Dispatcher window - Can't see the tracks

[dmrick]

I've been trying to get some activities out to go along with the Siskiyou Route... and discovered something that needs to be fixed somehow.

I was working on an activity in White City where there's a lot of train activity. There are numerous commercial sidings there and lots of yard stuff. When you place a consist on the tracks the Dispatcher window displays them as green rectangles centered on the track. However, when you are in a typical yard and you place trains side by side (especially 3 or more consists) the displayed consists completely block out the tracks. This not only makes it difficult to know which track is what, but it also hides such things as crossovers. There needs to be a better way of displaying this. Any ideas?

[baldwin]

You can zoom in on the dispatcher window right down to showing the individual cars in a consist.

[seagoon]

.... the Siskiyou Route... ....

Are you aware that www.siskurail.com goes nowhere?
It comes up with sites other than anything to do with rail.

[slipperman]

Hi,

Are you aware that www.siskurail.com goes nowhere?

The current address of the Siskiyou route is : http://www./Domain Expired//

Cheers,
Ged

[crstagg]

Hi,
[/COLOR]
The current address of the Siskiyou route is : http://www./Domain Expired//

Cheers,
Ged

But his signature graphic says ".COM"

[seagoon]

But his signature graphic says ".COM"

Which was the very reason I raised the point that it is defunct!

[dmrick]

Let me site an example to show how that's not feasible. At the start of an activity I'm told to locate and go to a certain track in the city of White City. I use the Dispatcher to prepare my route by throwing the necessary switches ahead of time. I do this on the move so that I'm not just sitting wasting time. In order to plan that route through a mile or so of yard-type tracks with wagons on them, I'd have to zoom in so far to see things like where crossovers were that I'd have to actually pause the game to keep the engine from overtaking me. It's almost mandatory to use the Dispatcher in this case because the individual that created the activity created a path that's a beeline out of town. To make my route much shorter I need to take advantage of the mentioned crossover, and this means getting into Manual mode to leave the path. The switches that make up the crossover are too close to use the <F8> switch monitor to throw the second switch before you run over it and trigger dynamiting the train by crossing a switch that's lined wrong. Click on this image to see it better. This is zoomed in quite a bit and as you can see you couldn't possibly throw the switches of the crossover. I've enlarged this screen capture quite a bit in Photoshop. It's much smaller on the screen...
Partially Zoomed In.jpg

The next image shows how far I'd have to zoom in just to set up these switches. When you zoom the Dispatcher window in this far even small movements of the mouse can throw you all over the place... taking even more time to get things done. As you can see I would have to do a lot of scrolling to move all the way to the left setting up switches necessary to reach the point where I'm to find the desired siding...
Zoomed Way In.jpg

Hope that does a better job of showing my situation.
Thanks

[dmrick]

A long while back... when my home burnt down I had to quite doing my route. My GoDaddy account expired and I lost the "siskurail.com" url because someone thought the could grab it and get me to buy it back. Rather than doing that I purchased the /Domain Expired/ url. That's been posted most places. Sure enough, a couple of months ago the chap that grabbed it offered to sell it back.

[crstagg]

A long while back... when my home burnt down I had to quite doing my route. My GoDaddy account expired and I lost the "siskurail.com" url because someone thought the could grab it and get me to buy it back. Rather than doing that I purchased the /Domain Expired/ url. That's been posted most places. Sure enough, a couple of months ago the chap that grabbed it offered to sell it back.

You didn't need to tell us why it was changed from .com to .org. Seagoon was just pointing out that you will get more visitors if you edit (correct) your GIF (or JPG) in your signature file. Newbies might go to siskurail.com and give up and never find /Domain Expired/

If you can't edit, it just stop using the one with the wrong URL.

[seagoon]

........ Seagoon was just pointing out that you will get more visitors if you edit (correct) your GIF (or JPG) in your signature file. Newbies might go to siskurail.com and give up and never find /Domain Expired/

Thanks, Charles; that was exactly the reason I mentioned it, in the hope that the Dale would either change the info on the image or remove it altogether.

I downloaded the Siskiyou route many years ago and still had the original URL in my info.

Dale, you need to amend it, for the sake of others who might get lost.

[dmrick]

Thanks for mentioning the signature... I'm a "one horse show" and so it's a bit difficult to catch everything.
BTW... I had to find the original file... and not the reduced-size image.

Started taking and developing my own pics around 1952... Been a semi-professional photographer ever since. I've shot everything from trips to Europe to many hundreds in Vietnam. I also do 3D animation stuff. In doing a search on just one of my drives it turned up 117,889 jpgs... not counting all the other formats considering all my photos for over 10 years have been RAW photos that weren't counted.

Finally found the original one and as you can now see, the signature looks a bit better.

[seagoon]

Thanks for mentioning the signature... I'm a "one horse show" and so it's a bit difficult to catch everything.............
Finally found the original one and as you can now see, the signature looks a bit better.

I appreciate that you are doing this solo, Dale.
Unless someone mentions it then a glitch can be so easily overlooked.

Which nicely segues to another one.....albeit small but confusing:

On your site you have the latest release advertised as Beta 0.10 and mention that if one wishes to check their build, then in the Siskiyou folder (under Routes) is a file named Last_Update.txt.

I checked mine and although my beta is 0.10, the line in that text file says Curret Version is Beta 0.04.

[dmrick]

Hope you all don't mind if I get "back on track" with my track viewing question...

What if either the consists were transparent or the tracks were on a layer above the consists...

Take a look here... The upper is about how mine looks like now. Below that is how it might look...

Any comments?

Tracks&amp;Consists.jpg

[seagoon]

The lower one certainly makes sense. The points (switch) is a lot easier to determine.

[baldwin]

If you are zoomed right in, you can see the individual cars in a consist, consist icons are much thinner and there is a lot more space between tracks. No need to draw tracks after consists.