Re: The complexity of operation...

[FourEightFour]

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[Rich_S]

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Is it a Quantum or Wabtec Event Recorder??? I'll give you the rugged labtop, if you hook it up to the Event Recorder for me You can even keep the cable after the download completes Talk about a crappy job

[MontanaRails]

If the locomotive event recorders are anything like aviation units, they're designed to handle insane pressure, heat, and impact damage. But I dont think anything can be prepared for that kind of abuse.

[thecanadianrail]

I've really gotta stop surfing the forums while eating......

[awaken1977]

If the locomotive event recorders are anything like aviation units, they're designed to handle insane pressure, heat, and impact damage. But I dont think anything can be prepared for that kind of abuse.

Japanese recorders of that kind can measure blood sugar and blood pressure monitoring, access to the internet (and your physician) and the ability to conduct urine analysis.

[Rich_S]

More potty info, since one is actually included in the nose of the GP40-2 The toilet shown in the video on page 1 is a vacuum toilet. Vacuum toilets have separate fresh water and waste holding tanks. Anyone who has ridden Amtrak has probably used a Vacuum toilet. The toilet shown above is known as a Recirculating Toilet or Pumper toilet. You pump the handle located beside the seat to flush the toilet. Pumper toilets use a product made by Sagar Industries known as Sagar toilet deodorizer / antifreeze. Pumpers are more like porta-potties or Port-a-Johns, where the bottom part of the unit is the tank that holds the waste. The newer units have spring loaded flaps to keep the waste from splashing out of the tank. AND before anyone asks, NO the event recorders are not stored in these toilets. The Pumper toilet shown above is on a wide nose or North American safety cab unit, i.e. Dash 9, EVO, SD70M-2 or SD70Ace. Ah modern locomotives, these toilets sure beats the heck out of the plastic bags they use to give to Southern Railway crews (That's the Southern Railway in the US, not the Southern Railway in the UK) in case they needed to releave themselves during a trip

[Rich_S]

We are building the Privacy Compartment first, and will include a locomotive in the Toilet View.

Oh boy, a potty with a view?

[_o_OOOO_oo-Kanawha]

You'd better watch out for the dangerous Alien Anal Probe, which sometimes makes a surprise appearance somewhere on the Cajon Pass, when you decide to relieve yourself beside the tracks when the potty is out of working order.

[_o_OOOO_oo-Kanawha]

Back on topic: the animated cab camera.

Does it need an extended 3D cab model to work? I bashed a likewise file together for the ES44 and set my coordinates to both seats and two opposite stepwells.

Upon entering the stepwell, there was only the locomotive body visible, no underframe, running gear or trucks.

The same animation sequence didn't work on the Shift-F2 head out view, it has different descriptions in the blueprint . So perhaps I'd better limit the cab view animation to both seats and outside the two side windows? Obviously, the ES44 lacks the toilet compartment.

Have you guys tried to hack the Shift-F2 view?

[Chacal]

Better keep the cab camera positions inside the cab.

The cab camera ("1" key) uses the cab geometry (interior) instead of the engine geometry (exterior).
If you position the cab camera out of the cab, you need to extend the cab geometry with the complete exterior geometry, including all parts that you don't normally see from inside, which would add a lot of polygons and have a performance impact. And you would have no trucks or couplers, since they are attached to the engine geometry.

Also, the sounds will be wrong: all sounds designated as OUTSIDE in the sound proxy blueprint will not play in cab view because the game thinks you are INSIDE, regardless of the actual camera position.
You can experience this by using exterior caboose cameras, such as the ones I've put in the file library, or those used for the Stevens Pass and the RWA cabooses. You are outside the caboose but you hear almost no sound, because you are using a carriage passenger view.

Head-out views (Shift-2 key) use the engine model, so these camera positions should be kept outside the cab.

[Chacal]

Instead of building the cab geometry and then building a bunch of "exterior" parts to it and increasing the poly load, you can use pieces of the exterior model like a child object in the cab view.

Yes, that's another way of extending the cab geometry. Clever idea if you build the engine geometry like this from the start, you have only one exterior geometry to maintain.

For sounds, you could make your sounds playable inside and out using the BOTH command on selected sounds.

Not good, because then those sounds would be playing inside the cab at the same volume as outside.
I'd rather copy some selected outside sound loops in the sound proxy blueprint, changing the copies to inside and lowering the volume.
Cab occlusion was supposed to take care of all that but AFAIK, it doesn't work anymore (if it ever did).

[mrennie]

This is only partially true. Instead of building the cab geometry and then building a bunch of "exterior" parts to it and increasing the poly load, you can use pieces of the exterior model like a child object in the cab view. The nose, deck, handrails, long hood, etc. that are seen in the cab view of the GP40-2 are not part of the cab. It is true though that if you added enough exterior parts to the cab so that you could roam all over the locomotive in the cab view and see everything up close, you would probably be pushing 135k polygons. Not real good if you are in five-loco lashup.

Another way (the way I did it for the FEF-3) is to use the entire cab - the model you use for the loco's interior geometry - as a child object of the exterior model, make all the parts that you're going to see from the cab when you stick your head out of the window (while still in interior cab view) into child objects too, and for each of those, set the "view type" (in "Render component") to "All views" (so that it can be seen from both the outside and inside camera views). That way, you don't have to add any duplicate parts at all.

[mrennie]

Cab occlusion was supposed to take care of all that but AFAIK, it doesn't work anymore (if it ever did).

It does work. I was using it in the FEF-3 for a while, but I took it out because I couldn't get it to vary depending on whether the doors and windows were closed.

[Chacal]

That's good news. Perhaps it works only for engines? I did tests with passenger cars and it never worked.
I made sure to use EAX / hardware acceleration.

EDIT: It does work. I just added an occlusion blueprint to an engine that had none and the difference is easy to hear.
I also found some documentation. I don't know why it wasn't working for my passenger cars.