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.

[tjbuege]

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.

I think you misunderstood my reasons for combining multiple sidings into one pickup event. I don't do it to get around the siding limit...I do it to make it easier for me to manage the activity. I'd much rather scroll through a list of a dozen events, than scroll through a list of 70 (or 90) pickup events.

Regardless, thanks for the clarification on the .ACT file. If I would have thought about it a bit longer, I would have come to the same answer.

Tim

[xpdingo]

I think you misunderstood my reasons for combining multiple sidings into one pickup event. I don't do it to get around the siding limit...I do it to make it easier for me to manage the activity. I'd much rather scroll through a list of a dozen events, than scroll through a list of 70 (or 90) pickup events.

Regardless, thanks for the clarification on the .ACT file. If I would have thought about it a bit longer, I would have come to the same answer.

Tim

Tim:

What route are you making a template for. If you intend to post it it would be good to know so others are not working on the same route.

Pete

[tjbuege]

Tim:

What route are you making a template for. If you intend to post it it would be good to know so others are not working on the same route.

Pete

It's not something I intend to post. I'm playing around with the Niagara Corridor route. I'm toying with the idea of developing multiple templates to allow more flexibility. I want to simulate specific jobs on the railroad, so I'll be customizing the traffic for each. I also might change the designation of certain tracks from one template to the next. For example, a track might be Industry in one template, or Unit in another, or Eye Candy. I would likely do this with yard tracks, so I can try and simulate classification jobs. I haven't worked through all the details yet.

As an aside, I'm working on figuring out how to determine a siding from car coordinates, to eliminate the need for pickup actions. It *should* be simple math, to determine the closest point to a segment of track. There's the whole matter of Qauternions used by MSTS to represent rotation. I've already tackled that. There is a spreadsheet already out there that can be used to convert Quats to typical Euler rotations, but it's buggy. I think the rotations were done in the wrong order. Anyhow, I hope to be able to figure this out. I've already written a program to identify gaps or breaks in the rail that might cause the cars to jerk suddenly. You plugin a threshold (in meters), and the program identifies the node in the track where the misalignment is. I did this to attempt fixing rough track. Problem is, it's not trivial to adjust the track. But that's another story.

If I do figure out how to identify sidings from car coordinates in the ACT file, I'll probably share it with Steve so he can update Activity Generator. But don't hold your breath...I'm pretty busy with other things.

Tim

[nbeveridge]

As an aside, I'm working on figuring out how to determine a siding from car coordinates, to eliminate the need for pickup actions. It *should* be simple math, to determine the closest point to a segment of track. There's the whole matter of Qauternions used by MSTS to represent rotation.

If I do figure out how to identify sidings from car coordinates in the ACT file, I'll probably share it with Steve so he can update Activity Generator. But don't hold your breath...I'm pretty busy with other things.

Tim

I worked with Quats when I was a mission controller at NASA's Johnson Space Center. This IS rocket science, since as you say it must be done in the correct order, and most people, even engineers and scientists, are not disciplined enough to learn how to do it.

And I guarantee that Steve will want to know your solution for the car location. If we could get rid of the pick up events, template creation would be much quicker and easier.