some progress news on the port & rewrite #Traincraft #TrainsInMotion

Okay, so the past couple weeks some big stuff has happened, so lets try and cover all of it.
TiM/TC's rewrite first.
This took a lot longer than planned, but there have been some MASSIVE rendering reworks, allowing for not only me to add new animations easier, but also for 3rd party mods.
In the process of this change I also overhauled the particles, now they are in 3D and run roughly 3.5 times better than the vanilla 2d particles. Of course the entire render has had performance improvements, not just the particles, I went all the way down to the tesselator.
Add to it, now they can keep chunks loaded and thus continue moving even without a player.

And here's that changelog.
- Changed to using the vanilla rail block check for pathfinding, since checking for ZnD rails here is redundant.
- Reworked the entire particles system, we no longer use vanilla code for it, the new particles are 3D and far more efficient than vanilla's 2D particles, with more realistic physics.
- Particles now use hex values for color, it's more efficient, and probably easier for end-users.
- Fixed some javadoc errors.
- GUI now uses the TMT tesselator.
- Reworked some variables to have more efficient scopes.
- New Grouped Model Render, this makes it far easier to add more features to the renders for blocks and cargo, from both 3rd party mods and from the mod itself.
- New Static Model Animator, this makes it far easier to add more animations for trains and rollingstock, from both 3rd party mods and from the mod itself.
- Entity render has been significantly overhauled to improve performance and simplify code.
- TMT CHANGE: the tesselator has been optimized a bit more, a number of unnecessary variables and calculations have been tossed, and a large degree of type casting is no longer necessary.
- TMT CHANGE: the TexturedPolygon class has been modified to better support the tesselator changes, should help overall performance without really changing anything.
- Complex chunkloading system that supports entities with sub-entities.
Most all of it is handled from a single class to keep it simple.
- Changed some public variables to private since we don't expect anybody
to be accessing them anyway.
- Fixed a glitch with entities crashing on spawn.
- Hitboxes now spawn on both sides, this should fix some collision and
interaction issues.





Okay and now for the TC port news.
So 009 was released, with cool's Ic4, fixed chunkloding, and no more slope bug.

The chunkloading has been an issue since the 1.7.10 port started, I never understood the system as a whole, once I started on it in the rewrite, I finally understood it. Come to find out, the system is simple enough that I was able to just copy-paste what I did for the rewrite, and it just worked.
There was also a bug with the slope detection that's been an issue off and on for a number of revisions, this actually ended up being an issue with the entire slope pathfinding calculation.

We also got some help from another minecraft user, this helped fix a large number of minor issues, and stuff we just never got around to.

So here's the 009 changes:
- Chunkloading has finally been fixed!
- Improved performance of EntityBogie
- Reworked some redundant variables from the transport classes and the transport enum
- Removed BogieUtility since it was nevcer defined nor actually used
- RollingStock speeds up/slows down on slopes again like it did in 1.6.4
- Fixed trains and rollingstock derailing/stopping/reversing on TC slopes
- Reworked Small straight track
- Changed rail recipe to iron-only
- Made it possible to convert MC tracks to TC tracks
- Improved performance of all TC rails
- Added IC4, courtesy of Cool9535
- and it RollingStock

Now we all know 009 had some bugs. And those are being tended to, here's the progress thus far on 010:
- Fixed the IC4 recipes.
- Added the missing recipe for the center beam freight car.
- Improved the ItemHandler performance for Freight-Cars --- courtesy of TheBlueCrystal
- Powered Track new draws RF-Power from the block below the track --- courtesy of TheBlueCrystal
- windmill now checks blocks above it to be sure it could actually be powered by some form of wind, --- courtesy of TheBlueCrystal
- Added better fuel management for steam and zeppelins, now they support all burnables, even from other mods I don't know exist.
- Improved general performance of defining the recipies.
- Removed some unused variables.
- Distil should now allow crafting even while TC ore gen is disabled. 
 
No release date yet on 010, but there's some stuff to look forward to. We're still looking into other fixes that can be included, and discussing some model changes/improvements (mostly the ic4).

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