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Annie's Virtual Pre-Grouping, Grouping and BR Layouts & Workbench


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2 minutes ago, Regularity said:

Impressive crop circle there, Annie...

That's the compass that's visible only in surveyor/editing mode Simon.  It's very useful for not only helping me to not get lost on twenty scale miles or so of layout, but also to check the general alignments of things.

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14 minutes ago, Annie said:

That's the compass that's visible only in surveyor/editing mode Simon.  It's very useful for not only helping me to not get lost on twenty scale miles or so of layout, but also to check the general alignments of things.

I realised, but it would be fun to leave it in sometime and see if anyone noticed!

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I use FRAPS Mike.  It's a free download and it will give you a framerate counter as well as a simple way to take screenshots on the fly.  The free version will let you make 30 second long video clips by pressing a key on your keyboard.  I have the paid version so I can make endlessly long (boring) videos should I want to and there's a lot more options for saving formats & etc.

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Frame rate was a real issue with Microsoft Train Simulator, but Open Rails is much, much better. In openish country I often get 40 fps, though it does drop in built up areas. There is one hedge model though which for some reason causes it to drop to about 15 fps.

I wonder if the person who created those (very nice) carriages for some reason had his monitor set with over bright colours. Many TVs seem to be. 

There is however a similar problem in moving from MSTS to Open Rails in that trees can wander quite big distances. One sometimes finds oneself driving straight through one, especially on the older routes.

But on the more modern routes builders have been aware of this issue and have used different trees which stay put.

What I would really like which MSTS does not offer is animated platforms. There have been attempts to have passengers wandering up and down but they look like puppets.

Jonathan

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A Russian chap made a good few animated figures for Trainz which are very good and move in a believable way, but when it comes to passengers on the interactive platforms they are all static and don't move.  It would be nice to have something more realistic than passengers disappearing from the platform, then reappearing inside a coach, but I guess the scripting and animations for that would be fairly complex and would take a good slice of a computer's resources as well to make it work.

 

Some scenic items in Trainz can have a horrifying resource hit similar to what you mention Jonathan.  I started to lay out a cornfield using some beautiful modelled cornstalks and as I moved along the field 'planting' the cornstalks the framerate steadily dropped like a stone.  The field ended up being a mostly harvested field instead with just a couple of rows left standing.

 

I really don't know why those coaches were so dulled down because the artwork on the textures is really nice as you have seen.  It was tedious fixing them all, but I'm very pleased that I did.

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No.128 drifts along the main street at Bluebell Woods.

 

p60XjxL.jpg

 

And where was No.128 going you might ask?

To the potato fields just outside of town.

 

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Outside of the township at Bluebell Woods on the original Valleyfields layout there was a huge empty bare dirt field.  After I lifted out the piece of Valleyfields that formed the basis of the Hopewood Tramway that huge field used to annoy me.  So I divided it up into smaller fields and then into smaller fields yet again, but it still was a huge piece of bare brown dirt.  Earlier this week I decided that the fields needed to have a purpose so they became the potato fields.  I figured that a local line like the Hopewood Tramway would be more than happy to run a siding into the fields so now the tramway has another local enterprise that it can serve.  I lettered up another two goods vans  as well to help things along.

 

Wu8N24s.jpg

 

BD5A60T.jpg

 

 

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vrRrO4D.jpg

 

Played trains quite a bit doing shunting and trip workings in between the scheduled passenger services.  I had a lot of fun doing it, but couldn't take snaps for toffee.  This was the only one that survived getting deleted.

I've had a Terrier, - HOPEWOOD, - shedded at Windweather MPD for quite a while, but it wasn't really up to the heavy shunting at Windweather Harbour so I moved it to the MPD at Tenpenny Wharf.  It seems to be working out very well there and has taken over a lot of the work my ancient Hawthorne tender engines were doing at the wharf.  The Hawthornes are a nice enough engine and I like them, but their brakes are terrible and they are a real liability when shunting on the wharf.

I'm considering having the Affiliated (Imaginary) Railway Companies buy three more second hand Terriers and naming them, 'Windweather', 'Tenpenny' and 'Barrow Hill'.  A fourth would have been named 'Oakmarket' but when I discussed it with the E&GR board they got a bit sniffy and said they didn't want a Terrier and wanted their three Hawthornes back instead since I thought they weren't good enough.

Even imaginary railways have problems it seems (sigh)

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I like my imaginary people Mike.  It's just that some of them have opinions and voice them strongly. 

My GER & Affiliated (Imaginary) Railways layout has a definite history  and decisions about what happens and how things are run are very much based on the personalities of the railway companies involved.  Each of the companies might be products of my imagination, but that doesn't mean that I can necessarily do as I please.  Inventing a believable 'what-if' railway company is not that much different to modelling a real world historic prototype when it comes right down to it.

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2 minutes ago, Malcolm 0-6-0 said:

Speaking of problems and please excuse the shocking ignorance displayed by my question - but in the basic simulator is there inbuilt programming  which precludes the general range of accidents etc. that occur in the real thing?

The simulator recognises signals and the way points are set and provided I've laid out the signalling correctly I'm able to run trains in both directions on a single track line without any mishaps.  Set points incorrectly or rough shunt too violently or run too hard up against buffer stops and trains will derail.  Properly setting out speed limits for each section of track is fairly critical too.

 

By and large the simulator does a good job of running everything.  Passenger services on my Norfolk layout are run automatically by the simulator's AI according to the schedules I've entered in for each train service, but all the shunting, goods workings and trip workings are driven by me.  Which means that just like a real driver I have to observe signals correctly and also be aware of what other trains services are running  where and when.  Most of the time I do Ok.  My layout isn't exactly Clapham junction so it's pretty low stress running the goods services side of things which is what I enjoy most.

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I ran a test to see how a Terrier could manage with running the 'Tenpenny Express' to Windweather station and back to Tenpenny Wharf again in between the regular passenger service on the Windweather Loop Line.  I took plenty of snaps, but I think I must've been pressing the wrong key because only these ones were in the folder.

 

An old rake of Hopewood Tramway coaches no longer used for the regular passenger services has now been assigned to Tenpenny Wharf.

Ka32E0w.jpg

 

Tenpenny Book Club members who were about to attend their regular meeting in the station waiting room weren't interested in catching the train.  The local bobbie was remembering his Dad telling him how he used to travel in those coaches when he was a boy.

LbvsZ0z.jpg

 

And many missing snaps later we arrive at Windweather station.  I have a complimentary 1st class season pass to travel anywhere I want to on the Affiliated (Imaginary) Railways.

The test run went well even though a Terrier doesn't really have big enough wheels for chasing the horizon like the 2-2-2 tank engines can.  The poor wee things sound a bit frantic if they try to match the single wheeler's timings. 

This is really the first time I've run train services in both directions at the same time on the Loop Line and my carefully placed signals and passing loops worked exactly as I intended them to do.  The 'Tenpenny Express' only runs twice a day so it wasn't difficult to fit it into the schedule.  A train from Tenpenny Wharf every hour on the hour would have been a bit more tricky though.

NCFQ4ar.jpg

 

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13 minutes ago, Annie said:

The test run went well even though a Terrier doesn't really have big enough wheels for chasing the horizon like the 2-2-2 tank engines can. 

 

All terriers are like that, have you ever seen a Westie chasing a mouse?  Lots of scurry and action, but the mouse usually makes its escape!

 

Personally, I think the bobby had come up on the train and was cautioning the driver for excessive speed...

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'Deeper Thought' isn't well so I'm using my cool little Dell notebook to post this message.  I think the graphics card has died since 'Deeper Thought' is giving the beep code for a graphics card error and not displaying any image when I try to boot it up.  I had noticed that the image quality had been getting a bit flaky while playing with my trainset lately so it looks like it's RIP Nvidia GTX 960.

Fortunately l do have a new replacement graphics card amongst my mountain of computer spare parts so a fix is possible.  It just that repairing my old monster of a HP Xeon workstation wasn't really on my list of things to do today.

 

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The silly thing is I've been meaning to replace the graphics card for ages, but have been a bit lazy about it.  One benefit of this small disaster though is that I've discovered just how easy it is to use my Dell notebook to reply to forum posts instead of using  a computer keyboard.  With a keyboard I make mistakes all the time when I'm sleepy so my little Dell notebook will be getting a lot more use from now on.

Edited by Annie
can't spell for toffee
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Graphics cards are rather power hungry so it could possibly be that your PSU isn't providing enough ooomph.  I had to replace a PSU in my own tower quite recently. 

 

I agree that it's very handy to have a small laptop for general correspondence and 'googling'.  Mine seems to live on my lap, nowadays.  I still prefer the tower for games, photo processing, and so on, because the individual bits are easily replaceable and, of course, it has a large monitor attached.

 

The best upgrade you can make to any computer, in my opinion, is to fit a solid-state drive.  They have got much cheaper but do look carefully at the write-speed spec.  Some SSDs now come as cards that fit in the expansion sockets - providing yours are compatible - rather than SATA connections.  They are approaching the speed of RAM, so should help to reduce any stutter when memory demands are heavy.

Edited by MikeOxon
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The older 9xx series cards are a bit power hungry, but I'll be replacing it with new 10xx series card that has much lower power demands.   The PSU wouldn't have been an issue though since my old HP Xeon professional workstation isn't exactly lacking in that regard.

 

l have a new solid state drive in the spare parts stash so perhaps I should fit that too while I have my computer on the workbench.

 

I got the Dell notebook ex-lease with all its accessories from a computer recycler for a very good price a while ago.  I hadn't used it much until now and I'm really enjoying using it.

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Actually I did try turning 'Deeper Thought' on again one more time and this time it worked.  Apparently the power had gone off in the night while I was asleep and the one thing a sizeable professional grade server machine hates is being switched off, - or have the power suddenly go out.  It always takes a while to get 'Deeper Thought' up and running again with all the systems checks it does and since the first stage of all that is activating the graphics card I could only think the worst when it failed to do that a dozen times in a row.

I have now stress tested the graphics card and all is fine and despite the horrible hot day we're having here it's staying nicely at 35 degrees C.  Emergency now over praise be.

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fDWDHea.jpg

 

Is that not a thing of beauty.  A further WIP Blender screen capture from Cameron Scott.  My commissioned B&ER saddle tank is getting nearer and nearer to being complete. 

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39 minutes ago, Annie said:

 

I have now stress tested the graphics card and all is fine and despite the horrible hot day we're having here it's staying nicely at 35 degrees C.  Emergency now over praise be.

 

Creeping towards 38c here but we expect an early evening cool change. The NW wind is beginning to blow in high cloud. Yesterday was a really beautiful day, sunny, medium to high 20s, today however isn't, although about a fortnight ago we topped 40c with a high wind and it bought down a tree across power lines which left us without power from about 10 am to about 10.15 pm. My biggest concern was if the fridge's residual cold and insulation could keep the beer cold for 12 hours - we just sneaked in :heat:  

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