Railworks America

I’ve always wanted to create a route, and after many failed attempts and a lot of YouTube tutorials, (big thank you to Brandon Phelan) I decided that I might actually try building one. I’d like to have a really long route, but I’m concerned the game won’t like it. Is there a maximum to route length? The route I have in mind is a fictional high speed route set in the USA. The idea would be to have a long route to make full use of the Chinese HSR trainsets, as well as the Jet Train and Super locomotives for fun.

Train Simulator handles very long routes well. I have never run into limits. It loads terrain and scenery off the hard disk as you progress along your route, and unloads it when you move out of range. The only exception is the track data. You need enough computer memory to hold your entire rail network. So as your route grows and you add track and especially if you have many big complex yards, you can begin to fill up your computer memory. The new 64 bit version should help some here. But my experience is you will run out of energy and ambition before you run out of track network memory :-).

Wayne

Just keep in mind the longer a route is, the more effort and time you need to accomplish it to make it look nice and still be practical. Surfliner I believe is something like 100 miles end to end but at the same time that was made by a team of devs working on it consistently. Look at any one of the route builders around here and you'll quickly learn this stuff takes a while, even on shortlines.

Thanks for the replies. Good to know it’s just a memory limitation, and I’m aware routes take forever, especially long ones. This route is just something I’m going to work on in my free time. I barely have an idea of what I’m doing, and this is the first route I’ve actually committed to continually working on, so I probably won’t release it. Just a for fun project to give me practice and create a long route to go fast.

To your comment about the Pacific Surfliner, the timetable lists it as about 128 miles. Not sure what it is in game.

It isn't the length of track that matters but a complex track layout is.

Every section of track or better said its propperties are saved as xml code in a file that will be later converted with serz.exe to the tracks.bin file (the track itself is saved in the track tiles folder).

As far as I know there was a problem when the xml code got to big to be handled by the serz application, but this problem is long gone

EngineerJohn wrote:Look at any one of the route builders around here and you'll quickly learn this stuff takes a while, even on shortlines.

Just to throw an example in: The route I'm currently working on has taken about a year of work for 135 miles and its scenery isn't as complex like on the most modern routes.

Long routes are fine. You'll probably run out of energy to continue to build like what i did with mine (Old Forest Division in the Steam workshop) but theirs always a spark that brings it back.

*Edit
Since you don't really have an idea on what to build you'll probably end up using every route DLC you have. I know i did lol.

The MRL route being worked on this about a thousand miles and loads just fine. At this point we have about a hundred miles with with scenery on it. Signals are all in and presently working on level crossing signals and gates. When I get that done maybe a alpha or beta or some such might be released.

My Route that I'm working on is about 85 miles in length give or take a few. If you add the secondary lines it probably brings it up to a little over a 100-110 miles. Loads with no issues. So I don't think length should be an issue.

Isn't there a maximum to the tracks.bin, the tracks database being one big monolithic file?

Isn't there a maximum to the tracks.bin, the tracks database being one big monolithic file?

There sure is. On my Trans Canada Route the tracks bin got to 32 mb's, then wouldn't allow me to save my work anymore. That was 2500 miles of track, no signals, crossing gates and such. All would go into tracks bin, further increasing its size. Regina on the left, Thunder Bay on the right.

Krellnut's 32 mb may take the prize. The biggest I have seen is 8.5 meg for the VNHRR Springfield Line.

Although I am surprised 32 mb would be a problem relative the multi-gigabyte memory most PC's have.

krellnut wrote:On my Trans Canada Route the tracks bin got to 32 mb's, then wouldn't allow me to save my work anymore.

2500 miles... that's impressive
Maybe with the 64 bit version now you can save more than 32 mb if you're still working on that route (or is it available somewhere?)

wacampbell wrote: The biggest I have seen is 8.5 meg for the VNHRR Springfield Line.

The Surfliner and the Woodhead are with over 10 mb even bigger.

At least now I also know what is or was the limit, if I ever build all the way to the west coast

wacampbell wrote:Although I am surprised 32 mb would be a problem relative the multi-gigabyte memory most PC's have.

With the 32 bit version of TS you are limited to 3 gigs of RAM before the sim crashes.

How about positional accuracy on such large routes?
How are coordinates stored and in what precision relative to the routes origin?

_o_OOOO_oo-Kanawha wrote:How about positional accuracy on such large routes?
How are coordinates stored and in what precision relative to the routes origin?

They are stored as 32 bit 'floats'. But the location values are relative to the tile origin so extreme precision is not needed. I assume their game engine uses an origin rebasing scheme where the world center is moved to the player's tile to keep all the scenery within range of a 'float' size location.

Tracks bin for MRL is 13 megs.