Cars and Xings

[Rick-MONON]

I have been updating my MONON-2 ver 17 activity paths to use in OR and remembered why I did not change it earlier.

At about 70% of the crossings, not all....... the cars and trucks crossing the tracks take a nose dive down and sometimes under the road.......

A good example of this is on the MONON-2 ver 17 at the city of Bedford in southern Indiana.

I know this has been discussed before and I notice it on other routes also, but, any idea when this may be addressed by the OR team in the future....?

[Rick-MONON]

LOL
I guess you need a picture...lol

This happens on other routes also!!!!!

Some xings are normal, sometimes the car goes under the road........

In MSTS....this does not happen at all!!!!!


This one the road is flat 0 degrees, but the road is removed in world file.
prior to the xing the truck is above the ground, at the tracks before
and after it takes a nose dive....


this one the car dips just a little



this one between the tracks the car is back to normal

[fleegle411]

In Open Rails, cars are set up to adjust their height to match the rail head height of any tracks they cross. This is so they 'bump' over crossings instead of phase through them as we saw in MSTS. This "whale jump" (as I call it) is caused when sections of track have been placed beneath the roadway at crossings (not sure why this was done, but I have seen it on several routes). The cars only see track sections on crossings, so they make darn sure they meet the rail head height, regardless of where it is. On the Pacific electric route beta released in the FL a while back, you can see cars diving through the road, and popping back up in a split second because of deeply buried track sections.

[Rick-MONON]

Thats NOT GOOD!!!!!

Route builders sometimes put extra tracks in so the cars do not get on the tracks when there is a road with a severe angle to the tracks, or we want the cars to stop sooner before the tracks, in msts you saw alot of cars being hit by trains because of the angle, so we added tracks to each side of the xing.......
We also add the extra tracks when we want the gates to come down at a xing on the main line but not a industrial spur that the train is not on when it is close to the main tracks.

There is got to be another way for the automobile paths to function!!!!

We are talking about alot of major routes needing to be changed at those xings.......and alot of xings per route!!!!!!

[geepster775]

There is got to be another way for the automobile paths to function!!!!

You mean other than the correct way, while avoiding all the workarounds for MSTS shortcoming needed in the past? Kinda like all those 0 degree nodes buried in many a MSTS route being made irrelevant today?

If it comes down to a choice of coding it right and making it work for Made-For-OR routes, or making it work for Compromised-for-MSTS routes, I prefer that the dev team delivers the former, not the latter.

Route builders can bury those track sections just under the surface where the vehicle reaction looks rather cool, or they can bury them deep and watch the swan dive. But that is their choice. It is also their choice to hack W files as part of their compromise efforts if they are so inclined, which makes fixing these spots when a new program algorithm comes along a lot harder.

Membership in the club of route builders who are slowly coming to grips with platform divergence issues is growing. In fact, recent inductee Rory looks rather dapper in his brand new club jacket.

[Rick-MONON]

I do appreciate the OR team alot, many routes now can be populated with many more items and run smooth non jerking trains of high quality.....

There has to be a way to put a switch in the options to turn off the bump effect at the xing so older routes can look good also.

This one item, would make many more routes usuable in OR.

[charland]

A couple of weeks ago one of the people beta testing the DARv3 sent me a shot from a crossing that was from v2, it pretty much showed the same International Harvester straight truck taking a crossing at 30 degrees like in Rick's screen shot. The crossing is on a real angle and to keep the road traffic from stopping too close to the mainline I had to add lengths of double track on both sides of the mainline. In MSTS you just bury these tracks under the highway and terrain and then set your crossing base that picks up the extra track and the mainline and that's it.

When I make a crossing I make it so the road section is just below the rail height. You would think that OR would just be using the road hangers to keep the vehicles dangling at a set distance and all would be well. When a car come up on the extra track beneath the road, the vehicle is reading the extra track and dropping to that level now, something it should never do.

I did fix this but it took three attempts. What it ended up being is making sure you use a short piece of track (4m), making sure you get that located under the proper road lane, and making sure it us just below the surface of the road before placing the crossing base.

Paul :-)

[geepster775]

Or perhaps, maybe the easier solution lies in surrendering these 12 year old carspawner vehicle models and developing a new generation of vehicles similar to what Hack did many moons ago, where the center of the carspawner version of the vehicle is not the actual center of the vehicle. Replacements wouldn't necessarily need the headlight shine on the road, just the center of the 'vehicle' would need to be well before the front bumper. Only the static scenery version of the same car would be like the center picture. For the carspawner version, the headlights of the vehicle could be allowed to broach the crossings at any wicked angle, but the body of the car would not.

It sure seems like an easier thing to tackle than hard-coding exception processing or applying all these semi-permanent quirks to routes that may create an issue 10 years down the road. And we can finally get rid of the hodge-podge of past designs (fat tires vs others with paper thin tires, etc) in the process. Gosh, one less thing you need a batch file for, too!

[charland]

It's not the vehicles causing the problem, it's OR reading those white hanger lines that are above the road... cars just hang down from them. The problem is that for some reason when there is a crossing, instead of OR just reading the elevation of the white lines about the roads, it's suddenly reading the white lines above the tracks that are below the roads and adjusting the vehicle's height to it, then snaps back to the white line height the road, then back to the track and back to the road... a vehicle should only be reading the height of the lines above the road... not the track.

Paul :-)

[ebnertra000]

There is another (and dare I say, better) way. Unless this trick doesn't work in OR, this will be the method I use when I start putting roads in my route

http://msts.steam4me.net/tutorials/carspawner.html

Scroll down a bit, as it's a full tutorial on car spawners

[Rick-MONON]

YOUR missing mine and Pauls point!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!


There are many older very good routes that this one item in OR destroys the route, we are talking about many more hours than that it took to code a change, and we are talking about omitting part of the code by adding a switch to OR to not use the bump in the Options of OR, so older routes can still be used........

We understand that OR has made changes, and as we find them out yes we can switch to another way, but not lets limit the routes we have to use like other trainsimulators....

[geepster775]

Paul, they made the vehicle take into account the lines above the track on purpose, its not a mistake. They did it so when vehicles cross this kind of crossing, where the road lays low instead of near the top of the rails, the cars crossing the tracks will bump up and over - on purpose. Also take into account the higher track associated with USTracks or DBTracks. When you replace Xtracks with those, the center of track is even higher. The vehicles at the crossing have to go up and over even higher.

The vehicles are the reason route builders have been butchering routes for a dozen years by adding those hidden track pieces buried under the roads on sharply angled crossings. How long ago were the Cajon and Tehachapi upgrades made available by 3dTrains to give people a taste of the possible? If you don't want to change the vehicles, then hack the spawners as outlined in the Steam4Me thing, either way, no need for buried track anymore. Either way, the intermittent reading of the track height is here to stay. Newer 'drop in' track systems are requiring it now.

[csantucci]

This has been fixed in release x.3898.

[Rick-MONON]

Thank you very much and kudos to the OR team again!!!!