziom

    @Richard, if you'll find a moment, I'd sure encourage you to share some final effects at Nové Zámky and Šurany stations, from previous screens and movies they were looking mighty pleasing. I've spent many hours there, many times, lots of good memories (and even a couple of models - rolling stock only though).

    The ŽSR 150 route of mine is right now on a shelf, as CEM is taking my full focus again. But when I am done with CEM, I would love to finish the 150 route. I have managed to obtain all the materials to make the route a 1:1 recreation, and I have friends who travel this line often. I also like this line (and the stations of Šurany and Nové Zámky), as my parents have started their railway career in these places, and they are locations I travel through to visit other family members. So I am quite familiar with these stations.

    But, ŽSR150 being a much newer route than CEM, I have utilised a different building method, that I want to use when reworking Slovakia on CEM, and the methods I used to build Germany. Also seeing as Hojné Údolie is going to host a line south towards Hungary, it will be quite fitting to take more inspiration from Nové Zámky specifically.

  • Central Europe MP Route Project

    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)

  • Central Europe MP Route Project

    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.