Gentle routes in Britain

[blastpop]

I am looking for British routes that I can reasonably run on my old computer (6 years, XP, 3MB ram, GEforce 9500GT). I can run without too much trouble Exeter and Isle of Wight but have trouble with WCML (got that on sale and at this point have buyers regret- hard to run).

Any suggestions of routes that might work at least OK on my system(railworks, third party or individual's routes)?

Thanks in advance!

Mark

[Nana-chan]

Woodhead should run fine if you can run B-E. Excellent route.

[lonewolfdon]

Just in case you don't have it yet, I thought I'd mention the Port Road addon. It's a nice little free route you can grab from Steam:
http://store.steampowered.com/app/24079/

[Clemmo47]

There are many small routes on UKTS,the largest UK RW community. It costs £3 per month for full membership but well worth it.
Best to have a look around the site and get used to finding items before you join. It's really big. Many items freeware but require the otiginal payware but you can find a lot of routes /scenarios that use default items,especially the challenge routes (a yearly challenge to produce a route with default items)

http://www.uktrainsim.com/

[Free Trade Inn]

There are quite a lot of sidings in Woodhead as well as OHW and elevated track sections. I would recomend Garnfield Branch Line (AKA class 111 pack), Falmouth and Project platform.

FTI

[boilerbill]

If you're willing to pay, Just Train's Bishop Auckland-to-Darlington route is simple but has great detail, especially in the stations and the museum. (http://www.justtrains.net/product.asp?pid=908)

For a free route, I doubt that you could get any more peaceful (and beautiful) than the Rusford Line (http://www.uktrainsim.com/filelib-in...m_fileid=28294).

[Hayesty]

I had difficulty running WCML with 4 mb of ram, lots of SBHH's.
Would also recommend the Rusford line a fictional Cotswold to Oxford modern era line. Runs very smoothly.
The Bishop Aukland route is beautifully detailed but I'm unsure how much potential it has for extra scenarios. Very much a there and back again route

Much as I like the Woodhead line I feel 3 mb of ram will make it run slowly with all the assets it requires.

[blastpop]

I guess the key would be to limit assets to ensure reasonable FPS. A route may be beautiful, but if it's a FPS hog, then chances I can't run it. I find I'm able better able to run routes without overhead electricity. Too bad there isn't a specific option to not display them for the sake of being able to run such routes. So I avoid the electrified routes out of necessity. I prefer diesel anyway... What about the SECML? is that a hog?

So bearing in mind what other routes would work? Thanks Boiler- I'll look into Auckland-Darlington.

[blastpop]

A couple things I've done that has helped FPS is to set RW to high priority in task manager. The other thing that helps with the jerky frame behavior is to turn off McAfee Real time scanning while I'm running the game. Mind you these are not a great fixes, but seems to smooth things out somewhat.

[Clemmo47]

Thanks for the tip about task manager. I learn something every day. I see that you have to reset the high priority every time you start RW though.
Does this Prio application solve that problem and let you save the RW priority ?
http://download.cnet.com/Prio-64-bit...-75324358.html

Do you put both Railworks.exe and RailworksProc on High priority ?
Thanks for the tips +rep

I have Gamebooster on and turn Norton to silent mode. Perhaps that helps a bit.

[arizonachris]

Pop, Lonewolfdon recommended a long time ago a program called Game Booster. It shuts down all kinds of services and processes that aren't needed for the game. Gives me about a 10 to 15% boost in frames easily.

And, yes, anti virus needs to be shut off, or like my Avast!, put into gaming mode. Every little thing that steals CPU usage.

[blastpop]

Originally Posted by arizonachris

Pop, Lonewolfdon recommended a long time ago a program called Game Booster. It shuts down all kinds of services and processes that aren't needed for the game. Gives me about a 10 to 15% boost in frames easily.

And, yes, anti virus needs to be shut off, or like my Avast!, put into gaming mode. Every little thing that steals CPU usage.

I tried Game Booster and it acted as a Virus (or the download contained one)- Started causing stability issues. I found others had the same problem with a virus on the internet. Are there other similar products out there that don't cause such a problem?

[lonewolfdon]

Though there isn't any virus with it (as far as I know), Game-Booster does seem to have some Adware tied into it now (so some Anti-Virus programs may not like that, or some Anti-Virus programs can be overly fussy about a utility that tries to shut-down some of Windows services).

Anyways, I prefer to use GameFire now:
http://www.smartpcutilities.com/gamefire.html

It's an open-source-software (No adware, spyware or viruses) free utility that works in a similar way to Game-Booster, and it seems you have more control and options of what you want it to do (you can set up a Gaming Profile with it and some other options) and seems to work well for what it does.

And yes, Prio works good on Windows 7. It remembers what settings you set a priority for a program so you don't have to re-set it on every launch via the task-manager. You set the priority once, then Prio will remember the priority-setting you made for each launch of the program after that.
I'd recommend to get it from here (and you can view more info about it too)
http://www.prnwatch.com/prio.html

However, a note; If you use both Game-Fire and Prio, first, launch and Start your RailWorks, then when you're at the in-game RailWorks menu, Alt + Tab out of RailWorks and run GameFire and activate your Game Mode, then go back into your RailWorks.

Otherwise I found if you run GameFire first, then it seems to shut-off the Prio service, therefore RailWorks won't be set for the higher-priority like you want when you Start it. But, if you Start RailWorks first (and then Prio would have already set RailWorks to run at the higher setting as you chose), then run GameFire, all seems to work well that way.

[Clemmo47]

Thanks Don. Is that the same process if using Game Booster? I looked up the virus problem and it doesn't seem to be an issue now.
. Various sites commenting on it. I just ran Edinburgh-Dundee express with all settings on high using Prio and I didn't get the usual message half way that I was running out of memory.
Might just be this particular scenario though.
Some random example of chat about virus on GB. Oh no, their Sims are dying!
http://forums.electronicarts.co.uk/s...ter-virus.html

[lonewolfdon]

Clemmo: GameFire works similarly to Game-Booster, cleaning and reclaiming some RAM, and shutting down some unnecessary Windows processes.

Game-Booster seems more "User-Friendly" and simple to use, whereas Game-Fire can take a bit of tweaking to adjust the various options and to set-up your gaming-profile how you want, but once you have it set-up it's easy to run, and I think GameFire has more options and gives the User more control of what they want it to do.

Also, since I got my new nVidia graphic-card a couple months ago, I've been using the free EVGA Precision X utility:
http://www.evga.com/precision/

I use it to slightly overclock my card before running a game (not too much, just enough to squeeze a couple of extra FPS from it while keeping it still stable and relatively cool temps under workload).

It also has some good options, can be setup to display an onscreen FPS readout while playing a game, as well as have the option to set a FPS-limit to help keep game performance smoother too in some cases.