Route Developers Trickery

[OTTODAD]

Testing various routes to see what so far has been achieved, I had a go at testing the Wupper-Express-11 in ORTS.

Appears that it has no overhead wires yet and the Wupperthal Overhead Railway will take some doing making it work in ORTS, see below !

Wondering how ORTS copes with all the custom animations created for MSTS I tried to run the SEAVIEW-5 which has many of.

Was told that there is a missing line in it's TDB at 3491494 and ORTS aborted loading the route.

Trying to test another route again hit a brick wall, irrKlang refusing to load and had to End the ORTS Runactivity.exe with the Task Manager. Another re-boot will restore it functioning.

I think that completing ORTS will be a task similar to putting man on to Mars and wonder whether the ORTS team has fully realized what it has let itself in for !

O t t o

[sniper297]

I don't see any of that as a problem, after all MSTS 2 and MSTS X made it plain there was to be NO backwards compatibility, if we have to do some tinkering to make certain routes compatible with ORTS in the future it beats starting from scratch. I'm currently playing with PO&N 11, since that has the aliased track sections in the coal mine it's NOT compatible, the latest version in the file library that will work with ORTS is PO&N 9. Hopefully ORTS will eliminate the bugs and limitations that made all the hacking in MSTS necessary, if it does then all the work needed to redo these routes will be time well spent.

[longiron]

Hopefully ORTS will eliminate the bugs and limitations that made all the hacking in MSTS necessary, if it does then all the work needed to redo these routes will be time well spent.

Jim,
That's the objective. The OR team will never understand how MSTS handled 'hacks' to make things work, nor does the team want to spend a lot of time on those issues. So if you've reached over your shoulder to scratch your foot in MSTS, OR may ask you why?

[longiron]

Testing various routes to see what so far has been achieved, I had a go at testing the Wupper-Express-11 in ORTS.

Appears that it has no overhead wires yet and the Wupperthal Overhead Railway will take some doing making it work in ORTS, see below !

I think that completing ORTS will be a task similar to putting man on to Mars and wonder whether the ORTS team has fully realized what it has let itself in for !

O t t o

Otto,
You've identified two areas (Gantry and signals) that are not functioning at the present time in OR. For active signals, OR just drops a static object at the signal location. The OR team has made significant progress on signaling (check page 34 of SoftDocs) for a glimpse of where OR is. See this post for more info: https://www.trainsim.com/vbts/showpo...2&postcount=51

Gantries are going to represent a class of procedural objects in OR. We have a way to go before procedural objects will be implemented.

If the OR team was attempting to exactly duplicate MSTS, then I'd agree with your assessment, but 100% duplication of MSTS is not the ultimate objective.

[OTTODAD]

If the OR team was attempting to exactly duplicate MSTS, then I'd agree with your assessment, but 100% duplication of MSTS is not the ultimate objective.

I appreciate that ORTS now is just the beginning of what it will be, hence my W.I.P.? annotation in one of the screenshots, also reporting missing overhead wires and as I have found today the train brakes in the German ICE train do not work.

Train driving controls are now notched and holding down the D and A keys no longer repeats them. I presume that making the Combined Throttle work in ORTS like it does in MSTS is somewhere near the bottom of your TO-DO List ?

What Jim has mentioned about some tweaks in his Port Ogden route also applies to routes like the Wupper Express, shown below and Seaview-5 which can never be compatible with ORTS unless the ORTS programmers can use all these special functions created by some route developers, not knowing what they did to their shape files to make forinstance animations possible.

Like you said, the primary objective of ORTS will be to make the defaults of MSTS work first and then perhaps look into making some of these routes forward compatible ?

What will be involved in creating new routes specific for ORTS ? A new Route Editor ?

My unfinished Gold-Spike route, got sidetracked by RS / RW, is a TsUtils merger of the Whitefish to Shelby part of the Marias-Kootenai, I was involved in creating and the Whitefish7-RR route, my friend René giving me permission to use.

Apart from my modified trackbeds MP3K tracks and added by me Distant Mountains, also using custom terrain textures created by my mate Frank Carver, I had DEMEX insert into it, much else is just MSTS default stuff and Scenery add-ons like the Czech and Mike Sinclair vegetation and trees.

ORTS seems to be running it alright, but will take a lot of work to make all that MSTSBin displays and has working show in ORTS !

Are you planning another test release of ORTS so that we can have some fun with it, promising to report only sensible and useful feedback on what has been done so far ?

In the meantime there is still a lot of mileage left in MSTSBin, I do not think will die for a long time yet !

Regards, O t t o.