Engine Replacement Research

[low_grade]

Go ahead and laugh at my ignorance lol but I always thought dining cars and cabooses weight about half of a freight car?? 53 tons would be 1/3 more! Oof, that's going to make me seriously reconsider dining cars at least...

[RulerofRails]

Yeah. It certainly doesn't make sense. Somehow the .cgo file weights never got utilized or the coding changed. I'm sure this is related to the in-game performance read-out showing the wrong weights.

[Gumboots]

Go ahead and laugh at my ignorance lol but I always thought dining cars and cabooses weight about half of a freight car?? 53 tons would be 1/3 more! Oof, that's going to make me seriously reconsider dining cars at least...

You'd think so, but the caboose and dining car are 1/3 heavier than freight by default. What I suspect happened is that they were originally planning on using the weight defined in the .cgo files to calculate load weights for partial loads, or perhaps different load weights for different cargos (ie: 10 tons for boxcar of feathers and 50 tons for a boxcar of lead, or whatever). Since the caboose and dining car don't get loaded with anything in the game they added extra weight to the .car file.

They must have decided to simplify things during development, since the weight value in the .cgo is deprecated. Setting it to 0 or 1,000,000 makes no difference*, but all cars have their .cgo weight set to double their .car weight as a leftover from alpha or early beta. My guess is that the weights of the dining car and caboose are leftover too. There are quite a few scattered throughout the game's coding.

If you want more reasonable caboose and dining car weights you might like to try these: Caboose Revamp RC 1 and Express_Cargo_Revamp_RC1. There will be upgraded versions of those packs soon, but they're perfectly usable as they are.

You might also find this interesting: Speed_&_Grades_Final_v1

*I always set it to 0 in anything I work on, just to remove one more chunk of confusing bytes.

[Gumboots]

Yeah. It certainly doesn't make sense. Somehow the .cgo file weights never got utilized or the coding changed. I'm sure this is related to the in-game performance read-out showing the wrong weights.

Since the default .cgo weights are always double the .car weights, the stats pop-up is giving accurate figures for the .cgo weights in any era. Which is fine, except that they aren't used. So it looks like back when the stats pop-up was coded the .cgo weights were the relevant figures, which implies that back then the .car weights weren't used. Not that it matters now. I'm just idly wondering how the dev process went. Probably messy as anything. Dev usually is.

If anyone ever figures out where the stats are coded into the .exe, it's probably a piece of cake to change them so they are correct. At least for the default four eras. I'm not sure how easy it would be to update them for extra custom eras.