[railguy]

I recently purchased the Mullan Pass Route from TrainSimulations. I've run a couple of activities with it and my observations are based on that. First, this is a wonderful route in most every regard. I have only a couple of criticisms of the route and I'll get to those in a minute. It's obvious that Sean Kelley did a huge amount of research to make the route as authentic as possible. One of his biggest accomplishments is that route, more than most, really captures the "feel" of the real thing. Vegetation, terrain, etc. is very accurate for the area--unlike many other routes out there. TS has also vastly improved the physics of the rolling stock substantially and, for the most part, the rolling stock included with the route is high quality. All in all, a superb effort, and well worth the price of the route.

Now, a couple of criticisms that I hope might be addressed, and one big issue that I will bring up as something I would hope the the OR Team will look at. The route issues:
1. Like far too many routes, night lighting (street lights, yard area lights, etc.) are sadly lacking. I can't necessarily blame the route builders for this. MSTS and OR (still) do a crappy job of rendering these (no decent light cast, etc.), so it's not surprising that many route builders don't waste much time with night lighting. I don't think that will change until OR makes sphere of light available to ANY light source in the sim. I've heard all the arguments against this, but TS20** has been doing it for years, so it can be done.

2. "Buildings in cow pasture syndrome." Again, this is really common in too many routes. This is where town buildings, industry, etc. are just plopped into the "grassy" terrain, even right in urban, suburban, industrial and town areas. There is some of this is Mullan, probably its biggest visual downer. One of the few route builders who has worked to avoid this is Rory Rice with the latest versions of Blackfoot. 3DTrains also worked at tackling this long ago in Feather River. Again, this is one area that TS20** has done better at getting right.

Finally, the OR "issue." More and more route builders, TrainSimulations being a major one, are adopting the "mini-route" method of installing routes. I avoided this with their earlier offering, installing the earlier routes in the main MSTS Route folder and I paid the price when the installer modified all kinds of stuff in the Global folder, etc. This time I installed Mullan as instructed in a mini-route folder. Here is what I HATE about that: The TS mini-route folder has it own "captive" Trains folder, meaning that it can only use the rolling stock supplied with the route, unless one copies any other rolling stock to that mini-route Trains folder that one intends to use with the route. That STINKS! I want the option to be able to use any rolling stock on Mullan that I have on my hard drive. Period. Copying all that over to a mini-route is not an option because my Trains folder in MSTS is 42.5 gigabytes! So, herewith is my suggestion: When OR loads, it should look for all rolling stock in any of the installation folders listed on the "Content" tab and make content in them able to load into an activity being run in the mini-route. The other, possibly preferable option would be to essentially eliminate the "Global" folder from OR and allow its contents to live in each individual route. That would allow any route to live within the single Route folder and grab its train content from a single Trains folder. I would welcome any discussion about this.

At any rate, a huge thank you to TS and Sean for a fine route.

[steved]

I got tired of having to have a separate Trains folder for each OR content install, aka mini route.
At one point I had six installs going, each with their own Trains folder. If I wanted to run a specific train on another install I had to copy all the stuff. It became tedious and hard to keep track of.
Now I have two Trains folders that I use. I have the whole enchilada Trains folder with everything and I have a smaller folder that has "the good stuff", things that have been brought up to Open Rails standards, custom cars, etc. I use Link Shell Extension to just drop a symbolic link for the trains I want in the root folder where I want it.
If you have a route with route specific trains you'll want to probably rename your Trains folder, I use Trains1 just to keep it in place.
Pro tip, you can use it for shapes and textures if you tinker with routes.

Steve

[conductorchris]

I also use link shell extension. It makes a lot of things easier with mini-routes

[R H Steele]

Use Junction Link Magic, same difference I suppose, although I really have never clearly understood the fundamental differences between Hardlinks, Junction Links, and Symbolic.

[uli]

railguy, on 29 March 2020 - 06:52 AM, said:

I want the option to be able to use any rolling stock on Mullan that I have on my hard drive.

Here is what I did: On my HD I have a full MSTS installation (at "C:\1MSTS") with all my routes and rolling stock and a separate folder "C:\TrainSimulations" that was created when I installed the BNSF Seligman add-on for OR. I hardly use MSTS anymore and have added my full MSTS installation to the "Contents" in OR.

I installed the Mullan Pass add-on into "C:\TrainSimulations" using the path preset by the installer. After that, I copied the "Mullan" route (only the route, nothing else) from "C:\TrainSimulations\Routes" to the "Routes" folder of my full MSTS installation and deleted all activity, service and traffic files from that copy. This way I can run any rolling stock from my full MSTS installation in explore mode on the Mullan route. Prerequisite is that you have X-tracks and Scalerail shape files in the "Global\shapes" folder of your full MSTS installation.

For running activities on the Mullan Pass route I use the route in the separate "C:\TrainSimulations" folder.

This works fine on my computer. I did the same for the CN Ruel Sub route and the BNSF Seligman Route for OR.

[railguy]

I thought that I would follow up on my solution to the Mullan Pass mini-route issue. Here's what I did: I figured out that my main "wish" was to be able to use all the rolling stock and consists that I have available for OR on the route. Copying all of that to the Mullan mini-route folder wasn't practical. So, I copied all of the Mullan Pass Trains folder over to my main MSTS directories (I no longer use MSTS, but have retained its file folders). Then I put Junction Links (thank you all for the suggestion of that) in the Mullan Route pointing all the Trains folders to the main MSTS Trains folder. Problem solved. Mullan still runs as a mini-route, but has access to all of my rolling stock and consists. I'm now pondering creating mini-routes folders for a number of my regularly run routes and doing the same thing. As a cautionary note, I was careful when I copied the Mullan Trains folder content over to the main MSTS folder to make sure that it did not overwrite things in the main folder that I did not want changed.

[Csantucci]

Good solution, I think I'll use it too for some mini-routes.

[railguy]

One further note--after I copied the Trains folder from Mullan to the main MSTS folders, I moved the contents of the Mullan Trains folder to a backup folder that I have on another drive. That way, I still have a "pristine" copy of the original Mullan Trains folder if I ever need it.

[ErickC]

I don't see why we can't have the ability to choose the route content folder and the trainset content folder separately in the options. This allows content developers to retain the important ability to test content in a separate location from their normal trainset folder, which is an important intermediate in the error checking process before beta test.

[conductorchris]

I agree with Erick. It's hard to imagine it would be hard programming.
I would also suggest the ability to have multiple TRAINSET folders.
This one change would make a lot of things a lot easier.
Christopher