Posted 07 January 2023 - 04:45 AM
My thoughts on Brandon's list
Firstly I have pretty much the same list, and as said above we need to be patient, unless we can recruit additional coders.
Steam Physics (almost there):
Booster Trucks- work is starting on these
Sound:
Whistles/Air Horns- Making a way to have more then one whistle play - Could be good for some locos, at least using a user defined cab control, but not sure about finding a keyboard short cut. (Some UK models use the B key for the second note on the two tone horn.)
Animation:
Coal Loads- Animated and fit with the tender - yes please. (Is there another coder interested in animation, so that Peter can concentrate on the physics?)
Tender Water Hatches- Animated water hatches that open when you go to refuel the locomotive with water. - maybe, but allowing a water crane to fill side tanks at the side rather than a tender at the centre would be good.
Also being able to refuel from a fire hydrant as well. - surely you can do this already, you just have to designated the fire hydrant as being a fuel (water) point.
Animated reversers - I am done with 16 or 32 frames for all of the rods and cranks - I really don't want to multiply that number by 10 or 20 to show all the movements in different gears, though it would look cool if any modeller has the time to spend on it.
Steam Graphics:
Having steam and smoke be separate from each other - it feels like we are just arriving there.
Sand- I am not so bothered about the sand as you don't see it from far away, but would quite like to see steam from steam sanding gear.
Having a working blower for steam locomotives and have it interact with the smoke/steam - the blower physics should be working now, but graphics for blower could be enhanced, also where ejectors exhaust up the chimney they should impact the smoke flow and direction.
Cylinder Cocks- Cylinder cock steam be dependent on how much the throttle is open or closed - again it feels as though this is coming closer, as with cylinder exhaust from the chimney.
Steam Physics (maybe one day in the distant future):
Differences in fuel- Having a difference in the type of fuel used by a steam locomotive. Meaning different types of coal, wood, oil, exc.
Modelling combustion and getting smoke colours correct particularly for hand firing is a significant challenge.
Wood and coal (and even bagasse) are similar enough in behaviour that the same model can be used with different parameters. One of the big issues with these fuels is the complex nature of combustion as they contain both rapid burning volatile matter and slow burning fixed carbon.
For the present time we can also consider coke as being the same as other solid fuels, although coke burns in a very different way to fuels containing volatiles and probably deserves a different model.
Oil is rather different and needs different controls including steam heating to make it flow and in some cases an atomisation control that is separate from the burner control. It is the opposite in combustion to coke being all volatile matter and no fixed carbon.
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Weter, on 07 January 2023 - 01:44 AM, said:
