QUOTE(tjbuege @ Feb 27 2009, 01:14 PM)
And for even more control, allow the option of randomizing source tracks.
Good point. It's easy to get caught up in trying to automate everything (something I do a lot with my job), but there always is the Activity Editor to fall back on for polishing up and fine tuning.
I'll play around with this idea. This might be a good way to generate yard jobs, too.
And that would be me! I bet you couldn't guess.
When I'm participating in operating sessions on model railroads, I'm the one that will take the most difficult switching job, or the yard job. I'm a problem solver, and I like challenging puzzles. One of the primary reasons I puchased Activity Generator was to generate an endless supply of switching activities.
That would be great (along with a check box to randomize source tracks!
)
Seriously, I appreciate the conversation we've had here. It has digressed somewhat from my original post, but I think it has been worth it. Not every developer is as interactive with their user community. I do not envy your position of trying to please everyone. It can become a challenge, I'm sure. So, thank you very much.
Tim
Thanks! At the end of the day it's people like you, who are passionate about this hobby, that I created this for. I too do a lot of model railroading, and am a member of a club near Tulsa that operates monthly with a dispatcher and full CTC, working yard, locals, turns, etc. See
www.csrailclub.com I originally developed this program as a hobby, for my own use, because I wanted to have fun switching at the end of a hard day at work. WRITING a switching activity wasn't any fun because a) it took to long and
since I wrote it, I already 'solved' the puzzle before I ran it. So I needed something that would GENERATE challenging activities on the fly.
As for the dialog, I enjoy the dialog too, this is a hobby for me and I do it for the fun, I do have a "real job" outside this MSTS venture. Yes I charge for the program but I do that to limit my interaction to only those who are interested enough in the program to plunk down $15, and also to pay for my web hosting and other services and expenses I incur monthly. I just filed for my 2008 income tax so I can honestly say that I LOST a little money on this business last year. But no big deal, I'm not really in it for the money and anyway I needed the deduction. My biggest problem is that my job entails a lot of travel so it sometimes takes longer than I'd like for me to get back to folks. I couldn't keep this site or the business alive without contributors like Norm Beveridge, Denis Gionet, Peter Mulvey, and many others. Nor would I want to.
As for the source tracks I'll see what I can do, but you need to know, although you will usually have to pull a contiguous string of cars on each yard track worked, if you don't check simple mode, those cars are NOT in order. To explain better, let's say there is an industry to be worked in simple mode. AG will then place cars on that industry track, and always call for you to pull a sequential subset from that track (if there are 5 cars on it you may need to pull the first 3, first 2, etc.). Also AG will place your setouts to that track, on a "source track", all together in a single string (unless it runs out of room on the source track). Now in "complex" mode (simple mode not checked), as you have seen AG will call for various cars to be picked up from that industry track, not necessarily in order. Also, it will randomply place each of the setouts, each on it's own source track. You will see this behavior more if you put 4 or more source tracks in the mix when generating. Now you WILL need to pull a string from each source track, because AG will keep adding cars to each track as needed to fulfill the setouts, but, in complex mode if you have 4 setouts for a given industry, it is likely that at least some of those will come from different yard tracks. In fact that is one reason that we print the "destination" on the workorder next to pickups from source tracks: so if you want, you can do the yard job too and put the train in order (block your train) for the coming setouts. So in other words if you have 4 setouts, one may be the fourth car on source track 1, another may be the first car on source track 2, the third might be the fifth car also on source track 2, etc. The program generates a random number between 1 and the number of source tracks you have called for, EACH TIME it needs to place a pickup to be set out later, to determine which of the source tracks to place that individual pickup on. Not so with simple mode, then, it tries to put the cars in order (it assumes the yard job has already blocked the cuts).
Since you clearly have an inquisitive mind, you can gain some insight into how the program really "works" by generating diagnostic files (such as the ones you sent me which helped me to resolve this latest problem), and then reading those files using WordPad. There is some stuff you can skip through, but eventually it will "talk you through" every decision the program makes: what tracks it checked, why it chose a certain one, why it stopped scheduling setouts or pickups on that track (typically because a numeric limit you set was reached), etc. It's a pretty good "peak under the hood" and can give you some good insight.
Thanks,
Steve