Editor turns fickle ... again!

[OldProf]

I should have known something was wrong when I opened the TimeTable editor and the frap rate dropped from 20+ to 5.

Wait ... I should start at the beginning. I've been working on an elaborate shunting scenario with quite a bit of AI traffic for Western Lines of Scotland. As of today, I thought it was ready to publish. I just wanted to take one more run through to make sure. This scenario begins with the player engine (PE) picking up a 21-wagon freight that has been dropped on Dumphries Station centre road, which runs between the two primary station roads. Here are the first few steps in the scenario:

1) PE reverses to Dumphries Depot entry marker, stops, waits for route to centre road to open, asks for permission to pass the signal at danger ...
2) drives forward to centre road and couples to wagons

Sounds easy, is easy, and has run correctly and easily since I first set up the scenario.

But not today! Today, having arrived at the entry marker and stopped, instead of a path opening to the centre road, the signal showed green with a divergence to the right, back toward the starting point, but ending abruptly before reaching there.

Solution? Well, yes, I did find one. First, I restarted my computer, cleared all blueprints.pak files, restarted RW and my scenario. Still not working ... as just described. Then I cloned my scenario and opened the clone for editing. The only thing I could think to try was removing the instruction to stop at Dumphries Depot entry marker, which I did. Suddenly, the scenario's opening maneuvers once again ran as planned ... without, of course, the stop at instruction. Okay, I can cover that in the beginning instruction. But, will the "dispatcher" change its mind again when someone else tries to run the scenario?

Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr!

[OldProf]

The saga continues:

As noted above, yesterday I "fixed" my scenario by eliminating the first Drive To instruction. The player still followed the same path and made the same stop and asked permission to stop at the same red signal in order to re-enter the depot area. The player was then able to couple to the 23 wagons (supposedly) dropped earlier and move them into Dumphries Yard siding 1 to begin sorting.

I returned to the scenario today just to run through it before publishing to Steam Workshop. I picked up the 23 wagons, but as I started to reverse east toward the yard throat, I saw a yellow signal with a "/" indication where there had been a green signal in all previous runs. Nevertheless, the 2D view showed a good path toward the next destination, so I headed there. Just past that yellow signal, the path vanished and the tender derailed.

Just for the record, before today's attempt to run the scenario, I verified the cache and deleted blueprints.pak files.

[Chacal]

Looks like the dispatcher is throwing switches under your wheels. Maybe you have an AI train scheduled to use this path later?

[OldProf]

Looks like the dispatcher is throwing switches under your wheels. Maybe you have an AI train scheduled to use this path later?

Yes, there is an AI train that moves through this path. Here's how: there are three roads through the station area, one heading up the line, another down the line, and one in the center, which is where the wagons to be picked up by the player train sit at the start of the scenario. As the scenario begins, the player reverses pulls forward for its pick-up, and then reverses again toward the yard entry junction. This is an east-west-east maneuver. As the player train, which has a green signal, begins to move toward the yard entry, an east-bound freight enters the east-bound passenger road and stops; after a few seconds, it proceeds, then stops again because the player train is in its way. Once the player train clears the path the freight will follow, the latter proceeds, leaving the area. Again, all of this ran just as I've described it until a short while ago, when it suddenly didn't.

What happens now is that after making its pick-up the player train gets a yellow aspect topped by a / indicator at the signal that was green before. Shortly after the player train passes that yellow signal, its path, as indicated by a blue line on the 2D map, vanishes and, if not stopped, its tender derails. Working with a clone of the scenario, I have tried delaying the arrival of that AI freight, but the same thing occurs.

This is a complex scenario, with a total of 10 AI trains moving through the Dumphries area, all but one of them after the player has moved into the yard area, which is isolated from the main lines by signals. In fact, the whole Dumphries area is heavily signaled. I added the AI carefully, one at a time, between test runs that sometimes indicated timing adjustments that had to be made. In those cases, I adjusted the start times until the AI passed through successfully and then tested the scenario again. Other scenario writers are well acquainted with this process.

The scenario takes about 60 minutes to complete. Why did it suddenly start failing in its first few minutes?

Again, what bothers (yes, and infuriates) me here is that this opening section of the scenario had run successfully many times before, abruptly and with no changes having been made to the scenario, it failed. By the way, I wrote to support@railsimulator.com about this. After the initial boilerplate message I received another, which I have seen before, that deals with content creation in general, meaning such things as rolling stock, static objects, etc. They have yet to respond to my actual message.

[thebigroyboyski]

Just to say that the town is called Dumfries, pronounced dum freece.
Sorry that's a little of topic.

[OldProf]

Just to say that the town is called Dumfries, pronounced dum freece.
Sorry that's a little of topic.

My apologies to Dumfries! I have no idea why I decided to substitute "ph" for "f", and thanks for the pronunciation guide.

[OldProf]

Forgot to mention earlier that this is what pops up when I click the warning triangle icon within the editor:



Now that gives new meaning to "Static Consist Clash"!