Atomic Systems

Still new at this and searching the tutorials and forums hasn't yielded answers to my exact questions.

I've created a Scenario for the Newcastle-York Route. The Scenario includes a number of AI trains that I want to exit via new Portals I've created close to the point of contact with the Player Train.

1. When I package this Scenario with RS_Tools_Pro, do these new Portals get saved (and therefore installed) with the Scenario?

2. I've looked at tutorials on Portals but still don't understand the bits about Distance to Travel and Time Stopped in the Portal properties window. Here's what I want to do, and maybe someone can tell me first off if it's possible, and secondly, how to set this up in the Portal Properties and the AI train's stopping instructions: send an AI train into a portal and then have it re-emerge at a named Siding on the route, remain there until a designated time, then depart for another named location in the route. Possible? How would I accomplish this?

If it's not possible, what alternatives do I have for getting at least close to what I want the AI train to do?

Thanks a lot.

Jev

Don't know the answer to "1", but to "2" my understanding is:

Distance Travelled is the distance that you're pretending the AI train has to travel to get to the place (eg: a station that you've pretended is somewhere down the line that you've put the portal at the end of) and the Time Stopped is the amount it'd spend there before it was able to come back (re-appearing from the portal, if you set the train to do that). RS then calculates how long it'd take the AI train to travel to this fictional station somewhere off your map, do the "stop", (and then optionally come back).

To answer 1: portals are a part of the route not the scenario. So unless the tools do something super clever (which is quite possible knowing Mike!) and package a part of a route and then redeploy it for a user, portals are NOT usable by others if you had to add them to make a scenario.

It is vital that route creators add a portal at every out of site track end for future scenario writers to take advantage of, even if they don't care about them.
I would also ask route creators to throw down siding markers with abandon. They might not be of any use to you now, but the number of sidings that are just wasted scenery in some routes I've downloaded is heartbreaking when you'd love to be able to fill them with AI stock.

Is it not possible to make the portals into Scenario items like the shed doors on the IOW route so you can have certain portals in certain scenarios? If that made any sense .
Danny

In most of the stock Scenarios with a max of 10 or so AI trains I get 50-60+ fps in yards, and as high as 100 fps on open track. However, from my work on a Newcastle-York Scenario with about 30 AI trains it's pretty clear that they put significant strain on the frame rate. I'm lucky if I can hit 35 fps, and most of the time I'm in the mid-20's, with frequent dips to around 14-15 fps.

It would seem best to have the AIs exit the Scenario as soon as possible after encountering the player train so the CPU(s) can forget about them. But, because Portals are embedded in Routes, Scenario creators who want to share their work with the community are limited to using those included by the Route developer.

It would be great if in some future RS release a new class of Portals could be added. These would be embedded in Scenarios rather than Routes, and during Scenario play they would be overlayed onto their base Routes -- sort of like temporary Portals. This would give Scenario creators the ability to include more robust AI activity while minimizing unnecessary drag on the frame rate.

I doubt I'm the first person to think of this. Has anyone else talked with RSDL about adding this capability?

Jev

jevon wrote:In most of the stock Scenarios with a max of 10 or so AI trains I get 50-60+ fps in yards, and as high as 100 fps on open track. However, from my work on a Newcastle-York Scenario with about 30 AI trains it's pretty clear that they put significant strain on the frame rate. I'm lucky if I can hit 35 fps, and most of the time I'm in the mid-20's, with frequent dips to around 14-15 fps.

It would seem best to have the AIs exit the Scenario as soon as possible after encountering the player train so the CPU(s) can forget about them. But, because Portals are embedded in Routes, Scenario creators who want to share their work with the community are limited to using those included by the Route developer.

It would be great if in some future RS release a new class of Portals could be added. These would be embedded in Scenarios rather than Routes, and during Scenario play they would be overlayed onto their base Routes -- sort of like temporary Portals. This would give Scenario creators the ability to include more robust AI activity while minimizing unnecessary drag on the frame rate.

I doubt I'm the first person to think of this. Has anyone else talked with RSDL about adding this capability?

Jev

With regard to your FPS in Newc-York you can blame the original Kuju developers for this, as thier methodology of adding scenery was to throw as much as they could at it!! That is why you could see an immediate change in the way RS behaved when they brought out the IOW route and subsequent Foliage pack. So it isn't all down to the number of trains running.

As for portals, I cannot comment specifically on these, but there has been talk of "Scenario RouteMarkers" being introduced within Mk3, so maybe they will include portals also. We'll have to wat and see.