Portal Questions

Loaded wellcars with 53' weathered containers top and bottom. No problems. When the consist enters my portal basic the drivers picture become a black picture with a big question mark on it. Rolling stock disappears as it is suppose to and when the consist reappears the wellcars have 20' containers on the bottom and 53' containers on the top. I have the portal configured for no trains load or unload and to consume all trains. Once the consist clears the portal (exiting) I can click on the driver and the image reappears. My questions: what's with the driver image and why are the 53' containers on the bottom now being 20' containers? Suggestions?

You have to remember that what goes in is gone forever. Now, what comes out is about the same as what went in, but not exactly the same. Let's say your car is set to load the 20' container at the bottom and a 40' at top. This is how the car is configured from origin. But you reloaded it with the opposite, 40 at bottom and 20 on top. Now the consist goes into the portal and it produces another consist that looks like the other one, but the configuration is the original, so it gives you containers loaded as in the original. A more vivid case is the tankers: Your tank is basically configured with diesel, but you load it with another fluid, say water. It goes into a portal and what comes out is diesel! may be the same amount in gallons or litters, but not the same commodity. As per the question mark when the consist is gone, it is normal, and for as long as I can assign a driver when it reappears, no complains here. There is another problem I can think of: You send the consist into the portal and it is gone. Set to come back in 10 minutes, you decide to save the session and start it again later. In my world, that consist is gone forever and will not come back ever. Seemingly courtesy of that bug that eliminates waiting periods (by using "wait for" command) when you save sessions. A bug that has been there for as long I can remember, and that it doesn't seem to be important enough to get it fixed.

I'm not sure that I'm following your reply. My car is set to load 53' containers on the top and bottom so why is it loading 20' containers on the bottom? The 20' containers are not selected, only 53' containers. I too can live with the question mark but I don't understand what is happening with the containers. Thanks for replying.

So you have to do some detective work: Go to the config file and identify the KUID for each type of container. Then look for the place where they should be, and compare it to what you see when you first install that particular car. If a default loaded configured car goes in the portal, a default (same) should come out. If not, we have another bug (but not a very serious one).

I'll check it out tomorrow. If I start now it may last well into the night. Thanks again.

Hi

When I use "Instant Load" for wellcars it always puts 20ft containers on the bottom so it would appear that is the default. As for the driver not appearing until the train has fully emerged from the portal - this has always been the case whenever I've used portals.

There is a driver command "InstantLoad with a product from a queue specified by the user", kuid:368725:60011 by author "elstoko". This allows you to select the product to load the wagons with so with this you could tell it to load whatever size container in the wellcar. I haven't tried this so I don't know if it can handle a double load for a wellcar but it might be worth experimenting with.

Regards

Brian

Thanks Brian. I'll check this out before I start my detective work.

Kennilworth said:

Hi

When I use "Instant Load" for wellcars it always puts 20ft containers on the bottom so it would appear that is the default. As for the driver not appearing until the train has fully emerged from the portal - this has always been the case whenever I've used portals.

There is a driver command "InstantLoad with a product from a queue specified by the user", kuid:368725:60011 by author "elstoko". This allows you to select the product to load the wagons with so with this you could tell it to load whatever size container in the wellcar. I haven't tried this so I don't know if it can handle a double load for a wellcar but it might be worth experimenting with.

Regards

Brian

Click to expand...

Yes it can. I have used this to make specific double stacks by using the command twice. one for the bottom and again for the top. However, there is one painful restriction to this one. It only can set any load from the first 9 "Q's". you lose the ability to load 10+. I can only hope and wait for a day where this one gets expanded or superceded by a bigger better one. I would try my hand at it, but I don't know my elbow from a pop-tart when it comes to writing codes and script.

Before I got too deep into my detective mode I took a look at other wellcars and found some by adamovic that suited my needs. The cars enter the portal fully loaded and exit fully loaded which was what I was looking for. Everything is good and I can actually play the game rather than delve into the mysteries of the game. Thanks to everyone who replied.

One setting that is off in Trainz Simulator 12 is the portal basic's production trigger radius. It should be set to a value of 100 but it is set to 20 instead. I have no idea if this is still true for T:ANE but it looks like it was something that was overlooked.

When a train is generated from the portal basic, it is released too early, before the consuming trigger. When the train starts driving forward, it is caught by the consuming trigger and deleted. This will go on forever unless you change the trigger radius. One thing to note is this only happens with small locomotives. It can be changed very easily by going into the config file in Windows Explorer and changing the value from 20 to 100 on the trigger that says it is the end trigger.