Rolling Stock skinning ideas

[Hawk]

I got them all updated. Better check out the page and make sure I did it right.

http://hawkdawg.com/rrt/rrt3/Xtras/Rollingstock.htm

[Gumboots]

Looks the part. What could go wrong?

[Hawk]

Looks the part. What could go wrong?

With me there's always a possibility of me screwing something up.

[Gumboots]

Yeah it aint just you. I was thinking of Murphy's Law when I posted that.

[Gumboots]

Hidden in the middle of this thread, that would be right! I was looking in the titles and trying to use the search but missed what was under my own nose. Thanks a lot, eager to see what they are like.

PS. Gave them a quick test run. They have a bit sloppy handling on sharp corners and sudden grades, but on a normal network running at normal speed they look fine. I was running a Red Devil and found that after 3 years I had a breakdown rate around 45%. Switched back to normal weight (different product) and the breakdown chance dropped to 15%. Given that the Red Devil has a good rating, this doesn't bode well for the poorer engines.

Thinking about this some more. What's really needed isn't double cars. The best solution would be to hack the .exe to allow 16 normal cars instead of 8. It should be really easy to do if the code can be found. I expect it's just a matter of changing one byte in a few places. I have no idea where those places would be though.

What I'm thinking is that WP & P's plan of simply doubling existing cars and car weights is going to put lighter engines at a severe disadvantage, because they can't handle twice the weight, while not doing anything to make the larger engines more profitable, because the doubled cars only carry the same cargo as the original single cars as far as the game is concerned. This is the worst of both worlds, in a way, and more or less the opposite of what is really needed.

Changing the limit on the number of cars would be a much better solution. That way smaller engines can still haul enough normal cars of cargo to be profitable without straining thermselves. The really big ones could haul trains twice as long, thereby earning enough to offset their horrendous fuel and maintenance costs. That way the Big Boy and Challenger could actually have a useful niche in the game, which IMO they don't at the moment. The breakdown problem on the big engines could be dealt with simply by upping their reliability level to the appropriate number in the .lco file.

[Gumboots]

I think it's worth taking another look at this double car idea. Now that it's possible to export straight from Blender, making doubles out of existing cargo cars suddenly became a lot easier. The old school way of doing it (manual hex editing) made shifting existing models forwards or backwards a nightmare. Now it's just a matter of selecting the whole thing in Blender and using G > Y > *value* > Enter to do the job. This means the majority of the work, assuming you're not going to re-skin the cars, is reduced to finding appropriate values for attachment points, which is pretty simple even if it will involve a bit of trial and error.

WP&P even mentioned (via email) that he had been thinking of trying out triple cars. Presumably he was thinking would be built the same way as the existing Bipolar, or the same way a Garratt would be: using the main body as the middle car of the three, with the first and second cars done as trucks. Triples would work best with short cars, to reduce the geometry problems around corners, but triple hoppers or something should be viable.

Note that I'm not thinking of messing with the .cty or .car files here. I'd be keeping weights, etc the same to give good compatibility with existing locos and maps. Personally I'm only thinking of changing the visual aspect. So the consist would still show a maximum of 8 cars, but depending on the modelling it could show up to 24 cars during gameplay.

[Gumboots]

Just checked out some stuff, for general interest. Attached is a screenshot of four models at the same scale. I've imported the default EP2 Bipolar (second one down) since that is already using the same construction as would be used by triple cargo cars, or by Garratts.

The top model is the one I made for the TGR Class M Garratt. The third one down is three default B era hoppers placed end to end. The last model at the bottom is the wheels and basic middle section for a NSWGR AD60 Garratt.

The Bipolar has yellow arrows showing the truck1 and truck2 attachment points to the body, and blue arrows showing the front and rear Track Points. These are almost exactly where the same points would be required for a triple B era hopper, so from that it is clear that triple B era hoppers will behave just as well as the default EP2 Bipolar. Any cargo cars of around the same length should be equally good as triples. Doubles should be no problem either.

The Class M Garratt at the top would have similar Track Points but a longer central body, with the two truck attachment points further apart. That shouldn't present any major problems for behaviour.

The AD60 is the longest and so would be the most likely to misbehave around tight corners or over sudden changes in grade. I'm still determined to do an AD60 at some stage though.

ClassM_Bipolar_triplehopB_AD60.jpg (78.79 KiB) Viewed 10267 times

[Hawk]

Note that I'm not thinking of messing with the .cty or .car files here. I'd be keeping weights, etc the same to give good compatibility with existing locos and maps. Personally I'm only thinking of changing the visual aspect. So the consist would still show a maximum of 8 cars, but depending on the modelling it could show up to 24 cars during gameplay.

Does this mean that you would see three cars but only be hauling one car's worth of goods?

[Wolverine@MSU]

Does this mean that you would see three cars but only be hauling one car's worth of goods?

I suspect yes, but it would be really cool if you could get three loads-worth on a triple.

[Gumboots]

There's no way of getting three loads on a triple without hacking the .exe to allow more loads in a consist. We can pretty much write that idea off.

You could just triple the weight of triple cars, but that would mean all cars hauled by all locos would be three times as heavy, because once a triple car is assigned to any cargo it will affect all loads of that cargo. This would break locos faster, and would not provide any extra haulage for loads, or profit from them. However, if anyone ever does want to change car weights it's a simple matter of changing a couple of bytes in the relevant .car file.

I don't want to break things, and cannot see hacking the .exe to be practical, so am just thinking of doing the visual aspect for extra fun.

Oh and using the same basic idea to make Garratts, of course.

[Gumboots]

I had a brief play around with the multiple freight cars idea yesterday. After testing the first AD60 Garratt model live, I'm pretty much convinced that this is close to the practical limit for things that can be made to behave fairly well. Anything significantly longer than this is likely to be a real mess around corners.

That sort of decides what can reasonably be done with multiple freight cars. The game's freight cars increase in size with each era, with the D cars being massive compared to the earlier ones. This is a bit dumb really, since in reality the loading gauge of a railroad doesn't keep increasing without limit. They can still increase in weight over time, but I'd prefer them to not be 20 feet tall and 15 feet wide, so if I remodel any freight cars I'd be making an effort to keep them sane for height and width.

Anyway, the limiting factor for RT3 purposes is car length, so I did some comparisons. There are 7 types of basic freight car, with different cargoes done with cargo icons on the side of the basic types. The auto carriers are the longest, and within a reasonable length limit it is only possible to use the A series autos if you want to do triples. The B series autos are far too long for triples, but could probably (not sure of this) be made to work ok as doubles.

For the flat cars, and the uncovered hoppers (called hop in the game folders) and the tank cars doing a triple B series is not a problem, but C series is too large for triple cars.

All of the others (box, chop, refr and stock) would be ok as triples up to C series. D series would still be far too big for triples.

After testing the Garratt I definitely want to do the multiple freight cars. I may try to develop them in parallel with the Garratt, because having a 108 foot long articulated freight monster hauling a piddly 8 cars just looks wrong.

It really needs at least double freight cars to look right, and that's just as a single header. Since the Garratt has a free tender slot available it's obvious that a double header is on the cards. They were used like this in real life to get ore and coal trains up over the coastal range, and I want one. Double headed AD60's are totally cool.

So really, to get it looking the part, it's going to need triple freight cars for a double headed Garratt to haul. This is not hard to do in principle. The only problems I can see are:

1/ Obviously double and triple freight cars have double and triple the vertex and tris counts of single cars, so rendering loads will increase. I think this will still be ok though, based on my earlier testing with the high poly double H10. I can always get really ruthless on the lowest LOD.

2/ Another possible problem with long freight trains is when two trains meet on a track. If the train is twice as long it will take twice as long for the overtaking train to overtake. This shouldn't be a real problem out in the country where there's plenty of space, but it might present problems in tighter maps that have stations at fairly short intervals. If your freight trains are long enough to span between two stations, and if the line is heavy on traffic, it may lead to trains not moving as freely. They could spend all their time trying to overtake or being overtaken. The only way to find out if this is going to be a problem is to do a fair amount of testing.

[WPandP]

Just a quick update to let the world know that I am still alive... and paying attention once more to the endeavors I began, thanks to the injection of new interest by Gumboots.

I will be providing my "roadmap" of intended rolling stock overhauls to him, showing where I was going to be going with all of the multiple-car-models and upped car weights and staggered production runs, etc. I want to weigh in with my thoughts regarding train weights and light/heavy engine performance.

Firstly, pretty much all of the early-era cars would begin as singles, so your 4-4-0 would have maybe 5 cars behind it. As time goes on, different cars will become multiples, so you'd gradually see trains growing from 5 to 7 to 10 to 15 cars, and so on. The icons in the train list have to be a bit abstracted, I was using dots to signify that an icon there stands for 2 or 3 cars in the view screen. Each icon is thus a "cut of cars" and not just a 1-to-1 representation; this interface compromise lets you still see the full train length on the list (which would be my guess as to why they baked in an 8-car limit in the first place).

As time goes on, my thinking is that the railroad must haul more of a given commodity in order to generate the same profit, which is the impetus behind development of ever more powerful engines and bigger cars. So, the fact that a cut of 3 cars produces the same revenue as a single car in the default game makes sense to me. The potential congestion hassles, when trains must overtake one another, are an actual challenge that railroads face, and I welcome the slight increase of game difficulty presented by this.

In fact, an overall increase of game difficulty was indeed one of my goals, because in the default game one can practically get by without paying much attention to grades and just assign any engine to any load. I wanted to create conditions that really bring real railroading concerns to the fore. So, instead of a single car that weighs 70 tons, make it a triple that weighs 210 tons...

My overall goal was to map it all out such that the average car weight is about 1.5 times the game's default weight, so I wasn't necessarily going for a straight doubling or tripling of weight. My "roadmap" has a graph in it, showing a steady rise in car weights that tracks at about 1.5 to 2.0 times the game's defaults, across all the cargo types. I suppose it would be rather easy to make two versions of each car mod - a "light" and "heavy" version - and let the player decide which to install. But I think it's fairly intuitive that a cut of three 70-ton ore jennies should tax an engine as though 210 tons were behind it.

The effects on breakdown percentage, though, might mean that a corresponding overhaul of engines is actually in order. I don't mind seeing trains slowed down by heavy and long trains, but having them exhibit an inordinate number of breakdowns doesn't seem right. I just want the player to face decisions about using big articulated steam for the heavy loads, and not for the crack express trains. And by having some cars be single, others double, and others triple, you end up needing different classes of locomotive for different cargo types. So, even within the same era, you don't end up with a single engine that is best for all cases. Hauling iron ore should call for a different kind of engine than hauling produce, for instance.

So, there's my thoughts. I'm still focusing more on my "real" trains (my N-scale layout) these days, but who knows, maybe I get dragged back into this? I've been hunting every now and then for a worthy successor game, but nothing ends up being as good as RT3.

[Gumboots]

I'm currently a bit unsure about how far we should push the freight cars thing. What I'm thinking is that if you're considering haulage over grades, this is precisely where multiple freight cars will look their worst.

Any combination of body and trucks acts as if the entire wheelbase is rigid in a vertical direction. IOW, it'll flex around corners but won't flex over changes in grade. This basically means it tends to look a bit crap going up and down mountains, or up and down anything for that matter. Anything with a really long wheelbase will look most convincing in flat terrain.

Then there's the manageability of sheer length around corners, past a certain point. Some double or triple freight cars simply won't look good on anything except straight track if the individual cars are too long. Let's face it, although the idea of increasing freight weights (combined with engine reliability upgrades) has appeal from a strategic perspective, the increased weights can be done just via the coding in the .car files. The only reason to make multiple freight cars is because they look cool. If they aint gonna look cool, aint no point making 'em.

So before going troppo on multiple everything, it'd pay to put some thought into how you're going to handle the visuals of different eras. I think this is going to require roughing out a range of likely suspects, then getting people to play with them and getting a consensus on what looks ok and what looks like rubbish when they're actually being used.

[Gumboots]

Ok, I've come to a conclusion about the maximum practical length for multiple freight cars.

Assuming we want them to look decent up and down graded track, and assuming that in practice we usually have some lumps and bumps in our track, I'm now convinced that the maximum practical wheelbase length for multiple freight cars is 100 RT3 units. This equates to 83' 4" at a scale of 10" per RT3 unit.

This is based on me trying out a range of locos over well laid, but still not perfect, mountain track. Since I was doing a quick sandbox test on the Beuth with a view to applying some drivetrain trickery to the Schools class beta, and since I already had the sandbox set up with Berkshires on mountain track anyway, I went through my installed roster and tried the same track out with a range of long wheelbase locomotives.

The Big Boy looks fine when going over uneven track. It has a total wheelbase of 90.7 RT3 units. The H10 double header looks pretty good too. Not quite as good as the Big Boy, but still fine most of the time. Each loco/tender unit of that has a total wheelbase of 97.7 RT3 units.

The basic AD60 Garratt test model I made a while back has a total wheelbase of 117.2 RT3 units, and honestly it looks like complete crap over uneven track. Instead of looking like a train going over lumps and dips, it looks much like a ship ploughing through waves. It's just too long. That extra 20% on the wheelbase just pushes the visuals too far, IMO.

So, AFAICT that effectively tells us how long any single unit can be before it will look like rubbish over uneven track. It can't really be any longer than each loco/tender unit of the H10 double header. It can get away with being a tiny bit longer, but not much longer. 2% longer should be fine, but 19% longer is definitely too much. That means we have a limit of 100 RT3 units for total wheelbase.

This then gives us a solid guideline for what models we can use for multiple freight cars. Getting them to turn into corners is no trouble at all (the AD60 Garratt and the H10 double turn into corners like race cars). It's only behaviour over lumps and dips we have to worry about. As long as we keep the total wheelbase under 100 units, they'll be fine.

[Gumboots]

Hey just out of interest I took a look at which D era freight cars were short enough to be done as doubles or triples without taking the total wheelbase over 100 units. There's a pretty good range already (some of WP&P's custom cars are included). Obviously modifying the mesh and skins for cargo cars is a lot simpler than modifying some other assets, if we want to add to the range of double and triples.

[Gumboots]

I just mocked up a possible full length freight train in Blender, since I already had umpteen models imported, just to see what it would look like. It looks like so much fun that I think we just have to have it.

All consists are 8 cars. Top consist is a mixture of some of the D era stuff that can be done as double units. Some of that is default and some is W&P custom cars. Second one down is WP&P double coal hoppers. The last one is triple WP&P bauxite hoppers (his iron hoppers will also work as triples).

Since it looks like so much fun, I'm going to have a crack at getting the bauxite hoppers running tonight. In principle it's easy, so time to have a go at it.

[Hawk]

That looks pretty wild.

[Gumboots]

Ok people, we haz triple bauxite hoppers.

I'll give them more testing over the next few days and see if I can get the behaviour a bit better. It's already pretty good, given the limitations of RT3. The 100 unit wheelbase limit I mentioned earlier is going to be about right for a maximum. These triple hoppers are about 90 units or so on the wheelbase, and you can see their limitations over lumpy track. Around corners they are about as good as any default cargo cars, which is to say they bunch up going left and string out going right (or maybe it's the other way around, but they all do it anyway).

I also made some adjustments to the UV mapping, so that the hoppers now have the text the right way around on both sides (it was reversed on one side before) and tidied up some of the skin alignment slightly.

In general I think these look pretty good and are great fun. A freight train finally looks like a freight train.

[Hawk]

You can download it here: http://hawkdawg.com/Archives/download.php?id=646

You do realize that link only works if you're already logged in, don't you? If you're not logged in it takes you to the login page. Even if you login at that time, you still aren't taken to the right place in the archives.

Maybe you should change it to this link:

Code: Select all

http://hawkdawg.com/rrt/rrt3/Xtras/Rollingstock.htm#wppbauxite

[Gumboots]

Done. Have uploaded the new zip.

Tonight's project will be to do the LOD's for the B and C era bauxite double hoppers, then export and test those. The top LOD is already set up ready for exporting.

I've taken the opportunity to revamp the UV mapping on these as well. The C era hopper had reversed text on one side (doesn't now) and since it had been made out of a box car by alpha'ing out stuff, it had a lot of redundant mesh and the alpha'd-out bits were sometimes visible against the sky (you could see them as thin black lines where the mesh edges were). This has been sorted now, so poly count is a lot lower and there won't be any odd-looking stuff against the sky.

Since both models had a fair amount of empty space on their skin images, I've also merged the cargo model mesh into the mesh for the trucks (the visible hoppers are done as trucks). This will cut the amount of processing power required since it'll mean fewer files to call, but the really good bit is that it allowed using a cropped photo of some bauxite to skin the cargo with better res, etc. This makes the cargo look a lot better, but still has the disadvantage that both hoppers have identical cargo. They did anyway, but since there's so much spare space on the skin I figure I'll have enough room for two cargo models at good res, and I can tweak the mesh individually since it's just part of the trucks now, so each hopper can different shadows, etc on its cargo. So I'll do that too.