Oh I had a very strange thing happen yesterday when doing the Ammunition cars. It reminded me of something Bomber said over in the "Locomotive Fixes for 1.06" thread.
bombardiere wrote:I did some experiment with X Y Z coordinates, and in this forum should be a hilarious picture of a main wheel doing large circles around the loco, but I never was able to set it right.
What happened yesterday was I had exported the basic B era boxcar and tested that with all boxcar cargoes. No problem. Then I did the Weapons and Ammunition cars, which are identical except for the skins and use exactly the same mesh for all components. The Weapons car was fine. The Ammunition car was another matter.
There are eight bogies and eight files for them. There is no file for a ninth bogie, anywhere. It simply doesn't exist. All eight bogies were correct, just like the other cars that shared the same mesh. However
![Mr. Green :mrgreen:](./images/smilies/icon_mrgreen.gif)
RT3's game engine, in its infinite wisdom, had decided that my Ammunition cars really wanted an extra bogie, and promptly invented one. On the right hand side of the car, perfectly positioned for track width, with an axle height of somewhere around 6 feet, and mapped to a section of the skin that no bogies have ever been mapped to.
So ok, I check all the bogie files. They're fine. So then I think: since the bogies on boxcar and weapons are ok I'll copy them into the ammunition folder, delete the old ammunition bogies, rename the good ones I pasted in, and repack that sucker and see what happens. What happened is that it was exactly the same. Still had a magically invented ninth bogie just like before.
Why? No idea. My guess is that it is some obscure game bug that is probably related to the naming of the files, and for some reason #Ammunition makes it go bonkers even though #Boxcar and #Weapons don't. What I've resorted to for the moment is simply using alpha to get rid of that chunk of skin (it wasn't important on the ammo cars anyway) so the magical ninth bogie is still there, but you never see it.
This is obviously not an ideal solution. It works for now, but if the same bug occurs with another car or locomotive in a more critical section of the skin that could be a real problem. What I'm going to do next is pack and test the cars for the next era (C for boxcars, B for weapons and ammo) and see how they behave. If they are all fine, that's means the bogie bug is random AFAICT. If the ammo car is still being funny for the next era, that will tell me it's somehow (don't ask me how) related to the car designation #Ammunition. If that's the case I'll just rename them to #Ammo or something that works.
Edit: C era boxcars are live. No bugs. Will test Ammunition and Weapons cars tonight. Just for the moment the B, C and D era boxcars are sharing the same skin, and are distinguished their different sizes and different trucks. Can get more inventive with skins later.