[ATW]

pschlik, on 16 June 2024 - 12:41 PM, said:

Have you tried the brake animations again in the last week? I've got a long vacation coming up at the end of this week and I'd like to tie any loose ends with this change before then.

I got some satisfying results an changes even in the most latest unstable. Using my original animation 0,1,2,3 rather then 0,1 keyframes I have changed it to read 0,8,9,10 and got what I was looking for in minimum BC 10psi then big differences at 10 pound reduction BC 25psi as the animation increases as intended.

Sofar things are looking great for animation. I am going to start trying out handbrake an chain animations and maybe later down the line reserved animations for angle cocks an retainers.

Thanks for your effort at this an all you do!!

[pschlik]

Cool, I might add anglecock animations since that should be pretty trivial two-frame animation where 0=closed and 1=open. Don't see as much value in retainers since those are small, would rather have animations for very visible things like the G/P/R selectors on european stuff...which isn't even simulated so there's nothing to animate.

[ATW]

Yes, retainers are not really important to see even though they have similar sizes as a angle cock.

I'm impressed with the new braking animations and have tried it on handbraking as the next step in my open time. Handbraking though applies shoes faster rather than in slow steps, they also won't be necessary on articulate cars as there are lots more steps an animation rounds to fully applying a handbrake in real life on articulate intermodal.
The more 3D involved the more polys but there is always the LOD options to vanish them 20 feet away from view or alpha blink a texture file for applied/release.

Brake_Rig_Test_Video

[pschlik]

Not bad on the animations! Good to see it working as I had once heard rumblings that some animations wouldn't work unless they were a child of the MAIN object.


Right now, there's not much that can be done about the handbrake animation not matching the brake shoe animation because under the hood the handbrakes instantly move from applied to released, so the animation is already faking it by showing you smooth motion. Wouldn't be too difficult to change the handbrake to take time to apply but that's a bit overkill for just some animations (though if it had gameplay consequences, maybe I would add it...one of my more devious ideas is making all 'manual' train car interactions take as long as they do in real life-have fun waiting an hour for the conductor to set retainers on the entire train!)

Now one animation thing I would want to try in the future, though I don't know if .s files can handle it, is having different animations for the handbrake applying and releasing. A lot of equipment has a lever to quickly release all tension in the handbrake chain instead of spinning the brake wheel in reverse. Maybe that can be done as a second animation type where the first half of the frames are for applying the handbrake, the second half for releasing.

[ATW]

There are certain tricks to the animations and bug cure I had dealt with. Now one animation bug in particular is Motion vs Rotation. I had TMB (Truck Mounted Brake) on this test unit and it doesn't like X (Right an Left motions) while attached child to a bogie so I don't think it's important to view TMB Cylinders unless one wants to stick head completely between bogies. Trick I did for the shoes while child to a bogie is fish for a good axes pivot location that makes it do a good rotation to look like a motion animation and it worked no crashes or glitches.

Handbrake animation for a quick lever release would maybe need a new code or separate trigger but doesn't seem too important but it may be needed some day and a different animation code for chains to reverse animation and handbrake wheel not to. But it's nice the way it is as most times the release lever is stuck for me i just turn the brake wheel in release position just as if it were how mid modern N/A locomotive handbrake wheels with no release lever except those painful older EMD ones that made you crank to so many rounds to apply the handbrake like 50 times like I did last night... good gym work out when to tie them down lol.

MS made a confusing parameter and never seen what it does but what exactly was MS thinking with "NumberOfHandbrakeLeverSteps( 100 )" and can it be finely put to use?