[cesarbl]

There are three different DMI objects that can be placed at the top left corner of the screen:

• Lowest supervised speed within movement authority: only useful for Limited Supervision mode, it shows a speed limit.
  
  
• Time to Indication: the one you quote from the SRS. It's formed by a white square that increases in size over a grey background. When the driver (or maybe trackside) determines that there are bad adhesion conditions, depending on the national values stored on board (A_NVMAXREDADH variables), three different actions can be taken: 1) limit the maximum deceleration used for speed curves, 2) show target distance and speed even in ceiling speed monitor and/or 3) show the time to indication. With the default national values only the deceleration is reduced, and the TTI and target information aren't shown. Therefore it's not common to see it.
  
  
• Time to Permitted: it's not defined by the ETCS standard AFAIK, but some manufacturers (e.g. ALSTOM) have implemented it. I don't know the technical name for this object, but it's the yellow/orange/red square that tells the driver that he's getting closer to the permitted supervision limit. It is shown while the ETCS is in target speed monitoring.

WRT the gradient, it's a bug that has been inherited from the C++ DMI. I messed up the colors and didn't noticed it. As soon as I finish the text message area I'll upload a version with the fix.

[Csantucci]

Thanks for clarification.
I was informed that in Italy only Time to Permitted is used. As far as I was told, the square increases not only if Vtrain - Vpermitted increases, but also when the distance to the target point reduces, which seems understandable, because if you are nearer to the target point you have less time to re-enter into the speed limits.

I have another question: I asked about the planning icons used here, and there are some which aren't present in the official ones (e.g. the tunnel icon). So my question is: can a customization of this icon list be envisaged, so that national specialties can be considered?

[cesarbl]

I'll have a look at some ETCS documents used in Spain to see if I can find any reference to the time to permitted squares, in order to get an accurate formula.

In ETCS trackside version 1 there were special non stopping areas for bridges and tunnels, but were dropped in version 2. However, there is no DMI standarization for version 1 AFAIK. Our options are:

• Provide generic tunnel and bridge symbols in the Content folder. This doesn't provide too much customization but it's easier to do.
  
• Add a Graphic() parameter to the .cvf, which is then loaded into the DMI and used to show custom symbols, selected by the TCS via its index.

I'm not sure about what do v2 DMIs show when a tunnel or bridge is received from a v1 trackside.

[Csantucci]

Hi César,
both your options are OK to me. Take into account that there are additional icons here (e.g. one showing a symbol of a terminating siding), so maybe version two could be more general, but it is more complicated indeed. Maybe solution 1 can be sufficient, if it is OK for you to add new icons while people develop scripts for other countries, which maybe would need additional icons.

About your last sentence: if I have understood well, I don't see the problem, because the v2 DMI script will drop all info from trackside which it doesn't want to display.
I'm doing this already now: I have many types of INFO signals, but only a minority of them cause an icon to be displayed in the planning area.

[Csantucci]

César,
I inserted some orders and announcements, and as always your software worked.
There are two issues:
1) The ETCS DMI spec says "8.3.4.22 Along the distance scale, the bottom of the symbols shall be positioned at the distance
from the current train front position to the location where the corresponding symbols for
track conditions will start to be displayed in B3/4/5.
Instead I think that you place them with the top positioned there, because when the symbol reaches distance 0, it disappears only when it is completely below the zero bar, see picture. This is for sure very easy to be corrected.



2) Unfortunately the icons are often not shown completely, e.g. the lower horizontal segment of PL_09 appears and disappears, but I doubt that there is further space fore improvement.

It was confirmed to me that there is also a next station icon, to be displayed in the planning area.

[cesarbl]

In chapter 6 of SRS it is stated that if a tunnel or bridge is received by a v2 system, it shall be translated to a generic non stopping area condition, so the 0X symbol (PL_09) will be displayed. This means that these symbols aren't covered by the standard, and as such I think it's better to define them via the .cvf
These are the additional symbols used in version 1. From left to right: bridge, station, tunnel and end of track.

Re the track condition location, I forgot to change the y position from the one I use in my DMI UI to Monogame. It's just changing GetPlanningHeight(condition.DistanceToTrainM) - 10 to GetPlanningHeight(condition.DistanceToTrainM) - 35, so not a difficult task. Anyway, I'll have to check all the positions when I finish the rest of the windows, and then document the constants to clarify the code.

Maybe we can get better results with the icons by using mipmaps. I'll have to investigate to see if they can be generated at runtime, to avoid having different .png for each resolution. Maybe one full resolution icon and another scaled to half will be enough.

[Csantucci]

Yes, those four icons are the ones missing. So I see that, simply, what we are using here is v1, at least on this matter. As already said, what should be displayed is matter of the TCS script, which will be written to run following v1 or v2, so I'd be happy if you could simply add the four icons to the existing ones, and if you want add a flag that can be set by the script indicating whether the icons have to be displayed or not.
It's neither a problem to me to create an .ace file, but the problem is more on your side to write the necessary software and script hooks to transfer the icons and to manage them in a special way.

About scaling, yes, I'm using icons scaled to half and manually adjusted.

[cesarbl]

I have uploaded a version correcting the bugs you have found. I created a separate variable TimeToPermittedS different to TimeToIndicationS to avoid using negative values. The text message area is almost implemented, but I've disabled it until I do some more testing.

Attached thumbnail(s)

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[Csantucci]

The braking square is now there


César, in your preceding picture what dimensions (3rd and 4th parameter in the Position() entry) have you set for your DMI SPEEDOMETER in the .cvf file?

[cesarbl]

I'm using (67, 67), but that's too big (there's not enough space to place the navigation buttons). The scale ratio between X and Y is kept at 4:3, so the 4th position parameter is ignored if it's the same as the 3rd.

I resized all icons to half with ImageMagick via the command line and I got much better results (symbol lines don't appear and disappear anymore). I'm not sure about what the best option is: 1) generate the half-scaled icons and add them to the source code, 2) generate them at compile time, or 3) generate them when loading the sim. The easiest solution for me is the first one, but I don't know if it is OK to add more binary content to the repository.