[railguy]

I have been meaning to post some of this for quite awhile, but a recent activity that I was designing reminded me of this. From what I can see, OR essentially treats loose consist locomotives and AI locomotives the same when it comes to lighting--that is, OR "implies" that a leading AI locomotive has headlights and ditchlights lit. I can see the logic for that--it ensures that lead AI locomotives have a lit headlight regardless of what the .eng file may or may not call for. However, OR treats loose consist locomotives essentially the same way, and I don't believe that is really correct--reason being, it's possible to have a yard full of idle loose consist locos that are going nowhere; they should not have their headlights lit. I suspect that the loose consist lighting "crept" into the software because there are cases where a loose consist is placed to emulate an actual train meet. However, even this often is not prototypical in U.S. railroading, as a train in the clear on a siding typically dims its headlight and shuts its ditchlights off.

One possible solution to this might be to allow a consist placed by the TSRE to be defined as either a "loose consist" or as a "static AI consist," with system-defined headlight parameters appropriate for each type of consist.

I've often thought that it would be nice to be able to define lights for more than train cars and locomotives, including sphere of light. That would make it possible, for example, to define a "Light section" for a street light, including a sphere of light, with the same parameters--color, size, brightness, azimuth, etc. I suspect one reason for a reluctance to do this would be that it could crash lower performance computers. That issue could be addressed, as it is with numerous other OR features, by having the ability to enable or disable it in the options menu.

Just some food for thought. As always, thanks to the OR team for all the great work they do, and for listening to OR users for suggestions and ideas.

[ErickC]

That would be a great solution for crossing lights, I might add. Especially if the lights could be somehow "attached" to an animated object (thinking wig-wags here).