I have the Checkrail Evansville route. It has a considerable number of industries and destination/originations. I used to just run a few AI trains doing tasks to get activity on the route. This usually resulted in chaos. After some thought it seems that the customer needs to act as a dispatcher and do a lot of pre-planning to have concurrent activities succeed. As an example, just sending a switcher to pickup a consist of cars to deliver to an industry need the customer(me) to determine which end the switcher/consist is coupling to so the consist can be released and the switcher move on to other tasks. If not the switcher is stuck at the wrong end of the consist on a dead-end siding. Similarly, it is necessary to not allow AI to just run wild or you have nasty meetings, long consists blocking a junction/switch, etc. There seems to a lot of "dispatcher" work to do in order to program a "typical day on the railroad".
Planning AI Activities in a Large Route??
- Thread starter boleyd
- Start date
I do the local work myself and leave the AI to the long portal to portal, or one end of the route to the other runs which is what they seem to do best.
I once suggested we have a dispatcher module included as part of the Trainz package. With this there would be a separate screen almost like the map view, however, this would be for dispatching and controlling the AI drivers and their routes. One of the problems I find now with Driver is the shear number of messages that pop up in the small message windows particularly when there are a lot of drivers or if there's an interactive station working with destination signs. The latter items cause a lot of diagnostic messages that run over the important driver info that scrolls quickly by.
John
I once suggested we have a dispatcher module included as part of the Trainz package. With this there would be a separate screen almost like the map view, however, this would be for dispatching and controlling the AI drivers and their routes. One of the problems I find now with Driver is the shear number of messages that pop up in the small message windows particularly when there are a lot of drivers or if there's an interactive station working with destination signs. The latter items cause a lot of diagnostic messages that run over the important driver info that scrolls quickly by.
John
What Adair and his friends need is a "perform flying switch at [junction]" command.
There is a way to get switches to change before a train reaches the switch.
Using switch junction and trigger junction rules. I used these in USA Prototype multi-player route and it worked fine when I drove a train
around the hold route at 85 mph without changing a switch.(just testing)
I set all switches to the right by default using directional markers, and the rules.