New 3D Rail System

Last week I started working on a new 3D Rail System for Train Sim. The current rails are actually a 2 dimensional texture that mimics the look of 3D. This was originally done to improve performance on mobile devices. While it looks OK on a tiny phone screen, it does not translate as well to larger high resolution tablets or PCs. Hence it has been on my list of fixes for a while now.

Unfortunately this will be allot of work as I will actually need to re-make all the rail paths in Train Sim across all of the levels. However I think I figured out most of the technical & performance unknowns and can now move to implementing this feature across all levels in Train Sim. At about days per level it should take a few weeks to finish.

So why invest so much time on new rails? I think as new mobile devices get more powerful it makes sense to update some of the core features in Train Sim to ensure it does not look dated compared to newer games. Although this is a large investment in time, I think it will be well worth it at the end