Too Many Sidings? Options

[tjbuege]

Hi,

While creating a template for a large route, I ran into a problem with MSTS Activity Editor. It started to silently crash when opening my template I was working on. After digging around and experimenting, I believe I have found a limitation in AE to the number of sidings that can be referred to with a Pickup Cars action. It seems you can not refer to more than 90 different siding. Has anyone else run into this problem? Are there any workarounds? How are templates created for large routes with more than 90 sidings?

Thanks,
Tim

[xpdingo]

Hi,

While creating a template for a large route, I ran into a problem with MSTS Activity Editor. It started to silently crash when opening my template I was working on. After digging around and experimenting, I believe I have found a limitation in AE to the number of sidings that can be referred to with a Pickup Cars action. It seems you can not refer to more than 90 different siding. Has anyone else run into this problem? Are there any workarounds? How are templates created for large routes with more than 90 sidings?

Thanks,
Tim

I believe the limit is 75 Pickup events, after that it will crash. Stop your pickup events before this and create your SWLACT file. Go to the activities folder for this route and move the file you just created to a temp folder and rename it SWLACT2. Keep doing this untill you have all the pickups for the template, always moving and rename them 2,3,4 or as many as you need. When done copy and paste all the folders into one with the correct name.

Pete















swlact file

[nbeveridge]

I believe the limit is 75 Pickup events, after that it will crash. Stop your pickup events before this and create your SWLACT file. Go to the activities folder for this route and move the file you just created to a temp folder and rename it SWLACT2. Keep doing this untill you have all the pickups for the template, always moving and rename them 2,3,4 or as many as you need. When done copy and paste all the folders into one with the correct name.

Pete
swlact file

An excellent response, Pete. This is a trick that experienced template creators employ routinely, and it is not obvious to others.

[tjbuege]

An excellent response, Pete. This is a trick that experienced template creators employ routinely, and it is not obvious to others.

It's definitely breaking at 91, so I'm seeing a limit of 90. Not sure why others see it at 75. Could it be because I run train.exe with the -mem:2048 parameter?

As an aside, I combine multiple sidings/pickups into a single Pickup Cars event, where it makes sense. For example, all sidings at a town get picked up as one event. This keeps the number of pickup action events down, and helps me locate specific sidings if I need to change something.

Anyhow, it sounds like I'm dealing with this the correct way, by doing things in stages. So let me ask this question...is the actual *.act file needed once the two *.csv files are generated? I believe the answer is "yes", because that is where the player paths are picked up from?

Thanks for the responses.

Tim

[nbeveridge]

It's definitely breaking at 91, so I'm seeing a limit of 90. Not sure why others see it at 75. Could it be because I run train.exe with the -mem:2048 parameter?

As an aside, I combine multiple sidings/pickups into a single Pickup Cars event, where it makes sense. For example, all sidings at a town get picked up as one event. This keeps the number of pickup action events down, and helps me locate specific sidings if I need to change something.

Anyhow, it sounds like I'm dealing with this the correct way, by doing things in stages. So let me ask this question...is the actual *.act file needed once the two *.csv files are generated? I believe the answer is "yes", because that is where the player paths are picked up from?

Thanks for the responses.

Tim

I do not know why you are seeing 90 as the limit. I always stop at or before 70, because 70 is always safe. Too much work to lose to take a chance on more than that.

Combining multiple sidings into one event never helped the situation, from my experience. I tried it and it failed. I.e. if I put 10 into one event, then MSTS would lock up around 66 (65 + 10 = 75). Again, too much work to lose to take a chance on more than that.

The actual .act file is needed, which file must includie the placement of ALL rail cars for ALL pick up events. This is required so that MSTS can know where and what cars are to be placed. AND the cars in the activity must correspond EXACTLY to the combined SWLACT .csv file, or else you will get unexpected (and undesired) results.