Originally posted by TRS
Why didn't NL2 have the ability to build in full rendered mode? The wireframe in NL1, was criticized as being to difficult to use. A sample of this is figuring out what wire is what wire or what node is what node. just asking.
I think there was something like this in the middle of this thread. (The search function on this forum is absolutely atrocious so I actually found it from a quote on NLE forums.)
Originally posted by PhyterThe greatest feature of course is that we've gotten mostly away from wireframe editing. Tracks are still edited in wireframe for performance reasons, but the scene is edited in WYSIWYG fashion. It's going to be much easier for you to visualize changes, make adjustments, and compose more beautiful, more complex scenes for your parks.
Given the complexity of rendering the full track, I can see this being a legitimate reason for sticking to wireframe. A better compromise would be simple geometry IMO (i.e. get rid of all textures and details, leaving just the rails and crossties), but it looks like wireframes simply draw faster than any geometry when editing. For a single track segment, the performance difference should be trivial, but when moving large numbers of nodes at a time, or when using FVD, wireframe should give a noticeable boost.
Best option is user choice IMO, but what we have now already looks to be a huge improvement in usability compared to in NL1. Hopefully there will be proper 3D editing tools this time (i.e. transform gizmos as seen in most 3D modeling software) instead of being forced to use 2D views to position objects, although with that said, I'm also hoping the 2D views aren't forcibly limited to top/side views as they were in NL1, but instead allow the user to rotate manually for oblique-angle side views (i.e. handbuilding a coaster that does a series of hills on a diagonal; only FVD based tools can seem to handle this properly right now), isometric views, etc.
Of course, NL2 is due for release very soon, so not really sure what's going to happen. I recall seeing posts mentioning that the 2D views could be re-angled but I can't remember for sure. We'll just have to wait and see I guess.