Stainmore and Eden Valley Route

[SteamSoundsSupreme]

Oh Dairy Me!!

Read a new Stainmore Blog post about a new development at Appleby. Also one of the great route building challenges - having in front of you a photograph and trying to recreate it in!

http://stainmorerouteproject.blogspot.c ... yates.html

[bdy26]

Hello everyone... long time no forums!

Here's a few pictures of work at Tebay, all the eye candy in shots is Phil's hard work, I'm just pulling at the terrain nodes

Dillicar troughs:



Lune Gorge



Tebay Station from the NER side looking toward Shap



Station looking SW-ish across the Exchange Sidings



The scenery is coming together steadily, albeit at the pace of a Super D!

Ben

[almark]

That looks fantastic guys,can't wait to be sat simmering away on Tebay shed waiting to bank a heavy freight up Shap

[SteamSoundsSupreme]

Thanks for posting these Ben. I simply hadn't got around to it. They are great pictures!

Matt

[SteamSoundsSupreme]

A new and unique item of rolling stock created for Stainmore! Read all about it in our latest Stainore Route Project blog post:

http://stainmorerouteproject.blogspot.c ... iness.html

[AndiS]

Not sure where this was discussed recently, but if any questions remain, just ask.

Ingredients are a particle effect on the plough that is switched on and off when a custom message is received from the snow drift. The snow drift is a signal that knows how long the heap is. So the rotating of the heap asset they show could be a bit misleading. The signal says "when train head is X m from link, send custom message "on"; when it is X m beyond, send "off" likewise". Engine (plough) says "on custom message switch particle emitter on/off".

And the snow heap pull away the cover of over the dug out section. They seem to hide it all under a big cloud. You could make the cover in sections of a few metres and hide them using ActivateNode one by one as the train progresses.

Your case is harder to do than that of the Germans as the rotary makes a much bigger cloud that hides much more.

[eyore]

Andi,

Firstly an apology that the emitters on the snow plough are not shown in the blog pictures after all your help in getting them working.

I would like to know more about how to create a snowdrift so if you can point me at the discussions you have had previously I would be grateful. (pls remember I'm useless at lua)

[AndiS]

Sorry for not remembering that this is exactly the snow plough we were talking about.

The video by the Germans is the second one here:
http://rail-sim.de/forum/index.php/Thre ... post327061

Let me know if you need translation. They don't say much anyway, except that it is great.

In the case of your plough, I would create three things.

1) Snow on the track that comes in segments of, say, 3 or 5 metres representing snow that is some 50 cm above rails. When a segment is fully under (in) the plough shape, it gets lowered to the level of the rail heads or a bit below. It will still cover the sleepers after the plough did its work.

2) Bulges left and right representing the snow dug away. They are a single shape showing a pair of domes raised from under ground as the plough passes them. Of course, the cloud coming from the emitters is of big help to cover their growing phase.

3) Static snow left and right of the track.

Depending on the minimum radius of your curves, there will be some maximum length for snow objects. Assuming that you decide the limit to be 50 m, you could have 10 segments of 5 m length. They extend 25 m on each side of the track link.

Each segment is constituted by two children of the signal blueprint. One for the snow on the track that is lowered and one for the bulges that are raised. I don't think you can combine this pair of movement into a signal object with a single animation due to the strong limitations on animations in this game.

So you got a signal with 20 arms. Would be interesting if the game manages that at all, or if there is a hidden limit to the number of children any blueprint can have.

As for normal signals, you would have only two child blueprints, one for snow on track and the other for one pair of bulges. Then you add 10 references to each of them, giving 20 children. If that is too much, try with 5 segments giving 10 children.

You could put the names of these children in an array patterned after normal signals, as if they were home and distant arms for 10 dolls. Or you use some naming convention that removes the need for that array.

OnConsistPass will just add 25 to the distance (because we are interested in the range of -25 to +25). Then, whenever a multiple of 5 is crossed, the next 'arm' motion is started.

I ought to beat up a script some time this weekend as what I write here will not get you there. Let's hope there is some timeslot somewhere.

[cjbarnes5294]

Further to Andi's excellent strategy, if you wanted to be really cruel you could add a function to the custom signal object's script that effectively shuts down the player loco by setting the regulator and reverser controls to 0, and lock the brakes on hard, if you attempt to drive through it without the snowplough. The result would be requiring another loco to rescue it or a triggered game over.

I was also going to suggest that the snowplough handbrake be set to fully on when being pushed through a snow drift, to replicate the resistance in the snow (the handbrake would need to be VERY strong to be worthwhile though), but then I remembered that seemingly only player engines can pick up custom signal messages and handle them. I'm not sure what could be done as a workaround at the moment, but it would be really cool if it worked.

Kind regards,
Chris

[AndiS]

You could make the snow heap a 1T junction with two track links, one at the start of the heap, one at the end. Entering a low figure as "diverging speed" in the single line of the signal properties table should slow down AI. But I have not retested that in years.

No idea about engine scripting, but the thing with the handbrakes sounds nice. I gave up on physics years ago, but I see Pete overcoming lots of hurdles. Most of that stuff will work in player engines only, I guess.

But you could tell the AI engine that if it finds out it is travelling at a constant 2 mph, then it should switch on the plough particles. Funny 'solutions' make their way into this resumed simulation. I mean if you use the same speed at some junction, there will be a sudden appearance of snow there. But if you set the ploughing speed below 5 mph, there is no risk that it gets mixed with any other speed restriction.

Note that the signal speed limit is observed till the train head reaches the numbered link whereas the speed limit that is a track property is observed until the tail clears it. Or so I remember. So the signal speed would be more appropriate for simulating ploughing effort.