Powder River Basin

[imnew]

Does Donkey Creek yard still have two tracks full stored BNSF power sitting?

John, I railfanned the powder river basin this spring, and when I was there ( at Donkey Creek Yard ) in early May there was still two tracks packed with SD70Macs.

[JohnS]

Bummer. I figured they'd still be sitting there but a guy can hope for business.

[NStrains]

Tomcat, if you REALLY want to figure out when the sim will start crying uncle, through a bunch of locomotives in the mix too.

[Tomcat]

Tomcat, if you REALLY want to figure out when the sim will start crying uncle, through a bunch of locomotives in the mix too.

Yep, that would do it for sure. I guess I won't be tempted to recreate the lines of stored locomotives unless my fire extinguisher is placed conveniently next to the laptop.

The upper limit seems to be about 6 100 car consists with 3 locos per consist and approx. 90 scattered hoppers. Oddly enough, the memory usage stays pretty much around 2100MB but the fps takes a nice hit and bottoms out at 23 to 25 in the midst of this mess.

Screenshot_Powder River Basin_44.28923--105.28322_20-46-42.jpg

I hate the default open top hoppers in the sim, not only for the drunken behavior shown below, but also for the physics being borked. I ran 100 loaded cars with 3 SD70s from Caballo to Donkey Creek Junction and was accelerating in notch 2 up Whitetail hill and then had to keep it in at least notch 1 to drag the hoppers down the 1.4% grade to Donkey Creek.

The coal hoppers that come with NS Coal District behaved more realistically in that I had to keep it in notch 8 to make it up Whitetail hill at a speed of 14 mph and then had to apply full dynamics and 9% air brakes to keep it under control downhill.

Screenshot_Powder River Basin_44.28894--105.27466_20-47-33.jpg

[JohnS]

If there was a way to make a low poly version of the engine and hoppers I bet we could fill more

[buzz456]

http://www.golden-age-rails.com/packsrw/yardfill.html

[GERUNIMO625]

Howdy,

Not to bust your bubble, but most the coal trains we get out of there (on the UP) are between 135-140+ cars nowadays.
They just keep getting longer and longer!

Take care!

[wlenz781]

If there was a way to make a low poly version of the engine and hoppers I bet we could fill more

From the way they look, I would assume the Kuju coal hoppers are low poly. I tried to make a UP repaint of some of the Bethgon CoalPorter II's that comes with the PennCoal, NS Dash 8, and CSX SD80 DLCs. Unfortunately, the way they are mapped does not allow me to color only the upper portions on one side. I don't have the experience to make child objects in order to repaint this.

[imnew]

Regarding repaints. Reach out to users buzz or ET44C4. I don’t know how they do it but they seem to find ways to repaint ‘non-repaintable’ engines and rail cars.

[BNSFdude]

You may be able to screw around with the LODs to effectively make a "low poly" version.

[JohnS]

You may be able to screw around with the LODs to effectively make a "low poly" version.

Bingo! that's what I was thinking.

[NStrains]

Tomcat, that FPS rating doesn't seem to bad at all. I would be happy to see that consistently on my laptop.

[buzz456]

Tim and I are messing around with some static locomotives. We'll see how it works.

[Tomcat]

Tomcat, that FPS rating doesn't seem to bad at all. I would be happy to see that consistently on my laptop.

I was kind of surprised that the fps wasn't lower, to tell the truth. I never had anywhere near 700 cars and 20 engines in the same place before and I assumed I would have a slide show. I'll have to do this a bit more methodically and place consists one by one while taking note of fps and memory usage with each increase. I'm a bit surprised by the memory usage only being 2100MB as well. Maybe it's due to low scenery asset count in each tile? On the other hand, the assets that are there take quite a toll on fps... the asset blocks of grass go on forever.

[Tomcat]

Tim and I are messing around with some static locomotives. We'll see how it works.

Buzz is doing all the work and I'm in charge of messing around!