Has anyone deciphered how the turntables actually are coded or function?

[NW 2156]

Afternoon, I am interested in laying a ground work for working turntables in ORTS. However, I am coming up with alot of blanks has to how this feature has been achieved in RS or RW? Can anyone shine any light on how working turntables are coded in RS or RW? Are the tables track section pieces?

How does the model actually get rotated around? Does the sim do some fancy flipping of the locomotive parts or does the locomotive actually rotate relative to it's last position?

Robert

[Mountain Man]

The turntable stands still and the entire virtual world rotates around it.

[NW 2156]

Thanks for the reply. I would have kinda guest something of the sort.

Can you supply anymore information on how this is achieved exactly?

Robert

[Bananarama]

IIRC, turntable track is controlled via the G/Shift+G, similar to turnouts and indexed according to the number of track nodes, an even value, defined in the Railworks blueprint.

[NW 2156]

So the turntable is controlled similar to a turnout with G/Shift+G, similar to turnouts and indexed according to the number of track nodes which correspond to the number of tracks present at the table?

As Mountain Man pointed out, The table it's self does not turn. The whole world revolves around the table once the locomotive is parked on the table and the G/Shift+G keys are used??? Is this correct???

I guess I need to know more about A. How the whole dang world is able to revolve around the turntable. B. How the table is setup as a track piece with the correct nodes, etc.

Mark, You still have the original MSTS 2 disk set correct? Would you be willing to try and decipher how MSTS 2 from 2003 would have done the turntable animations? I am thinking Rail Simulator and the MSTS 2 from 2003 must be pretty similar since they are from the same source. That source being Kuju. Atleast that is the rumor I have been given by some on both sides of the pond. (US & Britain)

Robert

[Bananarama]

As Mountain Man pointed out, The table it's self does not turn. The whole world revolves around the table once the locomotive is parked on the table and the G/Shift+G keys are used??? Is this correct???

No, he's not correct. I suspect it was a poor attempt at a joke.

As for MSTS2, I don't have a means for decompressing the shape files or digging into the EXE binary. You'll need to contact those in the know on the inner workings of OR.

[NW 2156]

I had a feeling that was a poor joke. That kinda of information is useless and only serves to confuse people who are tempting to add a seriously complex bit of kit to ORTS.

The fact is somehow the 3d mesh is able to be spun about it's axis along with the turntable it is sitting on. Only if I knew the secrets of how this worked in MSTS 2, RS, RW, TS2015?

Robert

[OTTODAD]

Hi Robert !

There are no working turntables in MSTS that I know of.

Railworks ones are coded into *.BIN files and their animation into *.BAN files, the program can use to make them work !

There is nothing you can do to create an animated one for ORTS and don't think that any member of their team knows now to !

[NW 2156]

Well that is pessimist attitude Otto. ORTS is a new build sim and should be able to have turntables coded into the program if we can take a working example and study the theory of operation and then duplicate and maybe improve on it.

Robert

[eric]

On this issue, I'd say it's a pragmatic attitude, Robert.

Kuju couldn't figure it out, and they wrote the program. They had to re-engineer an entirely different way of defining how track nodes interact to get it to work in RW.

If you were to try and take a working example from RW/TS/MSTS2 and reverse engineer it, wouldn't that really be stealing someone else's IP?...

[NW 2156]

Eolesen.

In order to technically steal someone's IP the code would have to be copied line for line and implemented into ORTS. That is not the end goal.

My goal was to find enough information to study and then design my own coding for turntables that does not use anyone else's IP. Just as ORTS does the same functions of MSTS but uses none of the MS/Kuju coding to achieve it's functions. The kind of information I was searching for in RS/RW/TS2015 is the same sort of information we have for MSTS thanks to countless people who studied the inner workings of the various aspects of MSTS.

Believe me, I do not want to implement anyone's commercial code into ORTS. Doing so is not only illegal. It is entirely against what ORTS is supposed to be.

I am a big supporter of open source software projects. Whether it be ORTS or Libre Office, Mono Game, Linux, Etc.

Mono Game for example imitates the workings of MS XNA. But, does not use any of the actual MS code to do so. The Mesa Project is a open source project that imitates the OpenGL. All these projects are based on MS products. But are fully open source and do not share any code with MS projects. But, those who designed those programs and projects studied and learned the inner workings from the original MS products. There simply would be no other way to make a program that can imitate the competition without first knowing how the competition's programs function to a certain degree.

I know we here are still reeling from this summers events. In the future better wording and examples will be used when treading around potentially touchy subject matter.

Robert

[CrowDrivr]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ESQpI4pkQp4

About 6 minutes in he operates the table in the game.
Before that he constructs the turntable in the route builder.


Off topic: Looks odd to me the way he drives as he uses the mouse to drag the brake and throttle
handles, whereas I always use a Ch flight stick hat to operate all
levers, *especially* with a steam engine where I need to just
nudge the levers a teeny bit. CH or other flight controllers are
what I've used since Rail Simulator 1.

[eric]

Yeah, reverse engineering tends to set off alarms...

The concept of the turntable is pretty simple to work out in the TDB -- all you need to know is which pair of nodes line up, and come up with a way to select a new node pair. Graphically, not so simple....

[conductorchris]

Mountain Man's joke about the world rotating around the turntable has me thinking about the camera control -- which really can rotate around a fixed point.

So maybe thinking about the graphics from the point of view of the camera is a solution? Could you not split the scene somehow? With the locomotive, turntable structure and track being one layer, as in photoshop and everything else being another layer?

(Not that I know the first thing about coding)

Christopher

[OTTODAD]

Mountain Man's joke about the world rotating around the turntable has me thinking about the camera control -- which really can rotate around a fixed point. So maybe thinking about the graphics from the point of view of the camera is a solution? Could you not split the scene somehow? With the locomotive, turntable structure and track being one layer, as in photoshop and everything else being another layer?
(Not that I know the first thing about coding)

It's a thought, Chris, but would have to find a method to code it so that the turntable lines up with the active track and make whatever transparent so that all is clearly visible !