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If you’ve visited the » openBVE Homepage « recently, you’ll know that Michelle has released openBVE v0.9.1.5 and DemoRoute1, and these introduce animated objects to the community for the first time. While the new animation capabilities are just a preview, aren’t supported yet and are subject to change, I’ve been playing with the new functionality to see what might be possible. As the animation capabilities may be altered in future versions of openBVE, none of these X-City demonstrations should be considered final.

In Michelle’s DemoRoute1 we can see an animated departure screen, clock, an A320 flying overhead, flashing level crossing light, moving cars and simulated interaction, and an escalator. These are the kinds of features I’d like to add to Cross-City South v1.4 as well, as they’re just brilliant–but rather than show you what Michelle has already demonstrated, I thought I’d start with something a little different. In the video below, I’ve used .PointOfInterest commands, and placed animated sheets of rain to create the effect of precipitation (achieved via texture shifting), moving clouds achieved via the same method, and animated water on the canal.

Note: openBVE will have built-in rainfall in future, so using animated objects to create this effect won’t be required eventually; but I was curious to see if such effects were possible with animated objects alone.

Video: openBVE v0.9.1.7 and X-City South v1.4 (textures not finished yet)

Animated clouds, falling rain, moving water, and a passing train

Note: This video is now included as part of a compliation on YouTube.

« [YouTube “High Quality” version] | [YouTube “High Definition” version]

Class 150 objects from » Network West Midlands «

A note on the passing train–this is just a fun experiment, and animated objects aren’t really suited for this purpose as the animated object doesn’t follow any track, but rather a direction defined in the animated object file; I probably won’t include it in the final release route as there’s no sound accompanying the train. However, the technique is suitable for trains passing over or under bridges for example, like in the » IIYAMA Line 2060 « route, where the train is some distance from the player, moving across the screen (Lichfield Trent Valley on the Cross-City North route could also be a suitable location for such an effect):

The moving water in the above X-City South v1.4 video also needs some work, but involves a static canal object with ordinary texture, and then two animated, texture shifted alpha-enabled surfaces overlaid; one moving left to right (to match the cloud’s direction of movement), and the other moving along the Z-axis. When combined, they make the water appear to ripple slightly if you look closely for a few seconds, particularly where the tree reflections are visible on the right.

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