For my thinkers

[SithMurcielago]

I was doing alot of reading from the books and looking at the game. Now from what i read some values like Max Force (Tractive Effort) are lower than what is in real life. Is this because people are trying to stay in the limits of the game to make the experience realistic or can this game truly represent the real life numbers accurately?

[Kali]

MaxForce as far as I can tell is only used by the AI, and as the AI isn't a real simulation it's probably a good idea just to set it to something that works well rather than a real number. In my experience the only useful figure for a diesel ( and probably electric also, I just haven't played with those much ) is MaxPower, which is power at rail in kW - most of the numbers in the blueprints are in SI units, not Imperial. With a little maths and some scripting you can turn that into whatever shape tractive effort curve you like and retain the ability to fully control the locomotive. Of course that does involve having either a graph or enough data from the prototype to make one, and then enough information about the control systems.

I hate the RW graphs. If they weren't there at all it'd be a bit more challenging to set an engine up ( ok, quite a lot more challenging ) but we might have a library of existing implementations to base new ones off... and they'd all drive right. At the moment every single engine bar maybe two has a system that works like traction control.

[SithMurcielago]

Interesting you say that I'm sitting here looking at books and at the same time keeping in mind that generally most games (Train Sims) don't portray accurate values from real life. I figured MAXPower & MaxPower at rail (Generally 80% of the MAXPower) had some true value to the game, but I'm just unsure about the Tractive Effort or Continuous Effort. RW Graphs do stink, but it is what is available. Hopefully there will be some big improvements to these figures that will accurately reflect the real life prototype.

[Kali]

MaxPowerAtRail doesn't do anything at all for the player ( I don't think it does anything for the AI either, I'm not terribly experienced setting up AI physics ). MaxPower is the only figure, and you need to allow for losses in it. 81-82% for DE, 80% for DH, I guess 91% for electrics. Is there a ContinuousEffort setting? I don't even remember that :) that's just the first point you can open the throttle fully without putting the ammeter in the yellow anyway.

I have a totally rewritten UK Class 158 which ditches the graphs entirely, and mimics a voith diesel-hydraulic transmission with the diesel-electric model. Sadly the RW implementation of hydraulic & mechanical transmission is broken to the point you can't actually get it remotely right - but the diesel-electric model is predictable and easy to script, so if you're up to the scripting challenge you can mimic pretty much anything diesel with it. I did it to see if it could be done and for the experience, and it works very well. I haven't yet tried the same technique on something with an infinitely variable throttle yet ( the 158 has notches ) but it should be ok. I'd wait to see what RW3 does to physics before embarking on something major though.

The point I was forgetting to make in the last paragraph is that the entire physics setup uses real world values - other than the cD which I don't have - and the first time I ran it once I'd got the script debugged and it wasn't being wierd, matched real-world timing. RW at heart uses basic documented real-world physics equations, you just have to junk all the additional wierdness from the graphs & so on to get to them.