Session rules - No description provided.

[celje]

I tried, it's possible to put in 33 portals ( i use 1920.. resolution) and yes, the scroll bar has not additional function. But working with big amount of portal is unpractical.

 

[sniper297]

The whole thing is unpractical, 10 year old MSTS was difficult to set up 30 AI trains running at once and had errors after continuous running for over an hour, but you could save, exit, and reload to fix or even avoid the errors, and it didn't hog system resources like this does. Even a dozen trains running at one time cuts the framerates from 50 down to 10, so the standard approach of setting up a continuous flow and forgetting it ain't practical.

Okay, so I looked at quick portal;

Quick Portal Manager v3,<kuid2:61392:5012:10>

"Global Portal manager manages scheduled train operations to any portal on the current route"

Do tell. What does that mean and where are the instructions? The whole point of starting this thread is I'm finding way too many rules and scripts that you could make a lifetime career out of just figuring out what they actually do and how they work so you can decide if they have any use for your application, and I'm not a young man looking for a lifetime career.

 

[Dap]

Do a search of these forums for Quick Portal Manager. pguy posted his instructions there several months ago.

 

[philskene]

Central Portal Control

Hi Jim --

A reply to both this thread and your PM.

My Central Portal Control certainly allows more than four portals. I'm not sure of the upper limit, but it's certainly way more than 4.

The main reason I use CPC is because it will allow an AI to be emitted the instant a session starts. With the normal portal the delay before the first AI is equal to the frequency at which AI is emitted.

One thing to be aware of - that "Maximum Trains on Route" includes the player trainz and all loose consists. If you have heaps of the latter you could well exceed the maximum allowed 99. If you do get to the limit the AI will not be emitted until an AI has been consumed at another portal.

On longer routes I use the "Schedule Library" rule. Add it to the Rules menu and then edit it. Name the schedule eg "AI from Portal A to B". Configure it as "Navigate Via Trackmark a1, Navigate Via Trackmark a2, etc, Navigate To Portal B"".

Now edit the "Driver Commands" rule to make sure there is a tick against both "Copy Commands From" and "Instant Load".

Go into Central Portal Control. Select the Portal, add the consist (loco + freight cars) and allocate a driver. Now under the driver you can add the schedule you just set up.

If you want the freight cars to load the instant the AI emerges from the portal the first entry should be "Instant Load". Then choose Copy Commands/Insert/AI from Portal A to B.

You can then add another consist under the first if you want to give variety to the consists encountered by the player. And another, ... . But do remember to give them roughly equal performance. If an AI is being constantly blocked by a slower AI in front it can decide to take an alternative route. So use maybe two locos on a heavy train and one on a light one.

Using the Copy Commands sure as hell beats running through the whole sequence of Track Markers to set the route every time a consist is added.

Tell me if this helps.

As for the need for adequate documentation of rules I can but only agree. In fact it should be compulsory.

Phil

Edit:

An additional point. If you remove a portal from CPC after setting up a whole series of portals you are stuffed. Totally. For some reason deleting a portal causes havoc with the route settings in the remaining portals..

 

[sniper297]

Yeah, I'm up to 14 portals now, the trick is to run full screen max resolution, since for whatever reason if the list extends past the bottom of the window it won't scroll down to the last line, "Add portal". As for max trains on route, I'm not getting that - what I get is new trains refuse to spawn on trigger with the max number set to the default of 25, "Remove excess trains" has no effect whether it's set to Yes or No, it appears Yes means yes and No means Yes for that subroutine. Set it to 99 and it does spawn correctly, near as I can tell it isn't removing anything since I have over 100 loose consists.

And the schedule library does work like a charm, main problem is setting up all the triggers on tracks the player will use and not the AI trains, altho I have deliberately set some AIs to trigger others just to simplify - player runs over trigger from Grand Crossing to the Belt Line, that trigger spawns the southbound belt freight, he passes over a trigger on the way south that spawns the northbound at the other end. Finally found a use for route layers in all this, make a new 'trackmarks" layer so when the experiment flops I can just delete the layer rather than tediously deleting all the trackmarks before adding new ones.

" Do a search of these forums for Quick Portal Manager. pguy posted his instructions there several months ago."

Exactly.

AI Routing Direction Marker,<kuid:30501:1013>

"Similar to the 'Track Direction Marker', however this object does not affect signalling."

That's what's needed for all this stuff, at the very least a one line description saying what it's for. Hunting all over creation for "Quick Portal Manager" and finding after several hours it's not what I need, multiplied by 2000 similar things, comes out to 15 years 7 months before I'm even ready to start building the route. What we really need here is a list of available rules and scripts in one place, with a brief description of what each does, and what makes it different from similar rules or scripts. And unless they're intuitive and self explanatory, some kind of instructions for use in the description text.

 

[philskene]

Jim --

Your question about jerking once you get a few AI running.

Your PC dual core or better? From Trainz '09 upwards the AI was shunted off onto the second core. It made an absolutely immense difference.

 

[sniper297]

Model: Dell DXP051
CPU: Intel(R) Pentium(R) D CPU 2.80GHz (2 CPUs)
Memory: 2046MB RAM

Operating System: Windows XP Professional (5.1, Build 2600) Service Pack 3 (2600.xpsp.080413-2111)
DirectX 9.0c (4.09.0000.0904)

Video: NVIDIA GeForce 8500 GT 512.0 MB
NVIDIA Driver Version: 6.14.0012.5721

Sound: SigmaTel Audio
sthda.sys Driver Version: 5.10.4823.0000

Hard Drive: Maxtor 6L160M0 147.8 GB

* McAfee Anti-virus
* McAfee Personal Firewall

DXdiag says "2 CPUs", really means dual core. That's what I have at the moment, all I can afford right now. Stuttering and jerking with the visibility down to 2000, sliders turned down, seems to have no effect one way or the other. And it IS the AI traffic, running the same route with no AI traffic I can easily get 40FPS instead of 10-15 that I get with a dozen AI trains running, even if there are no AI trains within 5000 meters of the player train just having them running somewhere on the route eats framerates. Irritating, since all I really wanted to do was set up a simple spawn-every-15-or-20-minutes steady pattern like the one on the MSTS PO&N versions. Ain't gonna happen here, need a Cray to run it.