The ground in a scenery is already an irregular mesh, so the cook keeps it: it cuts the
triangles along the tile grid, welds what coincides, and builds each coarser level by
collapsing edges. Nothing is resampled, nothing is interpolated, and a hole the scenery left
stays a hole. What was here before threw the triangles away, kept their vertices and built a
fresh Delaunay triangulation over them, which filled every hole, merged the two heights of
every retaining wall into one, and - because it never erased the super-triangle - emitted
indices three too large together with triangles reaching out to the artificial corners.
Tiles form a quadtree, as Cesium Quantized Mesh intends. A distant tile is a large one, so the
horizon costs tens of tiles rather than the thousands a fixed grid needed, and the level to
draw follows from the tile's own geometric error against what the screen can resolve - which is
what the format carries that field for. Every vertex on a tile's border survives into all of
its coarser levels, and so does every edge between two of them, so two neighbours drawn at
different levels share their border exactly: there is nothing to stitch and nothing to morph.
The file layout is the format's, with two deliberate departures, both written down in
quantizedmeshformat.h: the geodetic header fields carry scenery metres, there being no
geographic reference to convert from, and the material a vertex belongs to rides in an
extension of ours. Texture coordinates are not stored at all - ground tiles in world space, so
the coordinate follows from the position and from how many metres one repeat of the material
covers, measured off the scenery once and kept in the terrain's table.
Tiles live in one archive beside the scenery, an entry each, compressed on its own. Baltyk
cooks to 546 kB against 2.2 MB of heightfields, quark to 361 kB against 9.6 MB, tomaszewo to
375 kB against 9.9 MB.
Drawing is one call a frame: every resident tile lives in the same vertex and index buffer,
with its vertices measured from the middle of the terrain so that the whole map fits in floats,
and a frame is one glMultiDrawElementsBaseVertex over the tiles the walk chose and the frustum
kept. On baltyk that settles at 291 tiles resident, 16 MB of mesh, 85 tiles and 6k triangles
drawn.
What counts as ground is what the scenery says, not what its triangles look like. A node under
origin, rotate or scale is an object standing on the ground; a material with an alpha channel is
a tree, a bush, a fence or a catenary mast. Everything else is laid whichever way it faces, so
the side of an embankment or a cutting goes in with the rest instead of leaving a hole along
every bank. Whatever is left out is recorded per node, and the scenery goes on drawing it.
A cook is a cache: it is used again only when the archive, the note of which nodes went into it
and the manifest of what the scenery was made from all agree. A manifest listing a file the
scenery names but does not have used to fail that test for ever, since an absent file never
matches - quark has such an include, and nothing beside it could ever be reused.
tools/terraincook cooks the same way outside the engine, and meshtest beside it checks what the
cook promises: a tile reads back as written, neighbouring tiles agree on their border to the
millimetre, a hole is not filled in, a wall is laid exactly once, and a material's tiling comes
out of the source. seamcheck.py goes: it tested the morphing constants of a heightfield nothing
reads any more.
A baked heightfield was trusted for as long as its file was readable, and the logic
container while the .scn was older than it: an edited include went unnoticed by both,
and node keys leaned on file dates, so merely touching a file changed them. And cooking
only ever happened as a side effect of starting a scenery.
Every cooked artifact now has a manifest beside it - <scenario>.ehf.deps,
<scenario>.logic.deps - listing each file it was made from with its size, modification
time and a hash of its content (simulation/cookdeps). The parser records what it
includes as it reads, so the list is exactly what the load read. An artifact is current
when every listed file still has its content: size and time are the quick check, and
when either differs the content is hashed, so a touched or copied file does not force a
rebuild and an edited one always does. A file added to the scenery cannot be in a
manifest; the files read are compared with it after the load, and a mismatch sends the
terrain to be baked on the next start - the new file's nodes, whose keys are unknown,
are drawn as geometry meanwhile - and the logic, cooked from the loaded state, is cooked
at once.
The terrain depends on what the scenario includes and not on the scenario file itself,
which the launcher rewrites on every start; the logic depends on both, since events can
be written in either, and costs milliseconds to cook again. With the manifest vouching
for file content, a triangle node's key is its file, line, include parameters and
placement, without the date.
-cook loads a scenery, brings whatever is stale up to date, and quits: the step that
prepares a scenery ahead of play. It closes the window directly, as there is no
simulation to wind down; a quit command waited a minute in the queue for one. Baking on
a first start stays as the fallback, and -nobaketerrain still turns it off.
Tried on a copy of baltyk with a terrain include of its own: a fresh cook bakes and
cooks everything, a second finds nothing to do, a touched file changes nothing, an
edited include is caught by its hash and both artifacts are rebuilt, and a new include
has the logic recooked at once and the terrain on the next run. A cooking run of baltyk
takes 5.5 s with nothing stale and 10.7 s with everything to do.
Each resident tile had a height texture and a material texture of its own, uploaded with
glTexImage2D, and was drawn once per material it held with every other material's
fragments discarded, all of them whether in view or not. Thousands of draws a frame.
Now the tiles of a level live in one pair of texture arrays (terrain_tile_pool), a layer
per tile. A pool starts at sixteen layers and doubles when full, copying what it holds on
the gpu, so a level takes only the memory its tiles need; uploads go through a pixel
buffer orphaned for each tile. The ground textures of every material are gathered into
one sRGB array with mipmaps (terrain_ground) - drawn into it layer by layer by a small
shader once the engine has each texture ready, since the scenery's textures are
compressed and cannot be blitted - with a table of placeholder colours and measured
tiling beside it.
Each frame the tiles in range are tested against the frustum by bounding sphere and
gathered per level into a buffer texture of instance data, and each level is drawn in
one instanced call. The fragment shader reads the four samples around it, drops the cell
when any of them carries no ground - exactly the rule the bake already assumed - and
blends the ground textures of their materials by distance, so material boundaries
follow the samples smoothly instead of stepping along triangle edges.
State the copy pass changes is captured and put back, and the texture unit cache is
reset after raw binds, so the rest of the renderer finds things as it left them.
On baltyk: all 30 materials land in the array, 663 of the 1120 tiles in range are drawn
after culling, and a frame is at most six terrain draws. The residency line in the log
now says how many tiles in range were drawn.
Today's work on the binary scene format plan (binary-scene-format-plan.md), from the
first measurement to a terrain that bakes itself on first run and streams from a
thread. The step-by-step history is kept on backup/scene-streaming-format-presquash-0916.
Measuring first. -loadprofile times a scenery load by stage and by node kind and reports
node counts and resident memory. On l204 terrain is 95% of the bytes and 99.8% of the
nodes; on quarkmce2007 vehicles, not models, dominate what is left. The terrain turned
out to be a heightfield in all but name, a ribbon covering 12% of its bounding box.
The heightfield. scene/heightfieldformat.h is the .ehf layout: Morton-ordered tiles
of 128 samples with one shared edge sample, a point-sampled mip chain, zstd per tile,
a nodata sentinel, a material palette with a measured tiling per material, and a stamp
of the rules that decided what counted as terrain. scene/heightfieldreader.h reads it
for the tool, the renderer and the loader alike, and scene/terraincooker.h writes it,
shared by the terraincook tool and the engine so a first-run bake is the file the tool
would have made. The cooker rasterises every triangle where it is drawn (through
scene::place_in_world, the placement the region applies too), keeps an upper surface
laid within half a metre over another and the lower of two further apart, and then
asks each triangle whether the heightfield shows it: laid, reaching a sample, keeping
nearly all it claimed, and with the ground around it drawn at every level out to 2 km.
Baking on first run. simulation/terrainbake bakes <scenario>.ehf the first time a
scenery is opened, choosing the grid step from the first 200,000 vertices, and on later
loads leaves out the triangles its node table says the heightfield shows. Everything
else - trees, grass tufts, gantries, bridge decks - is drawn as written, so a bad bake
can at worst draw something twice, and the heightfield sits 2 cm under the triangles so
the original wins there. Nodes are keyed by file, line, include parameters and
placement; an edited file changes its keys and those nodes are drawn again. A bake under
older rules, or without its table, is thrown away and redone. A launcher copy named
$scenario shares the scenario's files. -nobaketerrain shows the triangles as written.
A scenery can still name hand-cooked fields, several at different steps.
Drawing and streaming. rendering/terrainclipmap draws resident tiles at the mip level
their distance earns, deriving the grid from gl_VertexID and texturing in world space
with the scenery's own materials. rendering/terraintileloader reads and decodes tiles on
a thread of its own; the renderer rescans what is in range only after moving a quarter
of a tile, asks for what is missing nearest first, uploads at most 32 tiles a frame,
drops arrivals the camera has moved past, and keeps drawing a tile at the level it has
until the right one arrives. The terrain has its own range, terrainrange in the ini and
a slider in the debug panel, 20 km by default and independent of basedrawrange; the far
plane of an ordinary view is pushed out to it. The debug panel shows the range, tiles in
view, on the gpu, wanted and queued, and how many sit at each level.
Events. The event queue moved out of the events into a binary heap with a deterministic
tie-break, and an event is handed its activator instead of storing it, so basic_event
is a definition and nothing else.
The logic container. scene/logicformat.h and scene/logiccontainer write a scenery's
events, their targets and sibling chains as flat, deterministic arrays with a schema
hash that refuses a mismatched build. simulation/logiccook cooks it from the loaded
state whenever it is missing, stale or unreadable, reads it straight back to check it,
and resolves each target to a position in the registry its event kind searches.
-cooklogic forces a cook, -verifylogic only checks. Nothing reads it at load yet.
Prefabs. scene/prefab describes a signal by the aspects it can show - lights, speeds,
animation channels, a sound - instead of pasting an .inc per variant, and expands an
instance to ordinary scenery text. Tried on a light signal and a shape signal.
Screenshots without a person present: -shot x,y,z[,yaw[,pitch]], -shotsettle, -shotstay.
Two things about the map behind the plan, neither of them the plan's own doing.
stb keeps one flip flag for the whole program - there is a single stb_image.c in
the build - and the model texture loader turned it on for its own sake, because
models want the bottom row first. A WMS tile is the other way about: its first row
is its northern edge, which is what the drawing code takes v=0 to be. So every
tile came out upside down as soon as any model texture had been loaded through
that path, which is why this has come and gone with the order things load in. Both
decoders now say which way they want it per thread, where nobody else can reach it.
And libcurl is no longer required to configure. A tree without it builds an editor
that draws and exports as usual, only with nothing behind the plan, and says so
once rather than showing a silent grey screen; the CI installs it, so what comes
out of the build has its imagery.
The track layout library came in as a subproject of its own -- its own
CMakeLists, its own install and export rules, its own include tree -- which only
made the build harder to follow now that everything else is a module. It is part
of the editor, so it lives where the editor lives.
- editor/plan_*.cppm / plan_*.cpp: the fifteen interface units and twelve
implementation units, flat in editor/ beside editorTerrain and orthophoto, with
the plan_ prefix keeping them clear of what was already there (editor/turnouts
is the preset catalogue, so the geometry is plan_turnout_geometry).
- modules are named eu07.editor.plan_*, like every other module in the tree.
- namespaces move under the editor's own: editor::plan, editor::plan::geometry,
::io, ::render. The library's old name is gone from the sources and the docs.
- every moved file carries the MPL header the rest of the tree carries; it had
none. version.hpp went with the subproject: macros only, and unused.
- the umbrella header is dropped -- nothing imported it.
- the unit tests survive the fold: editor/tests, behind EU07_EDITOR_PLAN_TESTS
(off by default), compiles the interfaces a second time into a small library of
its own, because a test can only import modules from a target it links and
linking the game would drag the whole simulator in. The code under test needs
nothing but a compiler. 7/7 pass.
- a switch may now be written with two dashes as well: --editor beside -editor.
Builds with clang 22 (-DWITH_BETTER_RENDERER=OFF); -editor and --editor both come
up in the editor on empty ground.
The editor branch was written against headers and the PCH, both of which this
branch has done away with, so its own files were ported rather than merged: the
five headers it added are now interface units and their .cpp files module
implementation units.
- editor/{puwg1992,polandmap,turnouts,orthophoto} become eu07.editor.* modules,
application/planpanel becomes eu07.application.planpanel. The plan tool keeps
to its own module rather than joining the eu07.simcore partitions: it stands on
the editor's libraries and eu07.application.uilayer, not on the simulation core,
so :editoruilayer can export import it without a cycle.
- glm arrives by import eu07.glm, never by include, as the rest of the tree does.
maj0sted is header-only and glm-free, so its headers stay includes in the global
module fragment - every unit that names those types includes them itself, since
a global fragment is not visible across units.
- the one textual conflict was :editoruilayer's include block against this
branch's imports; resolved this branch's way plus the planpanel import.
Builds with clang 22 (-DWITH_BETTER_RENDERER=OFF) and starts into the editor on
empty ground with -editor alone.
Only Platform/Windows-MSVC.cmake passes /DWIN32; neither Windows-GNU nor
the GNU branch of Windows-Clang does. Switching drivers silently took the
macro away from every translation unit, and third-party code that tests
the unprefixed WIN32 took its non-Windows path: FSR2 defined wcscpy_s as
wcscpy, which then failed against the SDK's own three-argument call. asio
reads the same macro.
Defined before any add_subdirectory so every target sees it.
CMake wires up C++20 module scanning for Clang only when the frontend
variant is GNU; for clang-cl it sets nothing and refuses to generate:
"the compiler does not provide a way to discover the import graph
dependencies". Not a missing tool, a hard gap - Compiler/Clang-CXX.cmake
guards the whole scandep block on the GNU variant.
clang++ on Windows still targets x86_64-pc-windows-msvc, so the ABI, the
SDK, the vcpkg packages and D3D12 are unchanged. CMake then takes the
GNU path and leaves MSVC false, which is what the /MD /Zi /O2 block wants
anyway; the version resource had to move to a WIN32 guard to survive.
clang-cl keeps the MSVC ABI, so the Windows SDK, the vcpkg packages and
D3D12 all still link; only the front end changes. That front end is the
one whose module support has been giving way - global module fragment
merging and type completeness at a template's instantiation point.
Switches the job to Ninja, which is where CMake's module scanning is best
supported, with vcvars64 for the SDK paths. Ninja is single-config, so
the artifacts move from build/bin/<config>/ to build/bin/.
CMakeLists: the MSVC-only blocks tested CMAKE_CXX_COMPILER_ID, which
clang-cl reports as Clang, so the version resource, the icon and /utf-8
would have been dropped silently. They test MSVC now, which is true for
both. /MAP and /MP stay behind a real-MSVC check - the first is a
link.exe spelling, the second clang-cl rejects.
Verified locally now that Vulkan and DXC are installed: all 31 targets
compile. glm has to come from eu07.glm only - having it both as a plain
include and as an import made every overload ambiguous. nvrenderer.h is
self-sufficient, since register.cpp includes nothing else. Fixes the
vcpkg triplet, which was pinned to x64-windows.
The module file set moves to its own eu07_modules library: a target can
only consume C++20 modules by linking the target that owns them, and
betterRenderer is a separate add_library. Its project includes become
imports.
CXX_EXTENSIONS must match across the two - a BMI built with -std=c++20
is refused by a unit compiled with -std=gnu++20.
Every module unit now includes the standard headers it uses. Declarations
reaching a unit only through an imported module's global module fragment
are reachable but not visible, so ADL misses the free operators older
libstdc++ declares beside a type - reproduced on ubuntu 24.04 (libstdc++
13), where gl/vao.cpp could not compare vector iterators.
Also drops a stale editor/editorSettings.hpp from the MSVC source list,
which broke the Windows configure step, silences the deliberate
include-in-purview warning in the glm wrapper, and removes GCC support:
clang or MSVC only.
Linux CI switches to clang 22; fixes what that exposed - export on
out-of-line member definitions, missing std includes, missing glm
imports. GCC 16 still builds.
The library was a heap of half-built services - fitting, parallelism, niwelety,
an SVG writer - that never met each other. In their place is one authored
Document and one solver that lays it whole: tracks as element chains, turnouts
placed on them, and a Solution that is rebuilt from scratch every time and never
fed back into the document. What cannot be laid comes back as a diagnostic with
the number in it rather than as silence or a fitted-away error.
Turnouts are dimensioned the way the drawings dimension them. The blade follows
Koc's rys. 5.9 - the curve is theoretically tangent to the opornica at PR, the
blade starts at a with a planed nose of d, and A is where the rail stands u
thick - and a + d derived that way lands on his tablica 5.1. Bending follows
5.3.6: it rotates the triangle OBC about the centre of the turnout, so the
tangent t and the crossing angle stand and both radii follow from them. That is
Koc's (5.7) and (5.8) without coding either, and it puts a symmetrically bent
Rz 49E1-190-1:9 on the catalogue's Rlus 49E1-380,292-1:9. A rozjazd standing on
a curve is bent onto it; one on a track drawn straight can carry a bend of its
own. The szyny laczace take up the difference, because the switch and the frog
are only bent, not re-cut.
The plan panel draws all of it: the catalogue drawing of a type with its
construction points, the theoretical arc dashed where no rail runs, and the
blade nose as the straight it is cut as. Dragging a straight now stops where it
would pull the track out from under a turnout.
File format goes to m0s 6. Versions 3 to 5 still open.
A switch (rozjazd) is a relation on a through niweleta, not a niweleta - the
through track is never split. It marks the theoretical point on the through
centreline; two tangent lines cross there (the through heading and that heading
turned by the crossing mark 1:n), and the internal diverging curve is fitted to
round the corner between them, reusing the same GapFitter the gap fits go
through. So the curve is free: a plain arc, or a łuk koszowy right inside the
switch. The theoretical tangent lengths and the curve length follow from it and
are read off, not set.
The branch niweleta's leaving straight is now locked to the frog: it starts at
the frog and runs along the frog heading every solve, only its length is the
user's. That enforces tangency no matter what is drawn, and because the first
straight is pinned tangent, any fit in the branch's first gap - including a
basket - meets the switch tangentially by construction.
solve_layout solves the niwelety and the switches together in two passes: solve,
read each frog, pin the branches, solve again. Switches serialize as an ejuncs /
ejunc section; older files without it still load.
Typical Polish turnouts (rozjazdy zwyczajne) are offered as templates that set
the crossing mark and radius together; the length each spans is computed from
them (arc = R*atan(1/n)) and shown, so how long the switch is is known.
The location picker now shows the real topographic map instead of a
hand-drawn outline, fetched as one WMS image for whatever box is on screen;
the schematic border is gone and only the city list remains, to jump the
view somewhere recognisable. Under the plan itself a georeferenced map gets
the orthophoto, tiled through the layout library's own EPSG:2180 grid and
cache.
What a native build was missing is here: the download (WinHTTP, on worker
threads), the decode and the texture. Finished transfers are handed back on
the thread that drains them, so both the library's cache and the graphics
API stay on one thread. The imagery service turns down browser user agents
and fails the odd request even for a plain one, so requests go out as curl
and are retried a few times.
Starting a new map now drops the loaded scenery and comes back on empty
ground, instead of leaving the previous scenery's contents under a plan that
has nothing to do with them. The reload is deferred to the top of the frame:
taking the editor off the mode stack while it is drawing its own panels
would pull the ground out from under them.
"New map" now asks what is being started. A fictional scenery keeps its own
frame, where coordinates mean nothing outside it. A real one pins the
scenery's zero to a point picked off a map of Poland, so the plan is drawn
in EPSG:2180 - the frame the layout library already works in, and the one
Geoportal serves imagery in.
The projection is the standard transverse Mercator series for PUWG 1992 on
GRS80. Checked against known values: the central meridian comes out at
easting 500000 exactly, Warszawa at 637382/486757, Krakow at 567614/244588,
Gdansk at 477038/720937.
The map behind the picker is a schematic border outline plus the larger
cities, projected from geographic coordinates on first use. It is coarse on
purpose - it is there to point at a region, not to measure against - and the
dialog says so. No network is involved.
A "Plan" panel, opened from Track layout in the editor's menu bar, draws a
niweleta the way the web frontend did: click to lay chained straights, drag
a corner to move it, and pick a fit for each gap between them. The geometry
is entirely maj0sted's - the panel gathers the input, hands the document to
solve_project and paints the rails that come back, coloured by whether they
came from a straight, an arc or a clothoid. Scenery nodes are untouched.
A fit the library cannot produce is simply absent from its answer, so the
gap is labelled as not fitting rather than left looking as though its
parameters took effect. Save/load go through the library's own document
format, so a project written here opens in the same state.
Also translates the comments added with -editor into English, matching the
files they sit in.
Drop-in copy of C:\Users\maj00r\Projects\maj0sted-master minus its web/
directory - the WASM frontend is not being ported, the editor drives the
same C++ API natively. What is left is plain C++20 with no dependencies:
domain model (niweleta, plan and profile geometry, fitting, parallelism),
project serialization, rail sampling and the editor document.
src/web/ribbon.cpp was missing from the library source list; added, since
without it the ribbon symbols never make it into the archive.
Squashes the last five commits: migrate to Python 3.14 (CMake, AppVeyor, Azure, README), vcpkg/setup-ci fixes, CMake adjustments, remove bundled ref/python 2.7, and related scripting/static file updates.
Co-authored-by: Cursor <cursoragent@cursor.com>
The loading screen has been significantly changed:
- The background image is now properly picked randomly instead of taking the `textures/logo.bmp` file, prepended by an external program such as Rainsted/Starter.
- The progress bar has been moved from a floating window to a thin green line at the bottom of the loading screen.
- The log window is now hidden by default. It can be turned on by setting `loadinglog` to `true` in `eu07.ini`.
- There is an animated wheel icon on the loading screen, and a trivia text is displayed.
New translation key:
- `"Did you know"`
TODO:
- Load trivia from a separate file.
