Weird things RT3 does.

[Gumboots]

Was just checking out the new Pennsy H3 in a sandbox, and found something really strange. The mail cars have twin fountains beneath them.
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Note that these are not customised units. They are completely bog standard default PopTop mail cars. I've seen them running heaps of times and they have never behaved like this before, but for some weird reason they have sprouted fountains in this sandbox.

[RulerofRails]

Never seen that before. I wonder is there some errant code somewhere that mentions the Hotel?

PS. I'm probably really late to the party, but I just discovered that if you go to the Income statement in the ledger and go back some years, then go back to 1st page, then on to the Train List view, the years from which individual train profit data is available also change. 8 full years of data available at any time. Thought I would share because it can be useful when testing.

[Gumboots]

Didn't know that about the ledger. It could be handy.

I think my test installation may be a bit corrupted. Not only do the mail cars spout fountains, but when I first installed the H3 it was fine except for one thing: the tender wheels were flipped 180 degrees around the Z axis. This wasn't a fault in the exporting or modelling, because I checked those again thoroughly and they were fine. So in the sandbox the tender wheels were shaded arse-backwards due to the normals facing the wrong way, and the flanges were on the outside of the track instead of being on the inside.

This was persistent in that sandbox, even after quitting and restarting the game a few times. However, it's now fixed itself and I have no idea why. Nor do I have any idea what it's likely to do next.

The mail car fountains are still sticking around though. I suppose they might randomly vanish too.

[Gumboots]

Found something else while doing a bit of testing yesterday. This one is obvious in retrospect, but had never occurred to me.

So most default PopTop cargo cars come in four eras: A, B C, and D. The tanker is an exception. It only has three eras: A, B and C. This is because oil and oil derivatives don't come into the game until after 1850, so they didn't bother giving the tanker a pre-1850 version.

The catch is Milk. For some reason they decided to put that into a tanker, and Milk is one of the cargoes that's available from 1829 onwards. But the A era tanker is designed to fit in with the other post-1850 freights, so instead of having a weight progression of 5>10>20>40 tons it goes 10>20>40.

The result of this is that if you are playing before 1850, Milk is twice the weight of any other freight. A consist of 8 Milk cars will weigh the same as 16 cars of any other freight.

[Gumboots]

Just found out something about the fountains-under-mail-cars bug. It's on my test installation, and for convenience I usually only run sandboxes for testing. The bug appears permanent in all eras in sandboxes (ie: hasn't fixed itself yet) on that installation, but does not appear in scenarios at all. Behaviour in scenarios is completely normal.

I only found this out last night, when for a change I decided to run a scenario on that installation. Obviously this is something to bear in mind when doing any testing in sandboxes. The game may behave unpredictably, for no discernible reason, even when there's nothing wrong with the asset modelling or coding.

Edit: Here' something odd. The fountains-under-mail-cars bug appeared in the scenario after the medal event triggered. Mail cars were normal before the medal triggered but, as soon as I got Gold and elected to play on, the fountains appeared. So it seems to be related to if the game has a medal goal set (ie: not triggered yet) which would explain why it was happening in sandboxes all the time.

[RulerofRails]

The fountains-under-mail-cars bug appeared in the scenario after the medal event triggered.

That's really weird. I have no words.

[Gumboots]

Oh I had quite a range of words, but Hawk wouldn't let me use them here.

[Gumboots]

Ha! Just checked a bit more thoroughly. The fountains bug only affects the C era mail cars. A, B and D eras are fine. No fountains. This is still ridiculous, weird and stupid (it's RT3) but at least it's only one era. I bet it will be fixable the same way I fixed the custom E era covered hoppers: simply rename it to some other letter.

Edit: Just packed and tested the custom express cars. Yup, that fixes the fountain bugs. All cars are good to go in all eras, at least so far. Will try and get the rest to test stage asap, since I'm currently enthused again.

[Gumboots]

Latest bit of fun and games in the RT3 weirdness department: the NSWGR 14 Class tender has started pouring out smoke like the old P8's does sometimes. It's been fine up until yesterday, when it suddenly went nuts on my test installation, and so far seems determined to keep playing Smokey and the Bandit.

On another installation (vanilla CtC, no changes) the tender is still fine. No idea why it's gone nuts on the test installation. Like the same bug with the PopTop P8, it will probably go away again at some point.

I was checking it out at close range. As far as I can tell the smoke generation point is below track level, and seems to be centered on either the tender's front LengthPoint or the loco's rear one.

[zzc]

The tender has bigger ambitions than just carrying water and coal; it wants to use those things too and grow into a full fledged engine/boiler.

[sbaros]

Has anyone left the firedoor open with the blower off ?
Wish you a steamy 2021, with more operational rail mileage, both real and simulated.

[Gumboots]

Lol. It appears that sometimes, for no discernible reason, RT3 will put various unrelated animation files under normal assets. I think the tender bug uses a volcano animation, I also have a suspicion that when it happens with the default PopTop P8 it's because the ,lco and .car files have underscores in the file names (none of the .3dp or .dds files have them).

The fountains under mail cars is a bug I've only seen once. Offhand I have no idea what caused that.

[sbaros]

The Post Office staff must have eaten something rotten.

[Gumboots]

Had some more weird things happen last time I tried to play the game.

1/ Locomotive motion tends to be jerky. Most noticeable when viewing the train directly from the side. I have a suspicion this is something to do with an update to Windows 10, since I don't remember ever seeing it until fairly recently.

2/ For some reason, my NSW map has taken to crashing just before I get to a Gold. Which is annoying. Not sure if it has started happening with other maps too (should test that).

3/ The other thing is that if I do a LOT of cross connections in the Sydney area on that map (using level crossing instead of overpasses, and having short curved connections between lines all over the place) the number of possible routes combined with the number of trains seems to make the game engine totally lose its marbles.

Stations explode into large spiky grey balls of pixels, and once it happens the game is screwed. Only way around it is it load a save and hope for the best.

[sbaros]

I have been suspecting since last year that Windows updates cause different effects on different hardware. For instance, the problem I had reported earlier with some of my PCs has largely vanished since about March together with bizarre crashes of other programs (notably encryption software). Maybe their driver updates or stuff like NET.FRAMEWORK are more succesful for specific processors and less succesful for others?
Have these fancy trackplans around Sydney worked better under previous Windows versions ?

[RulerofRails]

Hmm. Those things sound very weird. I have more recently got a new laptop which unfortunately came with Windows 10. I went with a Ryzen (AMD) processor. But I fear we are stuck with Nvidia for dedicated GPUs at the moment in higher performance laptops. From my recollection of various posts (I wasn't active here at that time) it seems that the majority of the problems with Vista (where the patch came into play) were seen on machines with Intel/Nvidia combination. Probably I would suspect more of Nvidia being to blame, but I can't say for sure. At the time I had an AMD CPU with integrated graphics which ran the game perfectly fine.

At the moment the game as installed from steam runs for me without any patch. No need for dgVoodoo or blurry texture fix. I don't play in this install. I booted it to check and I do see some issue with train movement. It looks like the game is drawing the assets in the wrong place for a split second, before correcting itself. This was on highest graphics settings and draw distance (steam installed it like that IIRC). Nor have I tried to use any sort of Vsync or FPS limit. With the right settings that might go away, idk.

The installs I use I have copied from prior machines. They are based on the GoG version, with dgVoodoo, and the patch for blurry textures. The problem with the steam version isn't present in them. These are the ones where I put hours into, and crashing is tolerably rare (I think I had two crashes in the last month) one from editor and another one more random (I was building something).

I much prefer to have a stable OS rather than one under development. The unstable one could be free, and we pay for the stable one. I remember reading somewhere that corporate builds of some software are much more stable than ones the general public can access (public are basically test rats). Not sure how easy it is to rollback an update. Are you saying that you only had problems with RT3?

The spiky station thing sounds especially weird. Do you have a screenshot of that? Does that bug get preserved in any saved games? I am curious at least to see how "crazy" your build is.

[Gumboots]

Have these fancy trackplans around Sydney worked better under previous Windows versions ?

No idea. Never tried them on earlier versions.

The spiky station thing sounds especially weird. Do you have a screenshot of that? Does that bug get preserved in any saved games? I am curious at least to see how "crazy" your build is.

I think I still have a save of one of the games that went haywire. If I do, it should be easy to make it do it again. It's quite spectacular when it happens.

[Gumboots]

Just went looking, and I still have a save of one of the games that went "exploding spiky stations bonkers". It's running my custom cargo cars (including an Alcohol reefer* I haven't released yet) as well as the NSWGR locos, so you would need those to check it out. Haven't got a screenshot of exploding stations at the moment. The game crashed** before the stations went spiky again.

But I think you already have the cargo cars, except for the booze reefer, which I can give you a copy of if you want it.

*I whipped this up because of the Alcohol haulage target in the NSW scenario. At the moment it only has custom skins for the relevant eras in that scenario (B & C, IIRC) and uses standard reefer skins for other eras.

**It's running 125 trains, and that along with all the possible routes is obviously pushing the game engine near its limits. It doesn't run slowly, the way it will if you have hundreds of trains. It runs at pretty normal speed, until it suddenly loses the plot completely.

[RulerofRails]

I'm running your custom cargo cars in my normal play installs. I have an xReefer.PK4 file from Aug 3, 2019. Is that the right one or not? If it's not, I would appreciate the updated one and the save game. My curiosity is aroused since I never remember this error reported/seen elsewhere.

[Gumboots]

Ok, this should be everything you need. The Booze reefer is just splitting Alcohol off from the other reefer cargoes, so I could skin it separately. All the other cargo cars are my usual custom set.

I don't know if the stations will explode into spiky grey masses for you, but I'm curious to see if they will. IIRC it usually happens when you click on a station, but it's unpredictable.