I have been working on an activity for the Lehigh Valley and have run into the problem of exceeding the number of activity events that MSTS can handle which I believe is 99. I thought that being able to put multiple pickups in one action event would enable me to get around the problem. Not so. I just lost another template.

The only way that I see to get around this is to enter around 50 pickups. Save and close. Create the car csv file. Change the name of the csv file. Bring up the template activity in the Activity Editor again. Delete all action events. Add another 50 or so pickups. Save and close. Create another car csv file. Copy the contents of that csv file to the first csv file. You now have 100 cars in that one. Bring up the template in the
Activity Editor again. so on and so on until all of the cars are in the csv file.

I note that in the Gallup Sub, you have about 348 cars in the csv file, but only 18 pickups in the Action events.

If there is an easier way of doing this, please let me know. Thanks.

Maybe we can prevail on George to increase this limit to 500 pickups in his next revision to BIN.

Don,

Yes you've hit on a limit with MSTS.  You can actually have as many pick up events as you like, but once you've saved, you can't re-open.  This isn't a problem for people running the templates because ActivityGenerator never puts that many pickup events into the actual activity.  I wish I knew a way to avoid requiring those pickup events, it would be a big help.  I have tried a number of ideas but so far none have worked.

For Gallup and some earlier ones, we have done it pretty much like you describe.  We put as many pickup events as we can stand into the .act file.  Then if we can't re-open this, we copy that .act file to a new name and delete all the action events in that file, and add more events, finally when we're done we merge it all back into one big .act file (which MSTS could never load) then run the Activity Generator "create csv file" utility.  Or maybe your idea is easier -- though you aren't limited to just 50.  Again, put as many in as you can stand, then create the .csv file.  Save that CSV file but go into the activty .act file w/ a text editor and delete out all the action events except one (to use as a placeholder), then go back and add more events, generate a csv file and merge it, etc.

Because of this limitation, for large routes, while I always place the cars near the beginning of my template creation cycle, I often do everything else (creating player paths, creating AI traffic, etc.) and save the action events for last.  That way I don't have as much frustration.

You haven't "lost" any of your work though (unless you've saved over your file).  You can still load the .act file in Activity Generator and create the csv from it, even if it's too large to load in MSTS.  THEN delete the events in that (or to be safe copy it with another name to some other folder outside of MSTS) and put more events until you're done, etc.

Thanks and sorry about this MSTS limitation.

Happy Railroading,

Steve

Steve,

Thanks. All is well. Template done & apparently working. Now testing some generated activities.

Don

Great!

Thanks for helping us to create templates!

Best,

Steve