Update on the steamers

[dtrainBNSF1]

Last week I got the payware version of RWTools plus the Store Them program. I'll be taking some time to get to know this software (the pdf is HUGE and yes I'm going to read it all) before getting on with mods.

[Chacal]

Keep in mind that RW-Tools have dozens of functions, of which you will probably use only a few on a regular basis.

[dtrainBNSF1]

Agreed. Although it would still be worthwhile in case I get any crazy ideas in the future about what to do after I'm done modding all these steamers.

[dtrainBNSF1]

So after playing around with RWTools and Store Them I'm ready to finish off the Cab Forward mod. Hopefully I can make some progress with scenarios and final tweaking of the simulation over the weekend.

You will need the following DLC to play the scenarios (the mod will work regardless and if you have RWTools you can swap out DLC you don't own and replace it with DLC that you already own):
Payware from Steam:
AC 10-12 Cab Forward
Donner Pass
SP F7 Bloody Nose
PRR Baldwin Sharknose
GN Rolling Stock Pack
B&O rolling stock pack

Payware from Britkits:
Lima Rotary Snow Plow
Heavyweight coaches

Freeware from Great Northerner:
NP 40ft Icebox Reefer Pack
ATSF 40ft PS-1 Boxcar Pack
MILW PS1 Boxcar Pack
Wooden Side Truss-Rod Frame Gondolas
40ft flatcars (NH and D&RGW)

Freeware from Railworksamerica.com:
Misc Weather Patterns by Zarker99 (http://railworksamerica.com/index.php/d ... ccessories)

Freeware from G-Trax:
Streamlined lightweight 4-pack

This mod will behave differently than previous mods. This will not overwrite the Cab Forward that came from Steam, rather it will create a different variant with the prefix MOD on the front in the Cab Forward folder and in the scenario editor. This is so that if you want to keep playing scenarios already included with the Cab Forward in Career mode and still be able to get a score you can and if you want to play scenarios from the Workshop which more likely than not won't use any mods at all you can. If you intend to write scenarios with the modified Cab Forward I suggest that you submit them to the file library here on the site - you can publish it on Steam but from experience writing a Workshop scenario with a FanRailer mod a whole lot of users in the workshop aren't willing to apply mods to their stock for Workshop scenarios even though it does improve performance and it's free.

[dtrainBNSF1]

Testing so far is going well. Here's a Cab Forward leading 100 loads of fruit over Donner Pass just down the line from Colfax. Two other Cab Forwards are assisting, one cut in near the middle and one cut in just in front of the caboose. Tonnage is somewhere near 4875 tons.

Are there any volunteers to try this puppy out before release?

Screenshot_Donner Pass Southern Pacific_39.12864--120.91674_12-12-30.jpg

[jalsina]

Hello David,
There has been a thread going on lately in Steam of name "Out of Water". Basically it is related with the issues of locomotives giving a random "ran out of water" and ending the scenario. Most of these errors have happened with double header trains.

However, I have been running a workshop scenario called "Conserving Diesel" by Jack. It is a nicely designed scenario with diesel trains except for the player´s train which is an intermodal consist of 60 cars pulled by a Challenger with the mission to go uphill to the Cajon Summit and finally to Hesperia:
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=474081883&searchtext=Conserving+diesel

In everyone of the runs i have tried, I got the error "ran out of water". The author and some others have reported the same in most of their tries.
Yesterday I replaced the Challenger by a Big Boy and made it to the end of the scenario with no problem of water at all.

This makes me think that the design of the Challenger boiler is flawed in some way, that triggers a problem with the steam core part of the game. All problems happened in the 3% grade. Mike Rennie suggested the crown exposed and other possibilities that are mentioned there. The issue of the Challenger is totally different of that of a double header steam loco.

I wonder if you are aware of some problem that could be fixed with a mod.
See that I am using your physics mod, but others that tried were not using it.

[mrennie]

Hello David,
There has been a thread going on lately in Steam of name "Out of Water". Basically it is related with the issues of locomotives giving a random "ran out of water" and ending the scenario. Most of these errors have happened with double header trains.

However, I have been running a workshop scenario called "Conserving Diesel" by Jack. It is a nicely designed scenario with diesel trains except for the player´s train which is an intermodal consist of 60 cars pulled by a Challenger with the mission to go uphill to the Cajon Summit and finally to Hesperia:
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=474081883&searchtext=Conserving+diesel

In everyone of the runs i have tried, I got the error "ran out of water". The author and some others have reported the same in most of their tries.
Yesterday I replaced the Challenger by a Big Boy and made it to the end of the scenario with no problem of water at all.

This makes me think that the design of the Challenger boiler is flawed in some way, that triggers a problem with the steam core part of the game. All problems happened in the 3% grade. Mike Rennie suggested the crown exposed and other possibilities that are mentioned there. The issue of the Challenger is totally different of that of a double header steam loco.

I wonder if you are aware of some problem that could be fixed with a mod.
See that I am using your physics mod, but others that tried were not using it.

Something else I discovered was that if you overfill the boiler, it also gives the "Game Over Ran out of Water" - same message for completely the opposite case. I said in the thread on Steam, the core code physics for double-headers is borked, just like steam+diesel and several parts of the single-steam. I did a double-header and managed to get a value of "1.$" in the F5 HUD - obviously a stack overflow somewhere in the core code that made it go bonkers.

[jalsina]

Something else I discovered was that if you overfill the boiler, it also gives the "Game Over Ran out of Water" - same message for completely the opposite case. I said in the thread on Steam, the core code physics for double-headers is borked, just like steam+diesel and several parts of the single-steam. I did a double-header and managed to get a value of "1.$" in the F5 HUD - obviously a stack overflow somewhere in the core code that made it go bonkers.

As you may have seen in my latest screenshots, today I registered 3 different pressure measurements both in the K4+K4 and the Connie+K4 double headers.
However coming back to the Challenger, this is a different case because it has only been ran as only one loco.
As David has messed with physics of that loco, I thought that may be he detected something that could help fixing that giant locomotive.

[dtrainBNSF1]

Something else I discovered was that if you overfill the boiler, it also gives the "Game Over Ran out of Water" - same message for completely the opposite case. I said in the thread on Steam, the core code physics for double-headers is borked, just like steam+diesel and several parts of the single-steam. I did a double-header and managed to get a value of "1.$" in the F5 HUD - obviously a stack overflow somewhere in the core code that made it go bonkers.

As you may have seen in my latest screenshots, today I registered 3 different pressure measurements both in the K4+K4 and the Connie+K4 double headers.
However coming back to the Challenger, this is a different case because it has only been ran as only one loco.
As David has messed with physics of that loco, I thought that may be he detected something that could help fixing that giant locomotive.

Yeah I've run into that problem. I think there's a couple of things wrong with it, but my prime suspect would be the boiler length line. Boiler length represents how the boiler behaves when climbing a gradient. This is one thing I appreciate about old MSTS - they got the general idea of the water level appearing to change as you went up or down hill and you could seriously overfill the boiler when coming down or when climbing up if you weren't careful you'd be just few miles up the grade and because of where the water was sloshing it could register a "Ran out of water" message and end your run. I suspect something similar is happening on the Challenger, just on a more inappropriately extreme level, because all the places where this has happened has been on heavy grades. Recent runs with further refinements on the Challenger (which I have not released yet) have so far been error free. Part of that is because I don't let the water in my boiler get very low at all when climbing Sherman Hill so the game can't give me that particular message.

Now about double-heading:
I don't normally take multiple steam locos over a piece of line unless I know it would have been standard practice (like sending 3 Cab Forwards on a single train near the end of steam on Donner Pass). And even then I try not to mix steam types. The reason for that is because 1) I want to get a feel for what the loco is doing on its own & 2) When double heading steam locos the HUDs for whatever reason read the boiler pressure of the loco in the rear-most position, so if the loco behind you happens to have a higher boiler pressure than you you're going to end up with a highly unrealistic operating boiler pressure in your loco. If you've got a smaller engine with a lower boiler pressure pushing behind you just for a hill (like a Fowler 4F banking a 9F on the Somerset & Dorset route out of Radstock) you're never going to reach full pressure and be able to use that pressure.

If I do end up mixing steam locos (like the Fowler example) I put my driver icon on the rear loco instead of the lead for that reason.

[mrennie]

Boiler length represents how the boiler behaves when climbing a gradient. This is one thing I appreciate about old MSTS - they got the general idea of the water level appearing to change as you went up or down hill and you could seriously overfill the boiler when coming down or when climbing up if you weren't careful you'd be just few miles up the grade and because of where the water was sloshing it could register a "Ran out of water" message and end your run.

TS has inherited this from MSTS. I discovered it when, for a bit of fun, I took the FEF-3 on a very steep grade, from the floor up to a table and onwards to the piano, in that first Christmas route they did in the living room of a house. The grade was so steep that as soon as the loco go onto it, you could visibly see the water level shift. That's good - it means you don't have to do anything in the engine script to simulate the effect the grades have on water level. Rhythmic sloshing back and forth because of the movement of the locomotive is another thing though (that does have to be scripted, as in the Connie and FEF-3).

The "ran out of water" message comes up when the boiler water level reaches 0.0 on the HUD, but also when it reaches the max defined in the engine simulation blueprint. It's a pretty stupid message.

Now about double-heading:
I don't normally take multiple steam locos over a piece of line unless I know it would have been standard practice (like sending 3 Cab Forwards on a single train near the end of steam on Donner Pass). And even then I try not to mix steam types. The reason for that is because 1) I want to get a feel for what the loco is doing on its own & 2) When double heading steam locos the HUDs for whatever reason read the boiler pressure of the loco in the rear-most position, so if the loco behind you happens to have a higher boiler pressure than you you're going to end up with a highly unrealistic operating boiler pressure in your loco. If you've got a smaller engine with a lower boiler pressure pushing behind you just for a hill (like a Fowler 4F banking a 9F on the Somerset & Dorset route out of Radstock) you're never going to reach full pressure and be able to use that pressure.

If I do end up mixing steam locos (like the Fowler example) I put my driver icon on the rear loco instead of the lead for that reason.

Here's something else I discovered when doing the double-heading for the FEF-3. In the FEF-3, the engine script controls the density of the steam and smoke, based on steam chest pressure, and various other things, including the motion of the running gear, depend on boiler pressure. Therefore, the script reads those pressures using the core code LUA functions for reading control values. It turns out that for the non-player loco in the consist, those core code values are always zero. My solution was for the player loco to send its own pressure values to the script of the non-player locos so that they would imitate the player loco. Anyway, the point is that the core code doesn't appear to do much simulation when it comes to the AI. My guess is that it does the bare minimum to make the AI run along the line at the right speed, with the right acceleration and deceleration when it's an AI consist, or simply moving at the speed of the player loco when it's a player consist. Presumably it adds its tractive effort and horsepower to the overall traction, but I suspect that's about it. I very much doubt that it does any calculations of boiler pressure, etc., at all for AI, even when the AI is in a player consist.

[jalsina]

Yeah I've run into that problem. I think there's a couple of things wrong with it, but my prime suspect would be the boiler length line. Boiler length represents how the boiler behaves when climbing a gradient. This is one thing I appreciate about old MSTS - they got the general idea of the water level appearing to change as you went up or down hill and you could seriously overfill the boiler when coming down or when climbing up if you weren't careful you'd be just few miles up the grade and because of where the water was sloshing it could register a "Ran out of water" message and end your run. I suspect something similar is happening on the Challenger, just on a more inappropriately extreme level, because all the places where this has happened has been on heavy grades. Recent runs with further refinements on the Challenger (which I have not released yet) have so far been error free. Part of that is because I don't let the water in my boiler get very low at all when climbing Sherman Hill so the game can't give me that particular message.

Do you think the physics of the Challenger could be cheated relating to the boiler dimensions or something else to help fixing that problem?
Something important for you to know is that the testing in these days has been done in several runs both with high levels of water (85-100%), medium (70-85%) and allowing to go as low as 50%. In all circumstances the Challenger failed in the high grades beyond 2.2% (Cajon).

Now about double-heading:
........

There is nothing we can do with double header steam trains in TS2016 as we do not have access to the core coding, but they were used many times in the real steam world as they are nowadays using more than "one" diesel. TS has a few scenarios at least for the K4 (not just workshop).

[dtrainBNSF1]

For testing purposes, does anybody know the ruling grade for the New River Gorge?

[dtrainBNSF1]

Dovetail is releasing an update to the Big Boy fixing many issues from my second Big Boy update, making update #2 for the Big Boy unnecessary. Check it out here: http://www.engine-driver.com/article/sh ... boy-update

I'll check out how everything works out with the new update, and see if anything needs to addressed.

I hereby request that once Dovetail releases this update that all of my Big Boy mods be removed from the library as they will be seriously outdated in light of this update. Any necessary physics mods will be uploaded to the library post-DTG update.

[jalsina]

Dovetail is releasing an update to the Big Boy fixing many issues from my second Big Boy update, making update #2 for the Big Boy unnecessary. Check it out here: http://www.engine-driver.com/article/sh ... boy-update

I'll check out how everything works out with the new update, and see if anything needs to addressed.

I hereby request that once Dovetail releases this update that all of my Big Boy mods be removed from the library as they will be seriously outdated in light of this update. Any necessary physics mods will be uploaded to the library post-DTG update.

I already did it for you.
DTG has released an update with improved sounds over those of TS2015.
The headlight has been fixed but not completely (we can talk later about that).
When you install your mods with the new update it will cancel all sounds. The reason is that DTG has made a remake of all aliasing changing folder names like for example "Rail Vehicles" by "RailVehicles". Besides there are more sounds available.

The boiler pressure does not work at all.
I have been playing with your engine files trying to change paths for sounds and it works. But the problem is that the new engine files have more sounds aliased (than your engine files), so the only way to do this is taking the newly updated engine bins (DTG... inside the AP) and introduce your physics fixes again.

I tested the Particles folder and the cocks work but I don´t remember if there were safeties and whistle steam flow. If yes they are not there.

I believe your simulation folder files will work as well (Though I have not tested anything there).

The TS2016 community needs this update very much. I am here to help you.

WHSITLE:
The new update whistle is also horrible and has not a right loop.
Today I have already edited the proxy for the Big Boy old whistle by Brian Meyers (b737lvr) in the RWA library since Dec 2012 (BigBoy/Challenger - New Whistles). This one may be ready for upload in hours but I need the permission of the author or pass him the proxy for testing, packaging and upload.

[dtrainBNSF1]

Interestingly enough I just got a PM from Mavadelo who has taken the physics upgrade I released and some modifications by Kevzombie to fix the sounds issue and released them here at this site: http://www.wolfdenmedia.nl/download/upb ... nd-update/

I've given him permission to distribute it, but I also mentioned that I can get a newer, more improved set of physics to him.

Until then, drop by his site and check out his download. I've already downloaded it and I'm going to make my physics tweaks to it.