Slow to Creep Speed at Junctions/Switches - FIXED

[boleyd]

I made many changes to a yard. Every time I tried to do a session in the yard the locomotive would creep at 2mph toward a switch and slow to 1mph. Eventually stopping for various amounts of time. Moving/removing switches did not help. Sometimes moving a switch and starting the locomotive from a new place helped until the next switch was encountered. This has been plaguing me on several routes.

Well maybe the Help Wiki had an answer. Obviously there was none that was specific to my condition. However there was When laying procedural track, use the straighten tool to lead into the junction to improve the junction shape. There was another notation about spline points. Well I had the spline points all over to shape the the yard and allow the switches to function.

I decided to"clean up the track" and see what might happen. I eliminated every spline point I could. I used the Straighten Track tool extensively. The result is now a fully functioning yard and one that looks much better. Probably common-knowledge but new to me. Backed-up to SSD.

The poor geometry of the tracks appear to be taking the AI code into an area where it simply thrashed around with small incremental adjustments until achieving a numerically satisfactory solution which may have taken more than a minute.

 

[JCitron]

Hmm...

Interesting observation. I must try this myself because I have creepy drivers too in more ways than one!

Who would of thought the spline points make the difference. The problem is there are going to be situations where lots of spline points are necessary, and does this issue plague regular track as well as procedural track.

 

[cascaderailroad]

I tidyed up in my yards too, but I still have creepy AI drivers, constantly speeding up, then slowing down, and hunting and pecking along

I love to drive manually in my yards, at 1-5 mph I have fabulous custom tracksound built into my track

 

[boleyd]

It is possible that the "straightening" process stores the geometry of a track in a condensed format as opposed the a format needed to represent the very wide possibilities of angles in a freehand/splined track. I faintly remember this from a Cobol task I had of converting micro-fiche to machine readable images so we could dump the film.

 

[JCitron]

That makes sense because there are now fewer points to figure out so there are now fewer possibilities, i.e. paths, to figure out before moving.