[railguy]

I recently downloaded an activity that featured no loose consists. So, I copied a block of loose consists from another older activity that I had on the same route. I've done this frequently and it is a nice way to avoid the headache of going into TSRE to add loose consists for every activity that I make. I even have created some "generic" loose consist arrays in activities to facilitate copying them to other activities. Then I can just go into the "target" activity to add or remove consists to customize the loose consists to that activity. It saves a ton of time. However, using version 74 of MG, I did discover something that I had not encountered before--I may just not have noticed it, or it might be a new issue. Since I had run the activity that I had copied the loose consist list from and added to my target activity, I had deleted some obsolete locomotives from my hard drive that I had used in one of the loose consists. When I ran my new "modified" activity, only a few of the loose consists loaded. I checked the log file and it noted that the two locomotive files were missing--no other notation. What I figured out was that OR loaded the loose consists in the activity file up to those two missing files and then quit loading any of the remaining loose consists after that. When I removed the missing locos from the loose consist list, the entirety of the loose consists loaded just fine. So, I would have thought that OR would have just skipped over the missing loose consists and loaded the remainder, but, apparently, that is not how it works, at least in V74 of Monogame.

The second part of this is a request. Would it be possible to add an option in Explore Activity mode to load traffic and or loose consists from an activity to the Explore Activity? I thought that I remembered that as an option way back when. Thanks.

[Genma Saotome]

I'm hopeful that some day loose consists will be just another consist file. That would make things a lot easier.

As I read your post it occurred to me to go look into the use of siding names/locations as a means to place a loose consist into an activity file directly. Wonder if that'll work....

[railguy]

I actually like the method of placing consists in TSRE because you can actually see where the consist is placed in the environment. There are still some things that are a little "clunky" in the interface, but it beats MSTS, in my opinion. I do agree with the idea of loose consists being treated as "just another consist file"--where one could just substitute a different consist in the location by changing it in an editor. That would be sweet.

[conductorchris]

It would make a gigantic upgrade to be able to load loose consists from another activity into explore mode. It seems like it would be so simple to do, but it would have a very big impact.

Why? Most users primarily use explore mode. So enhancing it would have an outsized impact. It would for me.

Christopher

[Genma Saotome]

 conductorchris, on 04 October 2020 - 06:52 PM, said:

It would make a gigantic upgrade to be able to load loose consists from another activity into explore mode. It seems like it would be so simple to do, but it would have a very big impact.

Why? Most users primarily use explore mode. So enhancing it would have an outsized impact. It would for me.

Christopher

Why don't you make a formal request on the OR Trello page? That is where they take requests for features. Having a key command that does something along the lines of "Save all Consists and their locations" would give you more than half of what you want and from the code side of the fence, the data is already available so it should be easy enough to move the right data to several files. The only open question would be where to put them and what to call them but that's just an administrative issue so that too should be easy.