Ffestiniog Railway Route (alpha test)

rwaceyw · Post by **rwaceyw** » Thu Apr 17, 2003 8:06 pm

I've made some already! Shall I upload? A Slate Shunting one..and a shuttle train with Criccieth Castle.

"We really need a funkey diesel now..."

kevmt · Post by **kevmt** » Thu Apr 17, 2003 8:12 pm

jdtech wrote:It happened again! I ran Prince with FRcoach 23, the one in WHR livery and WHR 23 + WHR27 and the sound cut out. I was on the cob, Prince was OK then I skipped to view 2 and it all cut out, I could only here the noise of the locos in Boston Lodge! WHY OH WHY! It's happening alot. Wait a mo...

Am I right in thinking that when this happens, you have some loco's parked in Boston Lodge? If so then I have had this happen myself. Other people using the route at the time did not have the problem and I think it may be down to your (and my) computer system not coping with the number of sounds trying to be played. I'll investigate further and see what I come up with.
Anybody else have this problem?
Cheers
Kevin

ianm42 · Post by **ianm42** » Thu Apr 17, 2003 8:24 pm

Absolutely no problems with the installation of the route on Windows XP. First impressions are that this is indeed a first class route, albeit incomplete. When it is finished, it will be truely wonderful.

I editted the default 'down' activity and made up a new player consist of "Criccieth Castle" and a few coaches.

Frame rates were up around 20 for most of the route, so no problems there.

From the first trips, I have spotted the following problems:

Around Blaenau, some of the tertex squares 'white out' while panning around admiring the views.

Along the route, FR coach number 24 kept blinking out. I have only seen this behaviour with freightanim loads before.

I did see the cows from the cob (see below). If the white lumps are sheep, then either they are minute or the cows are huge.

Also, some of the road vehicles seem to have suffered from scaling up. The volvo head and tail lamps have shifted, and the transit vans are completely messed up.

Click the image to zoom in

rwaceyw · Post by **rwaceyw** » Thu Apr 17, 2003 8:28 pm

Funny..but i don't se the cows? Mine are normal size! And fine!

jdtech · Post by **jdtech** » Thu Apr 17, 2003 8:31 pm

Cheers Kevin, I'll try that out sometime.

ManxPeacock · Post by **ManxPeacock** » Thu Apr 17, 2003 8:33 pm

I am really tempted to milk the cow jokes a bit, but I have udder things to do.

David

batroost · Post by **batroost** » Thu Apr 17, 2003 8:43 pm

Various things:

Derailments etc... I had similar problems in teh early days which Kevin reloved with revised .eng files for Merddin to give a more rigid coupling. Before this, with the bounding boxes view on (CTRL NUMPAD+) the engine and coaches were bouncing around hard to the point where even a 'durable' coupling would fail and give a derailment. Kevin may be able to advise if this is the problem if you let him know the engine and dates of .eng files (i.e. for the engine and fairlie end).

Cows: I have no idea why an object would suddenhy be bigger running on someone else's machine. As I said, I've checked the shape files are the same, and the effects have not been seen by any of my previous testers. If anyone out there can explain this effect I'd be mooooooost grateful. Also, I've yet to see a picture as it won't display on the forum.... And the white lumps are clumps of vegetation not sheep.

Activities: There is a problem with shunting that I only discovered this week. Up unitil this point I was blissfully ignorant of there being two kinds of points available in MSTS - namely 'automatic' and 'manual' - and that only the 'manual' points can be switched by the user in activities. I have used auto points throughout the route and I can now see that this seriously limits shunting in activities. For example, I can set up an activity to allow a run-around at Blaenau but I can't find a way of constructing one that permits you to pick up coaches from a Port siding and reverse them into the platform before taking them up the line! Having considered this for a while I've decided to replace ALL of the points on my copy of the alpha route with manual points - this now complete. I've also improved the signalling (lots of fancy indicators to go on at Blaenau) and started writing a few simple activities with Kevin's FR stock. I hope to release an 'update' zip in a week or two including the improvements. I believe that Route-riter allows an update file to be created with just the changed files in two versions of a route so this shouldn't be another mammoth download for anyone. Any other comments that I can get before this will improve it.

Thanks everyone for the encouraging comments; it makes all the effort (not just mine!) feel more worthwhile.

Vehicles: I know about this problem - from an early version of SFM. I'll tidy up when I get around to it, so just as an impression now.

White-Outs: I get this too at higher altitudes, seems to happen less with scenery objects in place... we shall see....

Regards,

Batroost (:evilbat: Cows, what COWS?!?

)

kevmt · Post by **kevmt** » Thu Apr 17, 2003 8:53 pm

ianm42 wrote: Along the route, FR coach number 24 kept blinking out. I have only seen this behaviour with freightanim loads before.

Ian,
Must admit I've never seen the effect before. I'll check it out.

Cheers
Kevin

batroost · Post by **batroost** » Thu Apr 17, 2003 9:17 pm

COWS COWS COWS COWS cows...

OK I see the problem... I must have scaled the cows twice so that they were x4 - they looked OK to me (from a distance) as I knew that the white lumps next to them weren't sheep but were clumps of vegetation...

But if we move one to Port car park!

So at half this size - with a 'real' sheep brought down from teh farm at Minffordd (unchanged):

I'm not happy about uploading the shape files on their own as they are MSTS default objects but you can rescale your cows by 0.5 using Shape File Manager if you wish. Updated cows will be in teh next route update.

Regards

(Can sleep now without having nightmares about giant cows...)

Batroost (:evilbat):)

batroost · Post by **batroost** » Thu Apr 17, 2003 9:19 pm

Oops second picture shouldn't have been a thumb!

pitleyfalley · Post by **pitleyfalley** » Thu Apr 17, 2003 9:46 pm

The connection went on 79%

- currently on 2% and trying again this time with getright

Chris

ManxPeacock · Post by **ManxPeacock** » Thu Apr 17, 2003 9:58 pm

Quote â€œCan sleep now without having nightmares about giant cows...â€

sillyevan27 · Post by **sillyevan27** » Thu Apr 17, 2003 11:00 pm

err...I hate to break the joke up right now...
But I think insted of GIANT COWS, you should get a giant iron

The track in some parts is 3 feet above the ground

and it'sso bumpy at one point that my Farlie (sorry about spelling) separated!

I had smoke on top of a slate truck and the other on the engine.

sillyevan27 · Post by **sillyevan27** » Fri Apr 18, 2003 1:39 am

Might I also add that there isn't too much scenery at the top station......basically just the platform!

Is that how what it's like on the railway? There are no trees...no shrubs or anything on this route untill after the second (I think...maybe first) tunnel.

It's very boring and monotonous

not to mention all the things that show up when I pressed the F6 key

Where there were crossings...I didn't see anything. Where there were colverts (???) there was nothing.

Oh and Kevin?
Didn't "Welsh Pony" have a rather famous dent in it's dome cover?? I don't see that on your model

jdtech · Post by **jdtech** » Fri Apr 18, 2003 6:52 am

It hink you were rather rude there to Kevin and Colin!