Crossing Bell Flashers Didn't Animate?

[qballbandit]

Hello,
OR has me guessing half the time with inconsistent occurrences with a handful of things.
Ran a piece of a route that I've run a dozen times or so, without yet seeing this happen.
None of the grade crossing flashers were animated, as in, they all stayed solid red on the left lamp.
I'm not really asking for any type of fix, because I bet if I play it again, they will animate just fine.
Running on the latest "dev/beta/test" version. Running with a player and AI train that have been used multiple times on the route, but, I changed the player path slightly prior to the run. (Entering the westbound leg at the beginning of the activity from the left leg of a wye, instead of the right leg I've used in the past).
All else was normal in the run.

I'll chuck this oddity in the "parking lot" along with a few other things that happen on-and-off, of which I can't figure out the triggering variables.

[commec61]

Hi Neil,

See this thread for what's wrong: https://www.trainsim.com/vbts/showth...-in-open-rails

[davebridges]

I am having the same problem with a couple of routes. I see the solution, but does anyone know which file needs to be fixed? It doesn't say which one in the message.

[MMSS]

Yes, the link states that it is the ".s" file of the animated flasher being used in the affected route. You have to find out what the affected shape file is then have to decompress the file with SFM or Route Riter then edit it with Context, Wordpad, etc. to the value shown in the link provided.

[eric]

The shapefile containing the animation needs to be updated to correct decimal values into an integer.

Apparently MSTS regularly ignored things like datatype mismatches. C# (and thus ORTS) is a lot more explicit, in that if it's supposed to be typed as an integer, it will barf on a decimal. MSTS would just ignore data past the decimal point.

[davebridges]

OK, I got that, but does anyone know which file the animated flasher is in for the Conrail Indy route? I've been searching, but haven't found it yet.

[EricF]

Surprised I missed this one -- Thanks Steve! I think I have a few routes to tweak now...

[davebridges]

Does anyone know which file needs to be fixed in Conrail Indy route? I know what to do, just can't find the file.

[commec61]

Actually, all of bruce's flashing files need to be corrected. They all start with ci_*.s. You need to upgrade the crossing and flashing traffic signal files.

[davebridges]

OK, thank you. I'll try that and see what happens.

[davebridges]

That worked!. Thank you so much for your help

[qballbandit]

Thanks for the responses everyone. I guess I'll admit that I must have missed them not working in the past.
I'll try and fix them up, and give the activity a shot again.
Much appreciated.

Edit: Went through the 9 routes that I haven't yet swapped the CI files with newer ones, and found it interesting that half were ok, and half needed to be fixed. Also, half were already uncompressed, and half were properly compressed.
What's more, I noticed how many dang shape files are in these routes uncompressed!