Advice Please

iainstronach · Post by **iainstronach** » Fri Mar 14, 2003 1:37 pm

I seem to have written a monster activity for the Woodhead route 2.2.

It is the conversion and enhancement of my Piccadilly to Woodhead activity for version 1.1

The journey now continues to Sheffield Victoria.

There is much more traffic on the line, some loose consists in the many sidings and limited traffic in the marshalling yards.
The whole activity gives the impression of a busy northern route.

The apk file is over 200K which is large for a activity, and frame rates drop to 6 on my AMD Athlone 2000xp with NVIDIA geforce 3 Ti200 video card.

The real problem is the stock.

The activity requires 52 items of stock. And while seasoned Train sim members will have most if not all of these items (MK1 BlueGrey Carriages etc) new comers may have none of these items.

I am conscious of the recent correspondence relating to missing stock items. 52 files is a lot to locate and download, even with the very best instructions

It would be possible to put a ZIP file in the download section that contained all 52 files

this would be some 85MB in size. This could be broken down into small downloads â€“say 5 X 17mb to make it more manageable.

Do you think there is any mileage in this idea or am I barking up the wrong tree?
Should I scrap the activity and make smaller less busy and therefore less realistic activities.

qzdcg8 · Post by **qzdcg8** » Fri Mar 14, 2003 1:45 pm

One approach would be to only use stock available from Tim Courts MidEastUK CD plus the extra Woodhead specific stuff, i.e. EM1's,EM2's and 506.

I think a lot of people on this site have bought Tim's CD so this would solve the problem.

P.S. I would love to try this activity.

johnbrooks · Post by **johnbrooks** » Fri Mar 14, 2003 1:46 pm

Please upload the activity but make it plain in the description that a lot of downloads are required. Then give a list in the readme, with file IDs if poss. Then its up to the individual.

john

numnutz · Post by **numnutz** » Fri Mar 14, 2003 1:49 pm

Up the activity as is with a list of stock required. If people don't want the trouble of downloading stuff they do not have then they can use route writer to change the consists. This is what I do for all the activities I have downloaded so far. The only problem with this is that (afaik) that RR does not seem to change static consists.

Hope this helps

kevarc · Post by **kevarc** » Fri Mar 14, 2003 3:19 pm

When I have done something like that, large number of downloads, I have started doing more than one activity using the consists. This way people get more bang for their download time. I did a 9 activity pack for the Cajon, FBL, and Raton routes. I used the same consists, with the same stock, in all of the activities. It totaled out to about 15 consists, so their was veriaty.

I did the same with the activity pack for the Conrail Indy Route - 32 activities with about 35 different consists. For that one I took the trains that operate over the line in a typical day and did an activity for each. I created a generic traffic pattern that had all the consists\services\paths. Then I would do an activity for each service. I had to edit the paths on a few that did set out and pick ups as they made their runs, but most I did not. I then used the generic traffic as a template and removed the service that became the player. You may be able to do the same here.

iainstronach · Post by **iainstronach** » Mon Mar 17, 2003 12:10 pm

My thanks to
qzdcg8
johnbrooks
numnutz
kevarc
for taking the time to respond to my plea for help.

I think I will have a look at Steveâ€™s suggestion as I have Tim Courts MidEastUK CD, and may well have used some of the items on that CD already.

It will take a little time to catalogue all the items but I will try and get the activity posted on the site in the next fortnight

Iain

dforrest · Post by **dforrest** » Mon Mar 17, 2003 1:12 pm

If you have typical stock for the route in the current version of the activity, please do not remove this by substituting MidEast CD stock.

saddletank · Post by **saddletank** » Mon Mar 17, 2003 4:26 pm

I would prefer to see maroon coach period activities with the EM1s and 2s. I just think this railway period is under represented at the moment. I am (being brutally honest) quite jaded with the blue and grey period now, having seen so much of it on MidEast.

I am not putting MidEast down, but if you want blue and grey then MidEast is great for that. It would be good to have 'preferred periods' for certain routes and the green loco/maroon coaches period seems to suit Woodhead better than the blue locos/blue and grey era.

Fodda · Post by **Fodda** » Mon Mar 17, 2003 4:37 pm

Hear hear Martin.

Much as I love the MidEast route, I much prefer the early diesel days and the steam/diesel crossover days . Why? I couldn't tell you... But big green engines just seem so romantic. More of these activities please.

Neptune50006 · Post by **Neptune50006** » Mon Mar 17, 2003 4:39 pm

I also think that you should upload it as long as it's made clear that there's a lot of stock required. Activities are an idividuals interpretation of a given route/period and should be allowed to stand as the creator intended. Kev's idea of using the same consist/stock for future activities is a good one and worth considering in this case I think.

kevarc · Post by **kevarc** » Mon Mar 17, 2003 5:09 pm

Thanks, it worked out real well.

One other thing I have been able to do, and this took ok's from a few skinners, was to take a bunch of single car uploads and redo them into a pack. For example, hat I do is get the cars that I want to use for some activities and edit the file names so they are unique. i.e. - for BN boxcar *******, I would remname each file bnbox*****. With the different file extensions all the files can have the same name. I then edit the s, sd, and wag files to correct the new file names. I use Route Riter to decompress\compress the s files. BTW the newest version can be used to compress the ace files. I then gather up all these remaned cars\files and move them into a folder. The folders are named for what is in them, in this example they would be moved into a folder called BNPbox. BNP = BN and Predecessors, this would be BN, NP, GN, CB&C, Frisco, and SP&S cars.