Railworks America

I still get confused about what each file does:

Dash9.Bin

Dash9 Engine Simulation.Bin

If we can get a refresher course in each, would be appreciated.

Rob

Dash9.bin defines the locomotive shape and colours, the couplers front and rear, the trucks it rides on, the lights, sounds and smokes it has, which cab it uses, what road numbers it can display, etc. It does this by calling/referencing other files, sometimes called "dependencies" or "child objects".

Dash9 Engine Simulation.bin defines the power plant, transmission, brakes and other stuff to simulate the locomotive in the game as accurate and real as possible.

You can open and study .bin files with RW_Tools, or drop them on serz.exe in the Railworks root folder to change then into .xml. With a good xml editor like Notepad++ (free) you can collapse and expand the .xml stucture to search for specific sections. You can edit some values and when you're done, drop the .xml on serz.exe again to compile it into a .bin file.
Clear the .pak cache, and your edited "hacked" locomotive can be run in the game.

Excellent, easy to understand explanation, and should be a sticky for future reference.



Rob

Using RWTools has the advantage of when you save the bin file it automatically makes the old file a .bak so if you mess things up you can easily go back to the old one. It will store several baks right there in your engine file or wherever for use if need be.