SP WEST COLTONS
BUSY DIESEL SAND AND REFUELING SERVICE FACILITY
Introduction
Our SP West
Colton route is extremely high detailed with many of the world tiles pushing
close to 1,200 objects or more. Combine that with the many high detailed
(high poly) feature assets we included on the route and the high detailed
trainsets and activities (with AI traffic) from Diesels West and you have
a very resource demanding route running in MSTS on your pc. If you have
a high end gaming pc with very little procecces running in the background
you shouldn't have any problems getting decent framerates using this route.
However, if you don't, the following suggestions will help improve your
framerates.
Using MSTSBin
You will need MSTSBin regardless of your pc to use this route as it alone will greatly enhance the performance of MSTS in general. To learn more about MSTSBin and download it if you don't already have it CLICK HERE. We suggest you get the latest version and if you have trouble setting it up let us know and we will try to help you. And remember to backup your original "train simulator" folder before you make any changes.
MSTS Display Settings
During beta testing we found that on some of the testers pc's that adjusting the MSTS display sliders improved performance on the route. These can be found in MSTS Options under the "Advanced Display".
SHADOWS - DYNAMIC SHADOWS - HIGH DETAILED SHADOWS - Unchecking some of these will have profound effects in regards to improving performance.
VISIBILITY - Setting this down from 2000 (meters) to 1500 or 1000 can help a great deal especially when operating in the yard.
WORLD OBJECT DENSITY - We did set different values to the many objects that we placed on the route so lowering this to 7 or 5 will reduce some of the objects on the route which may help performance.
All in all adjusting these settings is pretty much an exercise of trial an error with each user so we suggest that you play around with them untill you find something that works best for you and the situation at hand.
Route Carspawner Options
There are many carspawners on the route which provide vehicle traffic on the various roads and highways we included. The file associated with the carspawners is called the "carspawn.dat" file and is located in the route folder called "WESTCOLTON". The "carspawn.dat" file calls out a specified number of different vehicles to be spawned out on the roads and we have found that lowering this number can improve performance. In order to make it easy for users to change this we have included a folder called "CARSPAWN BACKUP" that has three folders in it. The folders are called "HIGH TRAFFIC", "MEDIUM TRAFFIC", and "LOW TRAFFIC" and each folder contains a "carspawn.dat" file that can be copied and pasted into the "WESTCOLTON" route folder. The default file that is already installed calls out 30 different vehicles (HIGH TRAFFIC) which is quite allot. If you do have some performance issues you can try using one of the lower traffic "carspawn.dat" files in the folders mentioned above.
Memory Resource Issues
Interuptions in your pc's memory resources can cause MSTS to crash especially with a route like this while running an activity with AI traffic loading around you so make sure you don't have programs running in the background that may be trying to contact a server somewhere for an auto update.
We would also suggest that you try keeping the processes running in the background on your pc to somewhere between 40 and 55. You can check this by pulling up the "windows task manager". If you have more processes running than the number we suggest you might consider having a professional look at your pc and see if they can clean some of that off your pc for you. It will help.
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