Railworks America

I was wondering does anyone know how the advanced brake systems that come standard on some locomotives are scripted or programmed. This stems from the fact that it no longer works when sound and physics packs from some developers are installed. Could there ever be a way to merge the files that control the advanced braking with the new sounds and perhaps the physics updates in order to preserve the former?

trainman251 wrote:I was wondering does anyone know how the advanced brake systems that come standard on some locomotives are scripted or programmed. This stems from the fact that it no longer works when sound and physics packs from some developers are installed. Could there ever be a way to merge the files that control the advanced braking with the new sounds and perhaps the physics updates in order to preserve the former?

The advanced brake scripting is more than just scripting (in the LUA/OUT files). It also involves adding various new control variables to the engine and simulation blueprints (the control variables are used by the script), and some associated sounds are put into the sound blueprints (the sounds are activated by changes to the control variables in the engine blueprint). If the mod sound/physics packs alter (or simply don't include) the control variables used by the script, the brakes (and possibly the loco itself), will stop working (the script itself could crash because of missing control variables).

For the mods to work, they would need to be done taking the currently published blueprints (with advanced braking) as a starting point, not any old versions that were published before advanced brakes were introduced, and they'd have to be careful to avoid messing up what is already in those new blueprints. It can be done, it just has to be done carefully.

Our mods simply delete and ignore the pre-existing Lua.

BNSFdude wrote:Our mods simply delete and ignore the pre-existing Lua.

yes and that's a good thing since a lot of the scripts are broken or not doing the proper corrections. So many examples but since they did this I can't add any brake mods or control changes. oh well I'll just live with it or find a way to fix it.

JohnS wrote:

BNSFdude wrote:Our mods simply delete and ignore the pre-existing Lua.

yes and that's a good thing since a lot of the scripts are broken or not doing the proper corrections. So many examples but since they did this I can't add any brake mods or control changes. oh well I'll just live with it or find a way to fix it.

I agree.
The advanced braking scripts aren't consistent, which is odd, since real air brakes are a Braking Unit and figured by the ton.
I've noticed some odd things with the advanced brakes, like trains that are only 15 cars long taking a mile to stop on level track from a slow 25mph (acting like it's just the engine brakes) or a recent loco purchase I just discovered that the advanced braking has a minimum reduction of 45psi, essentially jamming on the brakes at minimum.
Except for the minor difference between manual and self lapping brakes, they should be performing about the same on all locos because of the braking per ton design. Same with rolling stock.
I've noticed a lot of engines with advanced braking, still have that ridiculous 30psi cut off, which means no current to the traction motors when releasing the brakes and starting on steep slopes. This results in unrealistic backing up out of control with the U30B used with Feather River Canyon as an example.

At least with the old system, I could modify the brakes so I could actually do blended and trailing braking on steep slopes. I could modify my own release and application rates.

Maybe I still can modify them and I just don't know how.

trainman251 wrote:I was wondering does anyone know how the advanced brake systems that come standard on some locomotives are scripted or programmed. This stems from the fact that it no longer works when sound and physics packs from some developers are installed. Could there ever be a way to merge the files that control the advanced braking with the new sounds and perhaps the physics updates in order to preserve the former?

We've kept the existing advanced brakes on some of our packs whilst running our new scripts in parallel.

Ericmopar wrote:
The advanced braking scripts aren't consistent

That's because there are many so-called "advanced" brake scripts out there, not just the ones I did. For example, the scripts used in NS Coal Division and the Canadian Mountain Passes have nothing whatsoever to do with the scripts I did for Sherman Hill.