New Member Hello

Greetings everyone,

I have been using OpenBVE for about a year now since I run Linux Ubuntu 18.04 on most of my machines and the mainstream doesn't seem interested in making their products available for Linux.


It seems that development is a bit slow however and many of the websites have either gone dead or stagnant. As a result I've figured out how to make and modify routes and my next topic will be to find out if there is a way to convert SketchUp models to .csv or .b3d objects. Using SketchUp, I have made many objects for X-Plane which is another simulator that works on Linux. I also have the latest version of Blender as well as AC3D, but I'm pretty useless at using them.

With such powerful hardware these days, I figure one can make pretty complex models without any impact on performance, but too complex to do them manually.

Have a great day
Ralph

Don't overestimate the power of the hardware. Details and performance have to be balanced and always will have to. Mind there are way more objects in close proximity in a railway simulation than in flight.

You can convert SketchUp models to OpenBVE-readable formats via Blender. However those models have many unnecessary faces, edges and vertices with a multitude of performance impact compared to the same object modelled correctly. It is possible to clean such an object up, but that's so much work that getting used to Blender is easier in the long run.

though hand coding is a better method for building models it is understandable that not everyone can get accustomed to it so easily. Though most 3D models are rendered with triangulated faces which can cause high impact on low end PCs there have been attempts to make convertors to try and get rid of most triangulation in faces. This one can convert models directly from the sketchup model format into csv or b3d format with options for triangulation or no triangulation. I suggest giving this a try if you’re not too keen on building your models using text editing apps

http://www.mediafire.com/file/9535e720sml6r3z/Conversion.zip/file

Thanks for the welcome! I downloaded the convertor and extracted it. Now I gotta figure out how to use it.

Raffles wrote:Thanks for the welcome! I downloaded the convertor and extracted it. Now I gotta figure out how to use it.

Instrctions for installation and use should be included in the package. You don’t need to open any of the exe files. If you install it correctly then it will place a new section in the ‘tools’ menu of sketchup where you can convert your file from there. If the model has more than 10,000 faces it will create multiple csv or b3d files

Negative performance impact of triangulation? Are you sure? ^.-
I wouldn't say hand coding is best. The level of detail and complexity is best managed in a full fledged 3D editor, and we as a community will definitely find it hard to get new talented people to develop stuff for OpenBVE with this attitude.

Quork wrote:Negative performance impact of triangulation? Are you sure? ^.-
I wouldn't say hand coding is best. The level of detail and complexity is best managed in a full fledged 3D editor, and we as a community will definitely find it hard to get new talented people to develop stuff for OpenBVE with this attitude.

Maybe I’m wrong but triangulation usually increases the number of unnecessary faces in a model. Usually models with too many faces can cause a lot of lag. Though I believe hand coding is a more traditional method it’s probably up to the developer how they make the models

I wouldn't say hand coding is best. The level of detail and complexity is best managed in a full fledged 3D editor, and we as a community will definitely find it hard to get new talented people to develop stuff for OpenBVE with this attitude.

Maybe so, but where are these "new talented people"? I've seen little evidence of fresh content produced either by traditional or novel methods. I admit, I always coded using simply a txt editor (wordpad). I downloaded Blender but couldn't fathom how TF to use it and I find Sketchup a total waste of time and space.

Triangulation will have absolutely zero performance impact. A square face is simply two triangles.
They're what your graphics card pushes.

For that matter, we chop anything which isn't a tri into one when an object is loaded:
https://github.com/leezer3/OpenBVE/blob/master/source/OpenBVE/Game/ObjectManager/ObjectManager.StaticObject.cs#L636
(Assuming the object is of a sensible size that is)

SP1900 wrote:

Raffles wrote:Thanks for the welcome! I downloaded the convertor and extracted it. Now I gotta figure out how to use it.

Instrctions for installation and use should be included in the package. You don’t need to open any of the exe files. If you install it correctly then it will place a new section in the ‘tools’ menu of sketchup where you can convert your file from there. If the model has more than 10,000 faces it will create multiple csv or b3d files

It installed on both Linux and Windows, but it only generates the XML file. When the secondary executable, SketchUpXML2CSVEnhanced.exe, is invoked, nothing happens, indicating that it is crashing. I will start a new topic for this.

Quork wrote:Negative performance impact of triangulation? Are you sure? ^.-
I wouldn't say hand coding is best. The level of detail and complexity is best managed in a full fledged 3D editor, and we as a community will definitely find it hard to get new talented people to develop stuff for OpenBVE with this attitude.

I've done dozens of detailed objects for X-Plane with SketchUp, many of which the texture comes from photos I took. They would be impossible to do manually. I notice that the csv/b3d objects in the railway routes I have, are much more simple and generally low resolution. If we can paste pictures on this forum, I will show some examples of just how high the resolution can go, and I'm willing to try it out for OpenBVE.

leezer3 wrote:Triangulation will have absolutely zero performance impact. A square face is simply two triangles.
They're what your graphics card pushes.

For that matter, we chop anything which isn't a tri into one when an object is loaded:

(Assuming the object is of a sensible size that is)

As I understand it from creating objects for the flight simulator, this is how 3D rendering works. A triangle is the most simple polygon and everything is broken down to triangles in order for the 3D rendering to take place.

Forgot to mention that it only works with Sketchup 2017. Does not matter whether it is sketchup pro or the free version as long as its 2017