Railworks 2 Rail Simulator Feedback from a player
Hello,

I would like to share with the community my experience with Railworks 2 Rail Simulator and 3D Vision.

I love train simulation, maybe because my family counts many trainmen, and that is why I've been fascinated by this, let's call "unusual", type of simulation game: many of my friends complain these games are boring.

Anyway, let's get into the quick review.

The game was [b]not[/b] designed to work natively with 3D Vision, but fortunately it behaves better than many games, while it still got some qwirks to take care of.

The first and most important when getting started with the game, is that when you switch to cabin mode (key 1, after the game starts in locomotive external view, 2) and have set your 3D depth to a reasonably high level, you'll be unable to focus on what your eyes are seeing. This can be fixed by usage of F7 key to "push" the 3D scene towards your sight point. When playing in 100% depth mode, in fact, speedometer and/or steam handles are rendered "behind your eyes" (left eye frame is on the very right of the right frame, eyes tend to excessively converge). When you push the scene enough far, according to your comfort, you'll notice the 3D effect of the cabin like if you were really inside of it.

You will notice that, while the game was not designed for 3D, train internals' details are very accurately designed, and they actually look better in quality than in 2D. Then, when you take a look at the landscape that you can admire from your cabin's front glass, you can reasonably think of being immerged into the environment.

[b]However[/b], the game shows another bad quirk, that may affect your gameplay comfort. Since the graphics engine is designed (reasonably as all 3D engines to save memory) to hold in memory only those objects that are in the sight field, you will sometimes notice black blinking on your right. This is probably because when an object gets outside the standard sight field (right eye's I presume, since the left eye looks rightmost) it gets unloaded from the buffer and unavailable to 3D Vision driver. Pattern of "black blinking" is shown to match the pattern of thos objects that are "moving" relatively to your train. The effect is enchanced at high cruise speeds rather than during maneuvers.

All objects on the track, including regulatory lights, are rendered precisely at their own depth. One small defect is that sometimes you may notice a very small blinking reg, yellow or green aura around a light that is looking towards the opposite driving, but this occurs in 2D mode too and could be caused by the size of the lantern not matching the light itself's size (I'm not that expert in 3D graphics).

Last, pay attention that all OSD controls are rendered [b]at screen level[/b] (no stereo frames are generated), so it's important to use F7 to push the 3D scene as deepest as possible to keep all train objects below OSD.

Here is a 2D screenshot. Kudos and copyright to the author.
[img]http://www.iwannafile.com/img_store/0/19/16/87.jpeg[/img]

I hope this review will be useful for the community.
Hello,



I would like to share with the community my experience with Railworks 2 Rail Simulator and 3D Vision.



I love train simulation, maybe because my family counts many trainmen, and that is why I've been fascinated by this, let's call "unusual", type of simulation game: many of my friends complain these games are boring.



Anyway, let's get into the quick review.



The game was not designed to work natively with 3D Vision, but fortunately it behaves better than many games, while it still got some qwirks to take care of.



The first and most important when getting started with the game, is that when you switch to cabin mode (key 1, after the game starts in locomotive external view, 2) and have set your 3D depth to a reasonably high level, you'll be unable to focus on what your eyes are seeing. This can be fixed by usage of F7 key to "push" the 3D scene towards your sight point. When playing in 100% depth mode, in fact, speedometer and/or steam handles are rendered "behind your eyes" (left eye frame is on the very right of the right frame, eyes tend to excessively converge). When you push the scene enough far, according to your comfort, you'll notice the 3D effect of the cabin like if you were really inside of it.



You will notice that, while the game was not designed for 3D, train internals' details are very accurately designed, and they actually look better in quality than in 2D. Then, when you take a look at the landscape that you can admire from your cabin's front glass, you can reasonably think of being immerged into the environment.



However, the game shows another bad quirk, that may affect your gameplay comfort. Since the graphics engine is designed (reasonably as all 3D engines to save memory) to hold in memory only those objects that are in the sight field, you will sometimes notice black blinking on your right. This is probably because when an object gets outside the standard sight field (right eye's I presume, since the left eye looks rightmost) it gets unloaded from the buffer and unavailable to 3D Vision driver. Pattern of "black blinking" is shown to match the pattern of thos objects that are "moving" relatively to your train. The effect is enchanced at high cruise speeds rather than during maneuvers.



All objects on the track, including regulatory lights, are rendered precisely at their own depth. One small defect is that sometimes you may notice a very small blinking reg, yellow or green aura around a light that is looking towards the opposite driving, but this occurs in 2D mode too and could be caused by the size of the lantern not matching the light itself's size (I'm not that expert in 3D graphics).



Last, pay attention that all OSD controls are rendered at screen level (no stereo frames are generated), so it's important to use F7 to push the 3D scene as deepest as possible to keep all train objects below OSD.



Here is a 2D screenshot. Kudos and copyright to the author.

Image



I hope this review will be useful for the community.

#1
Posted 06/21/2011 07:27 PM   
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