[Kenny Eaton]

Good Afternoon All,

I have recently been reading a thread from 8/29/15 "Few General Questions about OR PLEASE", about setting up mini routes. I downloaded LinkShell and I must say that this was too easy to do. The first mini I did was copy&paste the routes and trains. Then linked the global and sound. Works perfect. The next one I did I made a Routes folder and linked the routes I wanted in there as well as Trains, Global and Sound. Works perfect. I now have two questions on this before I go further.

1. Once the Trains folder is linked, can you delete all the loco's not needed out of the mini without it affecting the root folder?

2. Route Editor. If you add scenery to a route in the main route folder will the link pick this up and pass it on the the mini for running in OR?

[Genma Saotome]

Kenny Eaton, on 03 May 2017 - 10:02 AM, said:

Good Afternoon All,

I have recently been reading a thread from 8/29/15 "Few General Questions about OR PLEASE", about setting up mini routes. I downloaded LinkShell and I must say that this was too easy to do. The first mini I did was copy&paste the routes and trains. Then linked the global and sound. Works perfect. The next one I did I made a Routes folder and linked the routes I wanted in there as well as Trains, Global and Sound. Works perfect. I now have two questions on this before I go further.

1. Once the Trains folder is linked, can you delete all the loco's not needed out of the mini without it affecting the root folder?

2. Route Editor. If you add scenery to a route in the main route folder will the link pick this up and pass it on the the mini for running in OR?

1. NO.
2. Yes -- in fact in works both ways.


What I've done to avoid the problem you cite in (1) is to create my own master library of rolling stock that is outside of any MSTS/OR directory tree. I have it organized into folders by the type of rolling stock, meaning diesel locomotives has its folder, steam locomotives have their's, boxcars, hoppers, etc. etc. Very handy. My library is further divided by era but that's not going to be useful for everyone.

I then make copies from here to the various miniroute directories. In some cases I use symbolic links, in others I use a great, cheap utility called Beyond Compare. It shows me two windows I specify, one being from my library (.e.g., boxcars) and the other a \trainset directory. It then matches up all the folder names and by color coding the names shows me whether everything in both folders is identical, or which one is newer. Highlight a mismatch, hit the copy button and bingo, they're now in sync.

Download a trial -- it'll say you get two weeks but as Einstein said, time is relative, so about 10 weeks will pass before it rolls over dead. I'm pretty sure by then you'll agree it's worth the $35.

[Kenny Eaton]

Thanks Dave. I may give it a try soon. After starting this thread, I did test the deleting. One engine file into a empty recycle bin. I immediately restored it. After some thinking, this is what I came up with. Link the trainsets folder into the mini routes then copy the consist folder in to all then just delete out the consists that I didn't want. Nothing but NS in the NS mini and so on.

[conductorchris]

Dave, you are joining links to multiple folders to create your virtual TRAINSET folder. How do you organize that so it works?

Here is a simple example of what I'd want to do: three trainset folders for NS, N&W and Southern. Some routes draw from the NS and N&W folders, some from the NS and Southern folders.

Christopher

[Genma Saotome]

Ignoring the era directories for simplicity my outside-of-MSTS/OR organizing directories for rolling stock look like this:

Rolling Stock Library

MSTS Rolling Stock Library (it looks the same as the OR library so I'll not both showing any detail here)
Open Rails Rolling Stock Library

Canada

Freight Cars
Locomotives
Passenger Cars

other countries I'm skipping

US

Freight Cars
Locomotives
Passenger Cars

And then for the interesting stuff that's inside Freight Cars, etc,, that looks like this:
Freight Cars

Boxcar
Flatcar
Gondola
Hopper
Reefer
Stock
Tankcar

Locomotives

Diesel
Heavy Electric
Steam
Traction

Passenger Cars

Heavyweight
Streamlined

My interests are strongly focused on the late steam early diesel era, mainline US railroads. Obviously with some other geographic or era focus the folders would be somewhat different.

I did not show era folders but they are mixed in between the class of rolling stock (e.g., Freight Cars ) and the type of rolling stock (e.g., Boxcars).. As an example, most follow this naming convention:
Built 1910-1950
Built 1950-1960
Built 1960-1980
I know a fair amount about when most rolling stock was first built, at least until 1960. Beyond that I'm pretty ignorant and so in reality anything that looks like it's post 1960 goes into that last category. What the "era" folders do is group things similarly to how I've set up my miniroutes. I have 13 right now... one has MSTS installed and that's where I might do route editing, either with KUJU's RE or Goku's. All of the rest take the same general form of region name plus range of years, so "Eastern 1932-52" would be one miniroute location, "Eastern 1953-64" would be another, and so on.

When combined with the "era" categories in the rolling stock library I now have the means to keep more modern rolling stock out of older era miniroutes, even tho the same routes may be present as well as be more circumspect about older stuff appearing in more modern routes.


On final comment. I understand that we can now put a path on each line of a .con file. I have not explored the utility of that feature but it sounds as-if it could eliminate the need to populate the \trainset folders by simply setting a path statement back to the organized library.

Now, with that very lengthy introduction, your questions: AFAIK you have to put individual folders into \trainset, just as we have always done. That blocks the possibility of creating a library of all Southern stuff, etc. etc., which is kinda what you were hinting you'd like to have. The solution I've created is, IMO better than leaving everything in one \trainset folder and it does let me put individual .eng and .wag folders into multiple miniroutes, but that's the limit. Either folders in \trainset need to be changed to allow many levels so you can have one for SOU and another for NS... or something else more radical is needed... or somebody looks into the path in .con files and then demonstrates how that would be useful.

[Genma Saotome]

P.S. I now have moved everything that exists under \routes to a SSD disk and am using symbolic links to populate my miniroutes. AFAIK this produces SSD speeds when reading the actual route files. If anyone knows the facts of the matter, please speak up as I'd like to know the real answer.

[conductorchris]

So you could use symbolic links out of the various trainset folders in all the miniroutes pointing toward the master rolling stock library. But man, what a lot of work to set up for each rolling stock folder!

How hard would it be to add an open rails feature to include additional folders into the trainset folder for mini-routes?

I'm bumping up against the 1TB hard drive limit in my laptop. That's really as big as they come for laptops - it doesn't appear that buying a bigger hard drive is really a good option. I'm having to do some sugary, somehow. I do have a separate Solid state drive with the intention of using it for routes, but I've been slow in transferring things over. I think that will have to be my solution.

Christopher

[Genma Saotome]

If you already have some mini-routes and are also near exhausting your available disk space, use symbolic links for any routes you have duplicated, for all \global and \sound folders, and if the size make sit worthwhile, common.cab and common.snd. On my PC those non-route directories add up to about 310mb per miniroute.

If there are routes you will not do terrain editing upon there are files in \tiles that can be deleted (you'll have to research which ones) and from what I can tell all .sd files can be removed as well, all of which should be archived on a dvd in case you have a need for them later on.

WRT using symbolic links for rolling stock, by and large I've done so only for those folders that are large. In many cases I have consolidated numerous individual folders into one by means of editing the texture name inside the .s file and then doing a copy - paste - rename as needed of the texture files. For the rest I use Beyond Compare.

Last, because I do have quite a few symbolic links I thought it wise to create a .bat file that identifies the links and lists them in a text file. I put a copy in each \route and \trainset directories. The .bat files are listed in the PC scheduler so it runs daily and the resulting text files are backed up daily. The contents of hte .bat file are:

del Symbolic_Link_List.txt
date /t > Symbolic_Link_List.txt
time /t >> Symbolic_Link_List.txt
dir /al /s >> Symbolic_Link_List.txt

And a snippet from the result:

 Directory of E:\Bin\Open Rails - US East 1930-1952\Routes

2015-08-19  05:45 PM    <JUNCTION>     Boston & Maine III [\??\F:\Bin\MSTS Static\Routes\Boston & Maine III]
2016-09-23  04:26 PM    <SYMLINKD>     L&HR_1940 [F:\Bin\MSTS Static\Routes\L&HR_1940]
               0 File(s)              0 bytes

 Directory of E:\Bin\Open Rails - US East 1930-1952\Trains\Trainset

2016-12-04  10:13 PM    <SYMLINKD>     BR PRR R50B [D:\Users\Dave\MSTS\Rolling Stock Library\Open Rails Rolling Stock Library\US\Passenger Cars\1910-1945\BLLW R50B REEFER PACK]
2015-10-15  07:36 PM    <SYMLINKD>     Common.Fleet [D:\Users\Dave\MSTS\Rolling Stock Library\Open Rails Rolling Stock Library\US\Common_Fleet_Stds]
2015-10-15  08:45 PM    <SYMLINKD>     Common.Model [D:\Users\Dave\MSTS\Rolling Stock Library\Open Rails Rolling Stock Library\US\Common_Model_Stds]
2016-12-16  04:19 PM    <SYMLINKD>     FM_BM_33500-33999 [D:\Users\Dave\MSTS\Rolling Stock Library\Open Rails Rolling Stock Library\US\Freight Cars\Built 1910-1950\Flatcar\FM_BM_33500-33999]
2016-11-24  11:51 PM    <SYMLINKD>     FM_PRR_F30A_BLLW_PW [D:\Users\Dave\MSTS\Rolling Stock Library\Open Rails Rolling Stock Library\US\Freight Cars\Built 1910-1950\Flatcar\FM_PRR_F30A_BLLW_PW]
2016-11-28  11:12 PM    <SYMLINKD>     HM_PRR_H21A_PW [D:\Users\Dave\MSTS\Rolling Stock Library\Open Rails Rolling Stock Library\US\Freight Cars\Built 1910-1950\Hopper\BLLW-H21A-2.0]
2016-09-25  01:31 PM    <SYMLINKD>     NE_NYC_19100-19300 [D:\Users\Dave\MSTS\Rolling Stock Library\Open Rails Rolling Stock Library\US\Freight Cars\Built 1910-1950\Caboose\NE_NYC_19100-19300]
2015-10-17  01:55 PM    <SYMLINKD>     RS_SFRD_Rr-35 [D:\Users\Dave\MSTS\Rolling Stock Library\Open Rails Rolling Stock Library\US\Freight Cars\Built 1910-1950\Reefer\RS_SFRD_Rr-35]
2016-09-25  12:50 PM    <SYMLINKD>     RS_SFRD_Rr-39 [D:\Users\Dave\MSTS\Rolling Stock Library\Open Rails Rolling Stock Library\US\Freight Cars\Built 1910-1950\Reefer\RS_SFRD_Rr-39]
2016-11-24  10:25 PM    <SYMLINKD>     RS_SFRD_Rr-40 [D:\Users\Dave\MSTS\Rolling Stock Library\Open Rails Rolling Stock Library\US\Freight Cars\Built 1910-1950\Reefer\RS_SFRD_Rr-40]

That can be quickly edited into actual symlink commands to re-create the links in the event of a disk crash or move to another PC.

[Jovet]

Kenny Eaton, on 03 May 2017 - 10:02 AM, said:

1. Once the Trains folder is linked, can you delete all the loco's not needed out of the mini without it affecting the root folder?

One way to think about what you're doing is to imagine your house. Let's say you buy a house at 331 Oak Wood Lane. You go to work and then drive to your house every night, where you eat and go to sleep. Eventually you change jobs and start to travel. It sure would be nice to have the comforts of home when on the road, wouldn't it? Luckily someone has invented a teleportation device which you rent and install at 10587 Big River Road in some far city across the country. When you walk into 10587 Big River Road, it instantly transports you to your house at 331 Oak Wood Lane, and when you walk out of your house, it transports you back to your distant location. When you're eventually done traveling each trip, you eventually go back to your house at 331 Oak Wood Lane. If you go to 10587 Big River Road and burn down the house that you find there, you'll find that the house at 331 Oak Wood lane has also burnt down. This is because they are the same house. It just has two physical ways of ingress instead of just one. Similarly, when you create these links to these folders, it's still the same folders and files. It's just in more than one place on your computer, which saves space instead of having to actually duplicate it all.

[Kenny Eaton]

Jovet, on 04 May 2017 - 02:15 PM, said:

One way to think about what you're doing is to imagine your house. Let's say you buy a house at 331 Oak Wood Lane. You go to work and then drive to your house every night, where you eat and go to sleep. Eventually you change jobs and start to travel. It sure would be nice to have the comforts of home when on the road, wouldn't it? Luckily someone has invented a teleportation device which you rent and install at 10587 Big River Road in some far city across the country. When you walk into 10587 Big River Road, it instantly transports you to your house at 331 Oak Wood Lane, and when you walk out of your house, it transports you back to your distant location. When you're eventually done traveling each trip, you eventually go back to your house at 331 Oak Wood Lane. If you go to 10587 Big River Road and burn down the house that you find there, you'll find that the house at 331 Oak Wood lane has also burnt down. This is because they are the same house. It just has two physical ways of ingress instead of just one. Similarly, when you create these links to these folders, it's still the same folders and files. It's just in more than one place on your computer, which saves space instead of having to actually duplicate it all.

Excellent way to put it Joseph. I linked everything in the Mini's except the consist folder. I did it this way because there are over 700 consist files in there and I have no idea what rolling stock is needed in all those. So, by linking the trainset folder to all the mini's I could just copy & paste the consist then just delete out the con files that I don't want in the BNSF mini or the NS mini and so on....This works perfect for me.