Randomized consists in TS12 ?

Hi all, I have searched this forum as well as the internet but not found much of an answer. Apologies for the newbie question but I'm quite new, as it turns out!

Anyways: Is it possible to have randomized consists in TS12?

I'm specifically thinking about an Inglenook or Timesaver -style of route where, for maximum replayability, you want a new consist of cars to be spotted each time you begin the session. These cars would be spotted amongst a number of pre-selected locations, and each time you started the session, they'd be in a different spot.

For a truly puzzle style of route, this would mean they'd be spotted randomly amongst a number of sidings.

For a more realistic style of route, this might mean they could be spotted on a fiddle yard "off stage" or else at an appropriate industry siding "on stage".

Does that make sense? Is something like this possible?

Thanks!

Steve

Portals can already generate randomly selected consists (up to 8, if I remember correctly).

So you can place a TM on each spur, set it as a portal using the "Unportal" rule, and have it generate several different consists at the start of the session.

E.g. if the spur belongs to a paper company, you may set up the TM/portal so that it generates
a) Loco + One boxcar (paper rolls)
b) Loco + Two boxcars (paper rolls)
c) Loco + One tanker (chemicals)
d) Loco + One woodchip hopper (woodchips)
e) Loco + Two woodchip hoppers (woodchips)
f) Loco + One boxcar (paper rolls) + One woodchip hopper (woodchips)
g) Loco + One tanker (chemicals) + One woodchip hopper (woodchips)
h) Loco only (to leave the spur empty)

The loco is absolutely required, because if it is not present the cars will come out of the portal at 40 MPH. I use a special invisible loco that is only 0.3 metres (1 foot) long.

Orders for consists a to g will be "Wait for 10 seconds" + "Decouple Loco" + "Delete train". The consist will come out from the portal then, as soon as it is fully generated, the loco will decouple and vanish: only the cars will remain at the industry spur.
Orders for consist h will be "Delete train", so as to leave the spur empty.

The same procedure can also be used to randomly generate different incoming trains.

It is not necessary to have random consists for the puzzles to be effective a single consist can produce many possible results.

To use the Inglenook Puzzle you only need eight different wagons in your consist from which you select five which are randomly placed in a new consist, which if I have done my maths correct gives 6720 possible combinations. Many people use eight cards to represent the eight wagons which they then pick five cards to give the order of the new consist.

With the Timesaver puzzle, five wagons are placed one on each spur, you randomly assign them to new positions (again cards representing the wagons and the positions can be used), and then shunt them to their new positions, again there is a large number of possibilities.

More details on these puzzles can be found here:

http://www.wymann.info/ShuntingPuzzles/shunting-puzzles.html

The Inglenook Siding page under Rules and Operation includes a link to a utility that can generate random list for your consists and there locations.

Pendolino said:

Portals can already generate randomly selected consists (up to 8, if I remember correctly).

So you can place a TM on each spur, set it as a portal using the "Unportal" rule, and have it generate several different consists at the start of the session.

E.g. if the spur belongs to a paper company, you may set up the TM/portal so that it generates
a) Loco + One boxcar (paper rolls)
b) Loco + Two boxcars (paper rolls)
c) Loco + One tanker (chemicals)
d) Loco + One woodchip hopper (woodchips)
e) Loco + Two woodchip hoppers (woodchips)
f) Loco + One boxcar (paper rolls) + One woodchip hopper (woodchips)
g) Loco + One tanker (chemicals) + One woodchip hopper (woodchips)
h) Loco only (to leave the spur empty)

The loco is absolutely required, because if it is not present the cars will come out of the portal at 40 MPH. I use a special invisible loco that is only 0.3 metres (1 foot) long.

Orders for consists a to g will be "Wait for 10 seconds" + "Decouple Loco" + "Delete train". The consist will come out from the portal then, as soon as it is fully generated, the loco will decouple and vanish: only the cars will remain at the industry spur.
Orders for consist h will be "Delete train", so as to leave the spur empty.

The same procedure can also be used to randomly generate different incoming trains.

Click to expand...

Awesome! That's a very helpful reply and exactly what I was looking for.

Is a TM the same thing as a portal?

Thanks again!

Steve

A trackmark can be used as a portal, but only if you use the Un-Portal rule available on the Download Station (or may even be built-in).

Shane

Some images from my highly experimental randomised session are better than a thousand words

1) Place a trackmark near the end of the spur where you want the randomly generated string of cars.



2. Adjust the range of activation of the trackmark.

"a" should be as short as possible, since the generated train "comes into existence" (and starts executing its orders) when the last car leave the range of activation of the trackmark.

"b" should be somewhat longer than half the length of the longest car appearing. In this case, the longest car is a 60ft boxcar, so "b" must be greater than 30 ft (9.14 metres).



3. Set up the trackmark as a portal, adding the "Un portal" rule to the session, then set up the rule options clicking on the "Edit" button.

I have set up five possible consists:

a) invisible loco + two covered hoppers
b) invisible loco + three covered hoppers
c) invisible loco + two boxcars + two covered hoppers
d) invisible loco + two chemical tankers + two boxcars
e) invisible loco only (i.e. no cars to switch)



4. Test #1: consist "c" is generated



5. Test #2: consist "b" is generated



6. Test #3: consist "e" is generated (no cars)



7. Test #4: consist "c" is generated (again )



I don't remember how many different possible trains can be generated by a portal: back in 2006, each portal could generate eight trains.

In this location there are three industrial spurs: if you set the portals so as to have five different possible trains generated at each portal, you will have 5^3 = 125 possible configurations, and you can be quite sure that every time you play you will have a different job to perform.

P.S. Achieving the same result for the cars to be delivered is a little more complex. In the above example, I'm thinking about generating three strings of cars (one for each industry) on three different tracks at the yard where the switch job starts working. The switcher crew shall than make up their train before departure.

Carlo, as you say, those photos are worth thousands of words!! Thank you so much!!

I haven't gotten into Surveyor yet but help like this is really valuable. Thanks again!

Steve

Hi

A route can have up to 99 trains generated by Un-Portals. There seems to be a limit of how many trains can be generated by an individual Un-Portal which I think was max number of trains divided by the number of Un-Portals on the route. If you have a max of 60 trains and 6 Un-Portals each Un-Portal can only generate 10 trains.

There is another way of doing this which is to use the SCS2013 rule. See this thread for details http://forums.auran.com/trainz/show...ike-to-try-SCS2013-for-TS12&highlight=scs2013

One of the commands in the rule allows you to add a random consist which uses "seeds" of wagons and/or locomotives. You specify the limits for the number of vehicles e.g. between 0 and 4 and this would add a random number of vehicles between the 2 parameters each time the session runs.

The sessions that I create using the rule are different every time they run with trains being made up of different vehicles and lengths. They also run at random times (set between two parameters) and are programmed to interact with one another to ensure that there are no conflicts. This means that trains pass one another at different points along the track when the session runs. Of course, with so much randomness built in, it is almost impossible to test every possible combination of circumstances but it generally works quite well.

Regards

Brian

Sorry if this is a stupid question.

I can follow everything that is going on with the exception of uncouple the engine.

Where is the command to do that in TrainZ 12? I see a couple command and a delete train command, but no uncouple command.

The Uncouple command that is built-in only appears when you are in Driver mode. There are alternative commands like Uncouplez available on the Download Station.

Shane

If you can only do decouple in Driver, how would you do what's listed below?

>>
E.g. if the spur belongs to a paper company, you may set up the TM/portal so that it generates
a) Loco + One boxcar (paper rolls)
b) Loco + Two boxcars (paper rolls)
c) Loco + One tanker (chemicals)
d) Loco + One woodchip hopper (woodchips)
e) Loco + Two woodchip hoppers (woodchips)
f) Loco + One boxcar (paper rolls) + One woodchip hopper (woodchips)
g) Loco + One tanker (chemicals) + One woodchip hopper (woodchips)
h) Loco only (to leave the spur empty)

The loco is absolutely required, because if it is not present the cars will come out of the portal at 40 MPH. I use a special invisible loco that is only 0.3 metres (1 foot) long.

Orders for consists a to g will be "Wait for 10 seconds" + "Decouple Loco" + "Delete train". The consist will come out from the portal then, as soon as it is fully generated, the loco will decouple and vanish: only the cars will remain at the industry spur.
Orders for consist h will be "Delete train", so as to leave the spur empty.<<

I was under the impression that this one done via session rule when setting up the Un-Portal so that a consist will be generated and then the loco deleted so the cars are just sitting there.

Am I missing something?

Hi Volusia

Use the Uncouplez driver command which shows as built in on my TS12. This may be due to the fact that I have the SnC add on installed but if it isn't built in on your installation it can be downloaded from the DLS. There are other uncoupling commands but I can't remember their names or authors off of the top of my head (getting old and my memory is deteriorating).

Regards

Brian

You are absolutely right: the orders for portal-generated consists are entered during the set-up of the "Un-portal" rule.

Usually, I also use the "Schedule Library" rule to set up two sets of orders:
a) "Wait for 10 seconds" + "Decouple loco" + "Delete Train" (for strings of car appearing on an industry spur)
b) "Delete Train" (when no cars are generated at the industry spur).
This allows me to give a single command (Copy Commands from) to all portal-generated consists.

You can also play with the number of "dummy" (i.e. loco only) consists appearing to represent the difference between spurs with heavy or light traffic.
For a spur seeing only sporadical service, you can set the unportal so that 9 out of 10 generated consists are dummies, while the 10th consists of a single car. In this way, the spur will be empty 90% of the time.

My content manager shows it built in. I don't see it when I'm clicking on the driver and adding commands when setting up the consists for the un-portal.

What is SnC?

I'm running 12 build 61388.

Thanks!

Kennilworth said:

Hi Volusia

Use the Uncouplez driver command which shows as built in on my TS12. This may be due to the fact that I have the SnC add on installed but if it isn't built in on your installation it can be downloaded from the DLS. There are other uncoupling commands but I can't remember their names or authors off of the top of my head (getting old and my memory is deteriorating).

Regards

Brian

Click to expand...

SnC is Settle and Carlisle which is a payware addon pack. You may need to modify the session in Surveyor in order to add the command, by editing the Driver Commands session rule.

Shane

You guys are great. Thanks to all the tips I got it working!

Now, is there a way to randomly generate a the orders of the cars in a consist using rules?

Do you mean having a definite number of cars, but differently arranged each time the session is started?

If your consist is made of a limited number of cars, you can enter all the possible combination in the set-up of a portal. By way of example, if you have three cars (A, B, C), there are six possible combinations:

1) Loco + A + B + C
2) Loco + A + C + B
3) Loco + B + A + C
4) Loco + B + C + A
5) Loco + C + A + B
6) Loco + C + B + A

The increase in the number of combinations is not linear: unfortunately, I do not remember the exact formula (I studied it many years ago... ).

That is what I meant. I was just hoping I could make two or three consists for a siding and have Un-portal or another rule, randomly select the train AND then randomly select the order of the rolling stock.

Pendolino said:

Do you mean having a definite number of cars, but differently arranged each time the session is started?

If your consist is made of a limited number of cars, you can enter all the possible combination in the set-up of a portal. By way of example, if you have three cars (A, B, C), there are six possible combinations:

1) Loco + A + B + C
2) Loco + A + C + B
3) Loco + B + A + C
4) Loco + B + C + A
5) Loco + C + A + B
6) Loco + C + B + A

The increase in the number of combinations is not linear: unfortunately, I do not remember the exact formula (I studied it many years ago... ).

Click to expand...

Unfortunately, as far as I know, there is no rule allowing random selection of the cars within a consist.

The only way I know to achieve what you mean is having a portal that randomly selects one of the possible consists. The number of possible combinations of N cars, however is N! (factorial of N, i.e. the product of all the integer numbers between 1 and N: e.g. 3! = 1 x 2 x 3 = 6).

The possible combinations, then, are the following:

2 cars : 2
3 cars : 6
4 cars : 24
5 cars : 120
6 cars : 720

Besides the boring task of entering dozen of consist, the combinations for a 5-car train will exceed the maximum number of allowable consists reported by Kennilworth at post #8 in this thread.

Oh well. I will just have to be happy with random consists.

Considering I didn't even know that could be done two days ago, I'm happy.

Pendolino said:

Unfortunately, as far as I know, there is no rule allowing random selection of the cars within a consist.

The only way I know to achieve what you mean is having a portal that randomly selects one of the possible consists. The number of possible combinations of N cars, however is N! (factorial of N, i.e. the product of all the integer numbers between 1 and N: e.g. 3! = 1 x 2 x 3 = 6).

The possible combinations, then, are the following:

2 cars : 2
3 cars : 6
4 cars : 24
5 cars : 120
6 cars : 720

Besides the boring task of entering dozen of consist, the combinations for a 5-car train will exceed the maximum number of allowable consists reported by Kennilworth at post #8 in this thread.

Click to expand...