[charland]

Another expert heard from, thank you for setting us straight. People like Rick and myself did our crossing the proper way, taking the time to raise the road sections up and over the rails (just below the railhead) so vehicles did not go through the rails at crossings. Others found it easier to just run the road sections under the track and put a crossing over the tracks to disguise what they had done. If you watch a vehicle go across one of these crossings you see it goes threw the crossing and not over the crossing. Someone at Open Rails decided that they could "fix" this eye sore by changing the way OR reads a vehicle at a crossing so people didn't have to do the work in the future. That means routes where the crossing were done properly will get screwed up.

So, any other words of wisdom from your vast experience in route building? Always love expert opinions.

Paul

[hiball3985]

charland, on 10 July 2017 - 02:15 PM, said:

Another expert heard from, thank you for setting us straight.
So, any other words of wisdom from your vast experience in route building? Always love expert opinions.

Paul

Just cracked me up :rotfl: . I understand what you and Rick are saying. I don't know exactly how many OR only routes have been made? and can only guess at the number in the future for a slowly dying hobby. If it can't be made to correct some of the problems to run 100's of old routes it is almost useless.
Not to take away from what the OR team has accomplished, there will probably still be more issues that come up and I'm sure they will respond and do what ever is possible to correct it.

[charland]

Hi Jim,

James came up with a way to solve the issue, for OR to ignore any tracks under the roads. That would fix the issue of having extra tracks away from the mainline in MSTS routes. Not sure why this guy was ragging on Rick, like you said, I can't think of a single route that;s out that was created using the OR editor... maybe someday.

Paul :-)

[waivethefive]

charland, on 10 July 2017 - 02:15 PM, said:

So, any other words of wisdom from your vast experience in route building?

Well, since you asked nicely..... :)

I simply claim your 'proper way' is not quite so elegant after all. The way you do it, the road sections are elevated above the terrain as they cross the ballast and ties. The road sections hang in the air, with no side berms.

If the road hugged the terrain and laid below the track with crossing planks as a static object, there would be no 'see-under bermless elevated road' issue. And now that the vehicles take into account the track because of the glorious changes made to OR, they bounce up and over the crossing in a very responsive way.

But that is not really Rick's problem. His problem stems from all the unneeded track section buried deep under the road on the approaches to both sides of the crossings to keep vehicles stopped clear of the crossing. And low and behold, Open Rails never required them to be present. So if we are needing to build routes that function really slick in Open Rails, you know like our future depends on it, then lets build routes for Open Rails. That generates the benefit of vehicles responding to the crossing but not needlessly bouncing/dipping on approach to it because the needless track is not there in a real Open Rails route.

Sometimes, nudging some of the established route builders off their (now obsolete) set course is harder than nudging an asteroid off its impact trajectory with the earth.

Honestly. You asked.

[charland]

No ballast on the side of road pieces because they are raised over a crossing. Gee, now there's a reason to trash a few hundred routes. Have a look around, there's a thousand things wrong with this sim and I can tell you, even OR hasn't been getting them all right. If you really want to see what the problems are, try building a route before criticizing someone else' work.

Paul

[Rick-MONON]

I am so sorry that 10 years ago when I started the MONON-2 that I could not take Open Rails into consideration before I spent 8 years building the route.

What can I say except thank you for bashing me here in the forum so hard, but I still appreciate the OR team regardless.

Yes any further routes we make will be for OR.

waivethefive, on 10 July 2017 - 12:56 PM, said:

Not that such should be the motivation, anyway.

We just need to stop adding all these dumb features like zero degree nodes and excess track under road crossings into routes. You cannot insert all these MSTS handicaps unneeded by Open Rails into a route and then complain when Open Rails reacts to them queerly. If time is such a concern, then stop adding them to begin with. Look at the cumulative time to be saved.

Wouldn't it be better to have the ability to set custom clearances when we place level crossings via TSRE? Route builders should have the ability to set distances that are longer for crossings that are sharply angled and the car spawner simply reads the data and holds the vehicles back. No need for all this stubby track buried under roads, nor any elevation comparisons added to the code to 'save the day'. Of course, such a proper fix would require moving beyond the MSTS RE, a challenge in and of itself among the self-proclaimed 'old guys'. But I'm sure Open Rails will still be at fault somewhere, anyhow.

The problem I have here is the bailout mentality. Rick did something really dumb, passing the point of no return, in his pursuit to make what became a very large route more MSTS friendly. So the fix he was faced with was considerably more complex than simply firing up the RE. If we keep providing 'easy button' solutions, when does the discipline to not perform such brain farts again ever get instilled? If we always expect workarounds in the code, then how do we get route creators to stop adding all that useless junk into future routes? Where is the motivation?

No one ever asked anyone to fix old routes afflicted with problems caused by Open Rail's display of embedded MSTS handicaps. All that was asked of them is if they want it to run properly in Open Rails, then build it properly for Open Rails from the start, without the MSTS baggage. The Open Rails project should not be in the 'route rescuing' business.

[waivethefive]

Rick, I apologize if you feel you have been targeted here, it wasn't my intention, but you are not the victim here, either. The real victim has long been forward progress. Which there has been very little of while we continue to struggle with making content suitable to both platforms, while not doing a very good job of finding success in either. In the time we have been serving two 'gods', we have done nothing but become mired in the mud. The inability, to date, for anyone to successfully release an open rails route for public consumption speaks volumes about the stall. Rory's route is an excellent example. It looked scrumptious, and I bet it worked like a top, right up until he was convinced in the 11th hour to accommodate 'the other side'. Kaput, back to the drawing board. I guess: "We still don't have a made-for-OR route" will continue to be a self-fulfilling prophecy if that's how we always roll.

Paul, I do build routes. I know the workload involved.

I have long asserted that payware will have an increasing role in the (smaller) future, while freeware will be forever fractured by this divide and will permanently be trailing payware development for some time to come. While there have been some crappy payware routes in the past, the recent material has been very promising, a different generation of material. I don't believe we are 'saved' by simply making sure 1,000 dated freeware routes in a file library somewhere still work.

[Csantucci]

Attached you have the modified runactivity .exe files to replace in x.3897 that don't let the cars run under the road level.
Pls. try this before I upload the patch.


12/7/2017: Attachment removed because patch uploaded in x.3898.

[charland]

That's great, you've built routes. Maybe you would be so kind to post a few links so we can all have a look at your work and see how we are supposed to be doing it.

Thanks for the patch, that didn't take long!

Paul :-)

[hiball3985]

It seems someone is totally missing the point of this post about the issue of older routes that were built long before OR and are still run and enjoyed by countless people. It's like saying I should scrap my 1957 Ford because it wasn't built to new car standards that can be plugged into a computer for diagnosis :rotfl: . Well thats not going to happen and I'm not going to up grade it to todays electronics.