I made a schedule and......it didn't work.

This was my first time ever making a schedule. This is in TS2012 by the way. I needed an engine to take a rake of coaches out of the carriage siding at one of my stations and then run into a platform, pick up passenger, wait for a short while (represents loading parcels into the luggage vans), blow its whistle and then continue on stopping at all the stations on the line before running around at the last station and returning stopping at all the stations again. Once back at the station the train started from the rake of coaches is returned to the carriage siding.
I'd tested that the schedule would work and slot neatly into the timetable by doing a test run and entering all the commands in manually while in Driver so going into edit mode for the session I entered all the same commands into the session menu. I went back into Driver and was delighted to see the train leaving the carriage sidings and heading for the station. Everything seemed to be going well, passengers were loaded, the wait time for parcel loading ticked by, No.84 blew its whistle....... and nothing else happened. No.84 just sat there and popped up the DCC manual controls as if to say, 'Go drive me yourself'.

Now all my engines on the layout are uniquely numbered under their own KUID numbers and I don't run any duplicates so I knew I definitely had the right engine. I checked the schedule listing in the drop down menu and it was blank with just a small representational image of the train and nothing else. So I'm stumped. Is schedule writing secret arcane knowledge only known to a blessed few? If it is I'm out of luck and I'll have to go back to using the not very exact method of using portals to do my train scheduling and forget about writing schedules in a session.

Unfortunately there is nothing arcane about this -- "Schedule Rule" is broken. It does not take one beyond the next halt. Auran knows this and one hopes there is someone working on it.

We have to work around it; we can use the "Driver Schedule" rule to feed commands to the driver based on trackside checks, which is a little more involved but works.

The Schedule Rule can still be used as a guide to the human driver but it does not rollover correctly a lot of the time in showing arrivals, although departures seem to be OK.

Sorry,

:B~(

Thanks very much for your reply. Well at least I now know it wasn't something that I was doing wrong.

I have been having a similar problem with a goods train on my very large route.For this one I am using Tane SP4 HF4. I don't use schedule, I just give it orders manually to setup the session. My sessions are very involved and this one takes just over 3 hours one way. It picks up wagons from various places, some empty but most are loaded by the driver, using lots of small waits and change train direction.
The problem you state, occurs in a few spots. Always at the same spots. It just sits with the dcc control showing. No messages come up about being stuck.
I found that if I drive the train forward manually it will suddenly pick up the the next order and go on his merry way. I have been working over the past week for up to 8 or nine hours a day ( we have suggested social distancing here at the moment), working the bugs out.
I have been able to get past the problem spot by placing a trackmark just past where it restarted and it works most of the time.
I have never had this problem happen before in all my years in Trainz.
The driver will often sit for ages trying to get through a spot that has more than 3 switches close together. But if I leave him to it he works it out on his own.
I have a dozen trains working on the session and some are using the same main line and work quite well together.
Cheers,
Mike

This is an issue I reported and worked with the QA team on. As you've described, this issue manifests its little head in multiple ways.

On very large routes, the AI will run fine for about 45 minutes to an hour before they become dumb. Pressing pause will sometimes, usually mostly, wake up the AI and they'll continue on their merry way as if they stopped for a tea break and a snack. As time goes on, the pause-key no longer fixes the problem and the only resolve is to save the driving session, exit completely and return. The AI will come in, and continue to drive as if nothing is a miss and go about their business as usual. A later repeat of this process, however, has issues. By now the AI are well into their schedules, lots of things are happening all over the routes such as crossings, stations, signals, industries, and level crossings are in full swing so now the AI are getting dumb again and stopping everywhere or doing other unexplained dumb things. Save, exit, and return, but now things are really batty. Signals are dark or remain red. The AI are driving blind, derailing due to going right through misaligned junctions, which are usually locked the wrong way, and they SPAD all over the place. Eventually the signals turn on, and the AI wake up and everything is fine, but things are a total mess due to the mayhem they caused.

Other related issues and scenarios occur. One is just as you've mentioned. The AI will drive fine, but then sometimes, if not always, will get to a station and sit there. A nudge in the backside will wake them up as if they sat at the station and took a nap. It's only a particular station or two, and that makes us wonder if there's something with the signaling, the station its self, or is it the Trainz gods playing us. We wiggle a signal, replace it with an other, and everything is fine, or so it seems, then the AI are back to their old antics again. What it is all about is timing and nothing to do with the signal or station.

AI will stop at signals and wait. The signals will change aspects, or the signal the AI is stopped at will remain red with the message of "No train approaching" while other signals down the track change properly. Changing signals from one "brand" to another works, again so it seems, so we go through the process of signaling a route all over again. Ah it must be a problem with the signals we think. Nope. A few iterations later, and the AI are back at it again. Saving, exiting, and resuming wakes up the signals and everyone is happy driving again.

So what's the problem? Well it's pretty deep into the game engine and admittedly, the issue is quite difficult to fix without fixing the whole thing from the bottom up. As explained to me it has to do with the message queuing system. This is where AI component message "talk back and forth" with the various components and are overseen by the rest of the game engine. This thread system gets overwhelmed over time due to many reasons such as antiquated scripts, and literally gets clogged causing things to get stuck.

The problem, I was told goes back further than T:ANE when I first reported the issue, but ended up reopening the case again because the ticket got lost when they swapped systems. We've seen signs of this in TS12, as Annie has, and probably the dumb AI issues in TS2010 and TRS2009 were also related. The older versions, however, are so remote to us now, and in those days we didn't run as complex things as we do now so stuff didn't always get overwhelmed.

The good news is N3V is aware of the problem, but the bad news is there is no ETA on fixing this.

Thought I've had is could it be an issue with the radius of the effect of track marks signals and switches / turnouts, overlapping and maybe one is nullifying the other? or the "train" is either "seeing" too far or not enough ahead.

The silly thing with this schedule is that I've previously tested it by entering the commands manually and it will run for hours with the repeat command enabled without a problem. The route itself the train has to follow is a section of my layout that has been much fettled over the past few months to remove any glitches and problems and it sees some fairly heavy traffic over the course of an operating session. In the case of the schedule I'd written though it was for the first passenger train of the day so there was nothing else running on the line at the time for the AI system to get confused about.

I have had the situation happen that John mentioned where after a few hours I notice AI drivers making mistakes and starting to run past signals (SPAD) so then I know it's time to shut things down. My layout is 40 miles long and reasonably well detailed, - and it does get busy in a secondary line kind of way with perhaps 6 or 7 train movements happening at any one time. I run TS2012 on an i5 powered computer with 8Gb of RAM and a GTX660 which is nothing startling, but TS2012 runs well on it with very little pausing or any of the other foibles that this version of Trainz is known for.

However thanks very much for your thoughts and suggestions gentlemen. I think for the present time I'll go back to manually entering in the commands for the trains that work local traffic that doesn't arrive and then leave via a portal. There is an advantage in doing that since the commands can be tailored as needed instead of being 'off the peg' which helps to make a running session more interesting.

Annie,

Setup the commands in the Schedule library. You setup this rule in the session editor and place the commands in there just as you do for each driver individually. You then save the command string with a name. The name shows up in the Copy commands from...

In Driver...

To use the command Copy Commands from, you insert that driver command just as you would anything else. You pick Insert from Library and choose your saved string of commands.

When you tell the driver to drive, the commands expand like you added water to those tiny sponges we used to get from different companies. The command string expands out and you can drive.

The purpose of this is to save you all the time of entering in the same commands each time you drive. The good news is once the commands have expanded you can edit and change them as needed.

JCitron said:

Annie,

Setup the commands in the Schedule library. You setup this rule in the session editor and place the commands in there just as you do for each driver individually. You then save the command string with a name. The name shows up in the Copy commands from...

In Driver...

To use the command Copy Commands from, you insert that driver command just as you would anything else. You pick Insert from Library and choose your saved string of commands.

When you tell the driver to drive, the commands expand like you added water to those tiny sponges we used to get from different companies. The command string expands out and you can drive.

The purpose of this is to save you all the time of entering in the same commands each time you drive. The good news is once the commands have expanded you can edit and change them as needed.

Click to expand...

Thanks very much John. This is wonderful, - I could kiss you. I now have three of my local passenger service's schedules saved nicely into the schedule library all ready for me to use. No more entering them in manually at the start of every session.

KotangaGirl said:

Thanks very much John. This is wonderful, - I could kiss you. I now have three of my local passenger service's schedules saved nicely into the schedule library all ready for me to use. No more entering them in manually at the start of every session.

Click to expand...

{{{{{ HUGS }}}}}

Accepted. Virtual ones are safe these days!

I'm glad I could help. This truly is a life and timesaver. I've gotten very fond of this rule and command myself.

Yes John the new commands worked perfectly, - except once when I accidently gave an AI driver the wrong schedule, but I've only got myself to blame for that. Adding the notify command to the end of the schedule is something that I've found to be really useful too when things get busy.

All in all very much a timesaver as it allows me get on with concentrating on running trains on my layout instead of spending a lot of time entering in commands manually for several train schedules at the start of every session.