Hey Radikyle, I don't believe this would over-ride the vanilla tank car, but I'll certainly take a look.

Hi, I re-downloaded the mod just in case a file was corrupt, but still have same issue. Curiously the red warning is gone now tho.

Anyhow here's a screenshot of the buy menu:
https://imgur.com/a/MJXToqN

This is a fresh map with only 3 mods active: this one, the Bettendorf Trucks (tho apparently it's not needed because they still load okay without it?), and UG's No Vehicle End Year (because this test map is year 2000).

Hope that helps! Cheers

good to know on the bettendorf, ill need to remove that. but your screenshot shows the vanilla tankcar and also shows the randomized numbers mod i made, so im not following?

Ugh apologies across the board, it seems I'm having one of those days/weeks of testing too many mod combinations and messing everything up. For example in that screenshot above I didn't even load the tanker mod 🤦‍♂️

Ok so now, having tested it carefully *with notes this time* lol, yes the vanilla tanker is there, so you can please kindly disregard that nonsense No idea how the heck I missed it.

The tanker mod does still have the red crash warning in the mod loading menu though.

And please ignore the bit about the Bettendorfs because they're not even a reqt for this mod, it uses the Base Set instead.

Having said that, separate tests of the ARA 70-ton Hopper mod, and the Mid-Century Randomized Baxcars mod, shows that they both load fine without enabling the Bettendorf Truck mod, even though both mods indicate they require the Bettendorfs. So maybe something up with those 2?
https://steamhost.cn/steamcommunity_com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2842712338
https://steamhost.cn/steamcommunity_com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2827109291

Back to this tanker mod, now that I've got my head sorted out, the only thing then is that strange red warning flag in the mod load menu. I don't know what it's on about 🤷‍♂️ maybe it's nothing.

Only other thing I noticed is the mod is tricky to find in the list because it uses a different name than the workshop. It's filed under T for "The New 1948..." 😄 Would it be possible to use the workshop name instead?

Many thanks again, cheers!

Those warnings are actually manually set and that's my bad xD

And yes! I can rename it

Awesome, thanks!!

Any thoughts why those other 2 mods still work without the Bettendorfs enabled? (I'm kinda hoping it's because they have their own trucks internally, since the Bettendorfs are not well optimized for performance.)

uh, well i never removed the bettendorf's mesh, texture and material files from the mod, haha.

and how are they not optimized?

Ah that would explain it! Yeah I just checked in debug view both with/without the Bettendorfs enabled and it showed the same trucks being used, so they're internal in the model. Screenshot:
https://imgur.com/a/9vW47ED
So since they're baked into the model, can probably just remove the Bettendorf requirement from the workshop pages for those 2 mods.

So that truck mod has the same optimization issues as many other workshop mods. They are very high tri count and the LODing isn't very aggressive -- they don't reduce detail enough, fast enough, with view distance. So they render with a much higher load than many vanilla vehicles for example. Each truck is 39K tris, and although they LOD down to about 4K each, that's still pretty high for what should basically be cubes at that distance, and it takes too long to get there. Put say a dozen medium trains in view around a busy station, and suddenly there can be 10M tris hitting the GPU, just for rail trucks. It hits the FPS hard. But like I said, it's not unique to that truck mod, unfortunately it's endemic to manyyyy in the workshop. I wasn't aware before, so now I'm choosing more wisely before adding one.

It's too bad there isn't some kind of "default fallback" feature, where a mod could use detailed trucks as an option, but if it's not provided then it falls back to the optimized vanilla trucks. It would allow users to have the various paints, which is the main appeal of the mods, while retaining closer-to-vanilla performance. But we have what the UG provides Cheers

have you noticed a large fps loss using them? I agree its large though, but if you're using the hudsons by neighborkid...yeah xD have you tried the berk?

Definitely. Sadly I've begun removing most of these mods (incl every NK one 😭). And a new Canadian one this week from a different author (160K tris, no LODs). So unfortunately I have to be choosy about which "heavy" mods I can afford to put on the map if I still want to enjoy a playable game.

I realize modding is a lot of hard work, and I hope I can contribute some day. For now I'm hopeful more mods will become competitively LOD optimized. Good LODs make great models run as awesome as they look, and the FPS benefits everyone, especially the mod creators 😊

Anyhow sorry for spamming up your tankcar msgs! 🙈 Thanks so much for the efforts, cheers!