Adding a tail light to rearmost vehicles.

[gptech]

Incidentally, does anybody know just how many coaches/which ones have the light 'built in', and was this a DT addition or an AP one?

A feature of the DT coaches as far as my ownership goes back, so i assume from day one.

Curiouser and curiouser then....it appears that only the NSE liveried coaches have the tail light on my system, which I believe was a livery 'exclusive' to the AP pack--I never had the DT offering, grabbed the Mk1 and Mk2's from AP when the DBSO was released.

EDIT:

It seems to be a long standing issue, http://forums.uktrainsim.com/viewtopic. ... 47d8c7e7bb details how the DT coaches had the light added when available through Steam.

[Carinthia]

the DT 40 has been nullified by the Railright one

. . . in your opinion, not DT's (I suspect) or mine. (For a very good reason, but I won't hijack this thread).

Curiouser and curiouser then....it appears that only the NSE liveried coaches have the tail light on my system, which I believe was a livery 'exclusive' to the AP pack--I never had the DT offering, grabbed the Mk1 and Mk2's from AP when the DBSO was released.

I actually own two versions - one purchased via Steam and another came with a special offer direct from DT. Both display the tail lamps identically. You are right in that I don't have NSE livery with mine.

Best regards,

John

[gptech]

Thanks for confirming that John, at least we now know a little of the history of this odd light and have an explanation of why we all seem to have slightly differing installations. A couple of posts on the Steam forum also state that variants of the RSC/Steam distributed coaches made their way into some DLC packs to further complicate things. Looks like we're going to need at least 2 solutions to cater for everybody!!

[deltic009]

the DT 40 has been nullified by the Railright one

. . . in your opinion, not DT's (I suspect) or mine. (For a very good reason, but I won't hijack this thread).
Best regards,

John

Perhaps I should explain myself better, you asked about spending time providing features which exist and function properly already on the superior 3d model that is the Class 40 from railright. Therefore I don't see the necessity to try and play catch up.

[Carinthia]

Perhaps I should explain myself better, you asked about spending time providing features which exist and function properly already on the superior 3d model that is the Class 40 from railright. Therefore I don't see the necessity to try and play catch up.

Thanks. I understood you perfectly. Please don't think I was demanding you (or anybody) fix the issues on either locomotive I mentioned - the comments were tongue in cheek. The responsibility for fixing both obviously lie with their respective developers who have both been notified of the issues long ago. I find it curious that Railsimulator.com products get lambasted on this forum for faults that are not fixed immediately yet other developers have unfixed coding errors which are (in one example) outstanding for years and nobody even raises an eyebrow!

There are also some issues with the Railright Class 40 which make it essential for me (and many others, I expect) to continue using alternative models in some circumstances. One is known to the developers, the other I am still trying to figure out but I suspect both are there for life.

Anyway, apologies for the digression.

John

[ChrisBarnes]

[cheeky mode] and the non-working tail lamps on trains after the SSS mod on the Jubilee (they are permanently on the tender).
[/cheeky mode]

John

Hi John,

I wasn't aware of this issue until I read your post. It was necessary to limit the max value of the control "Headlights" to stop the unwanted old 8F/jubilee lamp nodes from being rendered and allow for the custom headcodes with child object lamps. No doubt this is why the rear lamp of coaches don't display, which I hadn't considered would be affected at the time, but there's not really anything to be done about it unfortunately - it's either changeable headcodes on models that weren't originally designed for it, or retain complete compatibility with the core headlights system and old, fixed lamp codes on the locos. As for the tender lamps being on all the time, I can't really think of a way of getting around that at the moment - I can tell how long the consist is to find out if it's light engine or not and get the direction it's travelling in, but testing to see if the train is coupled to the loco or the tender and remove the relevant lamps, so it'll just have to stay like that for the foreseeable future.

Regards,
Chris

[Carinthia]

Hi John,

I wasn't aware of this issue until I read your post.
[etc]

Thanks for the straight answer on that one, Chris. Curious that SSS didn't pass this on to you as I reported it to them on 4th March. In the same correspondence I reported the non-working AWS bell which I was told was "easily fixed" but no progress there either. Not sure whether that is in your sphere, of course.

Please don't think your considerable work isn't appreciated but personally I am disappointed to buy a product for its enhanced sound only to find existing features are broken and cannot be fixed.

Best regards,

John

[ChrisBarnes]

Hi John,

If the AWS bell is to do with the sound not playing, then no I'm afraid that's not my area.

I agree that it is a shame when we can't have it both ways - gain a feature only to lose another etc. One thing that we have learnt from this thread is that it is possible to animate nodes on pre-existing models, so in the 8F and jubilee case, it might be possible to translate the lamps into the loco and tender out of sight, and then restore the Headlights control to have a max value of 2 instead of 0.2. I've never done an animation before and as I voluntarily do the scripting for the SSS packs, I must admit that I'm not in a massive hurry to try it out just now, but it is good to know that this aspect can be fixed.

This wouldn't resolve the problem of lamps on tender when not wanted etc. As far as I know, you can't query whether a node is on or off, which would be really convenient if we could because then it would be a case of only showing the scripted lamps if the core code lamp is being rendered etc. Otherwise it's going to take some clever logic that I can't think of at the moment.

Kind regards
Chris

[gptech]

Whilst we're waiting for an animation to be able to test that theory, is there a volunteer to give the half a dozen coaches that have been done 'the old fashioned way' a test?
Obviously I can't distribute the .Geo's, so you'd need to be conversant with RW Tools but the editing operation itself will be just a simple copy and paste over an existing section.

EDIT: I'd best point out that this is for the DT versions, NOT the AP ones. Quick way to check is to look in the textures folders of the coaches, if you have a DT_red_lamp.TgPcDx file in there then you have a compatible pack.

[nschichan]

Hello,

I have uploaded the exported animation ban file to here: http://columbia.libpthread.so/rw/pub/tl_fix_anim.ban

Then you'll have to add the following lines in the AnimSet section of the blueprint:

Code: Select all

						<iAnimObjectRenderBlueprint-cAnimation d:id="21071983">
							<AnimationID d:type="cDeltaString">tl_fix</AnimationID>
							<AnimationName d:type="cDeltaString">DT\DT_MK1_coaches\tl_fix_anim</AnimationName>
							<AnimateInEditor d:type="cDeltaString">eTrue</AnimateInEditor>
						</iAnimObjectRenderBlueprint-cAnimation>

Unfortunately you have to reset the animation via scripting for the new tail light position to be applied. Copy the following in DT\DT_Mk1_coaches\script.lua:

Code: Select all

function Initialise()
	Call("BeginUpdate")
end

function Update(dt)
	Call("Reset", "tl_fix")
	Call("EndUpdate")
end

And make the vehicle script of the wagon blueprint point to the newly created script.lua file.

That should be all that is needed for the taillight nodes to be correctly placed.

I can provide the blend source file of the animation if people need it.

Cheers,

[Carinthia]

Whilst we're waiting for an animation to be able to test that theory, is there a volunteer to give the half a dozen coaches that have been done 'the old fashioned way' a test?
Obviously I can't distribute the .Geo's, so you'd need to be conversant with RW Tools but the editing operation itself will be just a simple copy and paste over an existing section.

EDIT: I'd best point out that this is for the DT versions, NOT the AP ones. Quick way to check is to look in the textures folders of the coaches, if you have a DT_red_lamp.TgPcDx file in there then you have a compatible pack.

I'm willing to give it a whirl - that ought to be within my abilities. Can take the details by PM if you prefer.

John

[gptech]

Thanks for that nschichan,
this promises to be very useful!

John, I'll drop you a pm ASAP, shouldn't be too long but I have to go out shortly (honest, I do...I'm not just pretending to have a real life )

[gptech]

Hello,

I have uploaded the exported animation ban file to here............

Works very nicely too,



but to edit the positioning does mean you need to be able to edit the .ban files. Obviously not hard to do once you know how, but not many have that skill (yet)
If the coaches differ in size appreciably it'd also mean you'd need a separate animation (and script?) for each variant, once again probably not terribly hard once you know how.
We now have 2 different ways of going about it, neither one better than the other but both of them fall short of answering Matthews original question:

...what's required to have a scripted taillight that only appears on a coach when it's the last vehicle AND has a loco on it?.....

Neither method will work for stock that doesn't have the light 'built in', which means that those with the AP version would seem to be stuck with just the NSE livery that has a dynamic light--OK, the half a dozen .Geo's could be used instead of the default ones on the other liveries but that still leaves the BCK and and RF uncatered for.

[Carinthia]

Is this subject now dead?

I tested gptech's system and it works fine (although a little tricky, as individual coaches' code varies) so there is both this and nschichan's method to choose from. But both only work on the vehicles that display tail lamps on the wrong end and not on those that don't display at all.



And the problem here is that if you bought the stock through Steam a long while ago, a Steam update seems to have wiped out the tail lamps altogether (like the current AP issue, apparently) which leaves only those who bought from DT (and nowhere else) a set that don't get over-written. And, guess what? The RailRight Class 40 will over-write them with lamp-less ones during install too.

So I am guessing this really isn't realistic to pursue other than for the NSE stock?

John

[MisterWho]

... And the problem here is that if you bought the stock through Steam a long while ago, a Steam update seems to have wiped out the tail lamps altogether ...

I'd like to try to clarify this situation once and for all ...

While it's true that the DT Mk1 coach files supplied by RSDL / RSC / DTG are not the same as when they were originally released, it's only the file timestamps that have changed (at least twice between RW2 and RW6). The actual file contents however are exactly the same now (well, as of earlier this month when I last did a cache verify) as they were back on 18th Feb 2011 under RW2. There's been no change in the number of files and folders, or in the names of the files and folders - the file contents are exactly the same under RW6 as they were under RW2.

Comparing the Steam supplied files with those I bought directly from DT is a different matter however. While there are 1510 files in 136 folders which are the same in both releases, The DT direct release has 152 extra files not contained in the Steam release, with 55 extra files in the Steam release that are not in the DT direct release. I haven't yet done a detailed analysis of what these differences represent.

Hope that helps ...