Railworks America

As a general concept, how long of a line is too long to be pratical as a single route?

In working on my coast line from Los Angeles to San Francisco, I have placed 1/3 arc sec DEM and route markers for the whole line. Having done that I began laying track at the historical center located at San Luis Obispo and then worked my way both West towards SF and East towards LA. It's long!

I'm now wondering if I should not have approached this project differently, breaking the line into subdivisions as individual routes.

My thoughts are this:

1) Is there a practical limit to the size of a single route in RW?
2) The terrain from one end of the line to other differs significantly, from coast line to mountains to rocks to prairie, So it might be nice to use more than one base terrain texture.
3) Breaking it up may help debugging or prevent fouling up the whole line due to an error in one place or other.

Comments?

There is a route that is over 1000 miles long available on a dutch site. From that example, your route won't be too long. From what I read, 600 miles is the limit for the compass "jump-to" feature, but that is it. The only issue with bigger routes is bigger loading times.


PS. Backup often.

you can create a route base that has all of the ground cover assetts in them to solve that problem. most people prefer long routes over multiple sections of the same route. it will take time but it will all work out.

just personal thoughts here... nothing concrete....

Other than the freedom of going 70 mph, I get really bored on the long runs through the Mojave. I find myself wishing that 20 miles of it were just cut out and the rest spliced together. Some folks have said to me that if there isn't something to do every 10 miles or so, they find themselves gradually moving on to favor some other route. A practiced scenario writer has told me that running 50 miles between activities does not make for fun nor challenging scenarios. I'm sure that's not true for everyone... it was just a general observation from player feedback.

Now, to provide you some worthwhile food for thought in this post... as you get totally lost in the building of the route (like I do), try to remember and think about scenario writing. What are players going to DO on that track? While we may love building all of that infrastructure, ultimately, the enjoyment of the product will come down to action.

Backup often! If you have to ask "how often?" you're not doing it enough!



Tori

Toripony wrote:just personal thoughts here... nothing concrete....

Other than the freedom of going 70 mph, I get really bored on the long runs through the Mojave. I find myself wishing that 20 miles of it were just cut out and the rest spliced together. Some folks have said to me that if there isn't something to do every 10 miles or so, they find themselves gradually moving on to favor some other route. A practiced scenario writer has told me that running 50 miles between activities does not make for fun nor challenging scenarios. I'm sure that's not true for everyone... it was just a general observation from player feedback.

Now, to provide you some worthwhile food for thought in this post... as you get totally lost in the building of the route (like I do), try to remember and think about scenario writing. What are players going to DO on that track? While we may love building all of that infrastructure, ultimately, the enjoyment of the product will come down to action.

Backup often! If you have to ask "how often?" you're not doing it enough!



Tori

i somewhat agree withyou, if the scenery on a long route is good and lots of it you will hook alot of people to the route, just look at what the willamette pass route will be when completed, lots of scenery for long streches! that is what hooked me! all you halfto do is keep the scenery at a high level and people will like it alot.

Toripony wrote:Now, to provide you some worthwhile food for thought in this post... as you get totally lost in the building of the route (like I do), try to remember and think about scenario writing. What are players going to DO on that track? While we may love building all of that infrastructure, ultimately, the enjoyment of the product will come down to action.

Artist.

Toripony wrote:just personal thoughts here... nothing concrete....

Other than the freedom of going 70 mph, I get really bored on the long runs through the Mojave. I find myself wishing that 20 miles of it were just cut out and the rest spliced together. Some folks have said to me that if there isn't something to do every 10 miles or so, they find themselves gradually moving on to favor some other route. A practiced scenario writer has told me that running 50 miles between activities does not make for fun nor challenging scenarios. I'm sure that's not true for everyone... it was just a general observation from player feedback. *snip* Tori

Yeah, I agree. I love a long freight or passenger haul, but at 40 minutes of nothing to do, I get bored. And when I look at the time length of a given scenario, over an hour is pushing it, close to 2 hours I generally pass. Yep, scenery plays a huge part in keeping my interest as well. Mojave pales in comparison to the freeware routes that have come out in the last few months. (then again, that's what Barstow to San Bernadino actually looks like)

By the way, if you haven't gone too far on your route, it might be a good idea to build it off of a clone of Barstow- San Bernardino, therefore one day there might be a LA-San Bernardino connection by somebody.

All good thoughts. Thanks.

My goal here was for a prototypical route, but I appreciate the boredom that comes from long stretches with nothing to do. The nice thing about the Coast Route is that there is almost no stretch of track that has no scenic point of interest. Hopefully, scenarios with plenty of interference traffic will keep things interesting. Being primarily single track mainline means lots of meets.

The biggest problem right now seems to be the lack of prototypical motive power and rolling stock. I have only found the GS4 and Black Widow F7's so far, and some overnight box cars. Also missing the right searchlight signals and proper scripts to go with them - but I can write those myself if I have to.

Where are all the SP fans for Railworks?

I would appreciate some SP action.

Have you looked for the Searchlight Signals of SMMDigital? (http://www.smmdigital.net/)
There's a black widow repaint for the G-TraX lightweight passengercars available on trainsim.com and also a Dash9 repaint pack with UP and SP liveries from bobbel66.
The locomotive catalog can also help. Here are many available locos listed (not all): http://railworks.banal.net/catalog/pages/UnitedStates-Diesel-SouthernPacific.html

I hope is something you can use.

Thanks for that.

My personal interest is in equipment used around the late 1940's, kind of the peak of the SP just after WW2, primarily steam with EMD E7, GP9, and F3 for Diesels.

I have been toying with the SMM Searchlight signals. Though representative of the type they are not in keeping with SP configuration and none of the available scripts provide the aspects or functionality in keeping with SP signaling rules for the period. I will likely attack the scripts myself in the near future to get what I need. Signals are kinda my "thing".