Is Auran part of the Romulan Empire?

[WillPac]

This is just a guess, because I have been painstakingly building a route in TRS2006. I wanted a train to test the track from Portland (its northern terminus) to Albany (its current southern terminus), so I built one in Brooklyn Yard and set up a driver to do just that: drive from Portland to Albany.

After saving the route/session in Surveyor, I chose Quick Drive and went to that train I had just built (I had a handful of others already built, mostly those entering or coming from portals).

I knew something was amiss right away, when I could see the smoke and steam from the engine but that was all! I know I did not use the driver command "Engage Cloaking Device" but it was sure working nonetheless. Smoke and steam were all I could see; no engine, no boxcars, no flats, no caboose.

How do I disable this cloaking device without having to resort to launching photon torpedoes on the train?

 

[bl4882]

Hi,

How long did you let it run before you gave up on it? I have found that it sometimes takes ten or more seconds for the cars to appear, even though you sill see smoke from the engine, etc. right away. Maybe try letting it run and see what happens?

Hope this helps.

Bernie

 

[BobCass]

Hi All: This happens to me if I'm trying to run a saved session, and you have said it only lasts for 10-12 seconds..

 

[JCitron]

Ron,

I find that if I give the simulator a chance to load the content first before running, I don't have any ghost trains.

Add in a few wait commands in the driver commands so the drivers don't go running off before everything loads first.

John

 

[WillPac]

Hi,

How long did you let it run before you gave up on it? I have found that it sometimes takes ten or more seconds for the cars to appear, even though you sill see smoke from the engine, etc. right away. Maybe try letting it run and see what happens?

Hope this helps.

Bernie

Not sure how long I let it run, but I know it was more than ten seconds. I kept jumping from cab view to other cameras to see if it would show up in any of them as it moved out of Brooklyn Yard toward Clackamas. Maybe I will give it another go, because I know I didn't give it a LOT of time to show up.

I did notice that Surveyor with this route has become painfully choppy and slow to respond. I might have too much detail on this route, which might be taking up memory and CPU usage.

 

[WillPac]

Ron,

I find that if I give the simulator a chance to load the content first before running, I don't have any ghost trains.

Add in a few wait commands in the driver commands so the drivers don't go running off before everything loads first.

John

Thanks for that idea, John. I will give that a try, because yes, it went by default to a train that runs back and forth from a Silverton logging camp to the log dump at Pulp, and I had to switch to the train in Brooklyn Yard, which was already underway (and cloaked).

 

[WillPac]

Hi All: This happens to me if I'm trying to run a saved session, and you have said it only lasts for 10-12 seconds..

Bob:

I reran it last night, this time going straight into Driver, rather than Quick Drive from Surveyor, and it was still running cloaked -- until I paused the game, that is. Then the train starting decloaking one car at a time, and it stayed visible after that.

I DID run into some real lags, especially around Salem. I am thinking I need to replace some of the high poly count items (I love those hi-res and super hi-res JVC trees) and replace them with low poly items or large block splines (I have a TON of these, too).l

 

[BobCass]

Willpac: You know I have discovered that splines will bother your frame rate more than individual items..I use to have a route and I had allot of splines because it was easier to do..It seemed worse if I had trees right next to the rightaway..So I know what pain it is to the route..Individual trees are better, but what a pain in the caboose it is to plant individually..

 

[angelah]

Splines

I took a lot of splines out of one section of my WCL series, the second I think, and it ran better. Use splinesm but do so sparingly.
And use detail toom but only beside the tracks and a few feet further out.

Hope that helps/
As far as Auran belonging to the Romulan Emprire, well, they're clinging on, so must be Klingons!

Angela

 

[JCitron]

That's a good point about the splines. Other than telegraph poles and roads, I use very few of them for that reason. I never really liked the spline trees anyway because for some reason they jumped in front of each other. This was long before TS2009 and TS210 brought along their own issues with the alpha channels.

@Angela - I like your latest uploaded content. Your buildings are wonderful.

John

 

[WillPac]

The most common spline I have used are the TPR city ones (Boston, NYC, Brooklyn, industrial, warehouse, brownstone neighborhoods) and the JVC Pacific pine spline (which looks, in my opinion, better than any other tree spline, even fairly close up, although it works best at the top of a mountain, as it follows the ridge line better than others).

Do you think that if I replace the city splines with the city blocks that are sized objects (also mostly TPR) that would help? Like I said, the biggest lag came at Salem, which has city splines on one side of the tracks and a sizable industrial area on the other side. It might lag in Portland, too, but like I also said above, I couldn't get the train to decloak until it was almost to Clackamas (a very small rural town in 1954).

And the lag made me realize how much time I've wasted on detail. With this layout set in November of '54, I decided to add a Christmas tree farm in the rural community of Canby. Long rows of 3, 5, 7 and 9-foot trees, surrounded by strings of lights, with a lit Nativity scene, decked out Christmas trees in every window of the farm's lower level, Santas, snowmen and holiday music playing continuously. Then yesterday as my test train rolled through Canby, the tree farm was so far from the tracks I couldn't even see it!

 

[BobCass]

Willpac: What you were talking about city stuff..That is the reason I like to country scenes, less trouble with frame rate..

 

[WillPac]

Willpac: You know I have discovered that splines will bother your frame rate more than individual items..I use to have a route and I had allot of splines because it was easier to do..It seemed worse if I had trees right next to the rightaway..So I know what pain it is to the route..Individual trees are better, but what a pain in the caboose it is to plant individually..

I have only been using JVC's Pacific forest spline for distant ridgelines. I love his amazing maples, birches, etc. in a variety of autumnal changes. These I am starting to use along the right-of-way where I can see them. They are all hi-res or super hi-res so a waste of time and frame rate to use in the distance.

And on your little P.S.: I don't have any of the gorgeous SP Daylight cars or engines. I found the coaches a few months back, but they were all faulty and wouldn't show up, so I deleted them (had NO clue how to fix them then), and I haven't gone back to see if they are still out there.

I happen to have a couple of SP timetables, and from them I learned that the Daylights here in Oregon only ran through September, so my mid-November layout shouldn't see them. The only passenger run still around at year's end is the Cascade, which pooled with Great Northern or Northern Pacific to run from Seattle to San Francisco. It runs with standard Espee gray coaches.

 

[WillPac]

Downloaded a layout called Industrial Wasteland (odd name, since it's all even green grass and pockets of trees), and I began to populate it (it came with a lot of default industries and a few scant buildings), so I built it up with an urban flair, since anything with a seaport AND an airport would be a decent-sized city.

I alternated between individual buildings and splines, and did the same with trees and experienced none of the lag I get with my own layout. That is until I began populating the main yard. I found no lag with buildings, trees or splines, but a LOT of lag when I began placing hoppers, boxcars, centerbeams, flats and engines.

When I got to point where I could test run things, I followed the UP coal hauler from the yard. Things were fairly herky-jerky (not bad, but not real smooth), until it left the confines of the yard, then the train rolled nice and easy.

I've been toying with the idea of adding a new section that is unscenicked with nothing but long yard tracks where I can "store" any engine or rolling stock I might need. And maybe experiment with the yard. I know a yard full of cars is a blight to the railroad (too many cars not earning revenue), but a yard is one of my favorite focal points.

So maybe I will experiment with some of the Wiley4's railcar splines to give my visible yards some signs of life and see how THOSE affect the frame rate.

Has anybody else noticed this lag around rolling stock?

 

[pfx]

My ex-wife's dog was Romulan. I was sitting eating breakfast one morning when it appeared from nowhere, complete with its funny eyebrows, stunned me with some form of phased energy weapon (sorry Trekkies, I might not have the terminology correct) then stole my cornflakes, tea, and morning paper.

I never understood why the ex never believed me.

 

[JCitron]

Ron,

I fixed a bunch of passenger cars from Magicland recently. The repairs weren't too bad. If you post the errors up on the forums, I'm sure I can help you.

I use the TPR blocks for my route, and they load in fine. Check out my screen-shots over in the Screen-Shots forum. I posted a bunch of pictures of my current route work. You'll see the TPR blocks in the Bristol area.

John

 

[WillPac]

Ron,

I fixed a bunch of passenger cars from Magicland recently. The repairs weren't too bad. If you post the errors up on the forums, I'm sure I can help you.

I use the TPR blocks for my route, and they load in fine. Check out my screen-shots over in the Screen-Shots forum. I posted a bunch of pictures of my current route work. You'll see the TPR blocks in the Bristol area.

John

John: There is nothing "broken" on the layout. I was trying to figure out what the drag was on my created layout and ran into talking about splines vs. individual buildings with you, Bob Cass and Angela.

So I tinkered with this downloaded Industrial Wasteland layout, which had very little on it other than '06 built-in industries. I started to fill it in with urban sprawl and nature's foliage, using individual buildings (or maybe blocks) in one part, then using splines in the next, just to see if a lag showed up in one area. The TPR urban blocks and splines are my favorite city ones, and the JVC trees top my list for foliage.

Although I still have many gaps to fill, I didn't see any lag at all when around any buildings, splines or trees. It wasn't until I began to place rolling stock in the main yard that it started to lag. It was slow to respond and sluggish to turn or shift the cursor in the yard, but outside of the yard, the lag vanished.

So I was curious why a group of 500k to 1.5MB cars would cause a lag where a cluster of buildings or trees of the same file size didn't.

 

[BobCass]

willpac: I know it looks funny to me also..But I think it the mass that really enters the picture..I have seen allot of big yards in Trainz and all of them are somewhat void of rolling stock maybe this is why??

 

[WillPac]

willpac: I know it looks funny to me also..But I think it the mass that really enters the picture..I have seen allot of big yards in Trainz and all of them are somewhat void of rolling stock maybe this is why??

Yeah Bob, that could be the reason, and I don't really want EVERY track in EVERY yard full of cars. Some days UP's Brooklyn Yard is so packed you can't see much of the trains moving thru the yard, while other days it's so vacant it's almost spooky.

That's why I think I might remove all cars not assigned to in-yard trains and see if Wiley4's rail car splines improve the jigginess or, God forbid, makes it worse!

Ron