Southern Railways "Schools" V class [WIP]

[Gumboots]

Ok, how's this for lateral thinking?

So I'm making a Schools class choofer, just for the fun of it, and that eventually got me into thinking about how it could be used. After looking around a bit and pondering the situation, I realised that it's really a bit of an orphan at the moment. It could be used in umpteen scenarios, but doesn't have a special place as things stand.

An obvious solution is to make a specifically Southern Railway scenario, which has quite a bit of scope for being interesting. The grouping of smaller railways was in 1923, and BR nationalisation was in 1948. This means Southern itself was in existence for 25 years, the standard RT3 scenario length, and that period spanned everything from the Roaring Twenties, to the '29 crash and Great Depression, followed by economic recovery, followed again by that stupid war some silly people wanted to start. This means there are plenty of possible events to throw into the mix, and cargo targets can be changed for some years to add some extra strategy.

The other thing is that Southern was unusual among UK railways, in that around 75% of its income in non-war years was from passenger cargo. This changed to about 60% freight in some war years, but for most of the time Southern was very heavily reliant on express. This means the scenario should be coded to reflect that, and a scenario that heavily emphasises pax haulage is unusual anyway. Unusual is good, since it would take the emphasis off industry and require a different playing style. People often wonder about how to maximise pax haulage, and this might be a good way to find out. The intention here is to have at least one un-mergeable AI railway (GWR and SR shared some of the same territory and lines) and have a requirement that SR ends up with more loot, which it will have to get from massive pax haulage while GWR will have access to heavy industry as well.

Problem: RT3's editor is, once again, letting us down with its range of options. It has heaps of useless options that nobody ever wants, but lacks some really good ones. You can get industry profit in event conditions, but there is no way you can get express revenue or freight revenue. This is a bummer because I was initially thinking of having a pax revenue target. Pax loads is useless since that can be baited and switched if anyone wants to. Revenue can't be cheated, but also can't be coded.

Looks like the only way of doing it is to use territories, with heavy passenger production and limited industry in the areas Southern has access to. This is a crude substitute but should be workable.

So this is all looking promising as a scenario basis, then I got to thinking of other stuff. Southern also owned hotels, ports, and ships as part of its business empire. Hotels are a no brainer. Ports can be user-built or pre-placed. What about ships? This is when I vaguely remembered something about the British Miracle map, which I've never played, having "steamship lines" in it. I downloaded that map and took a look at it, and the "steamship lines" are just ordinary tracks and trains running across blue-painted zero-altitude land bridges through the ocean.

This is a cute idea. OTOH I don't like it. It looks daft to me to have tracks and trains running over the ocean. I couldn't put up with that myself, and was a bit disgruntled about it all. Then I realised something: it's just a skinning problem. As long as you only want steam trains (like me) there will be the modelling for electric track sitting around unused. The actual track model is the same for all track, with the difference being the catenary model for the flying fusebox tracks. Obviously a custom catenary model could be made and dropped into UEC. This could then be skinned to cover the tracks with nice ocean waves or whatever, but for game purposes would still be "electric track".

So, if territories are set up so that electric track is only affordable across the ocean, then you can have a rail network full of steam locos and your electric locos will be limited to the oceans. To stop idiots running choofers across oceans, similar territory tricks could be used to nobble oceanic choofers so they would be far too slow and unreliable to bother with, with the result that people would only use "electric locos" for crossing water. The obvious trick here is to skin an "electric loco" as a, you guessed it, steamship. This can have speed, hauling power, cost, whatever, tweaked to something suitable. For example, it could chew masses of fuel and be expensive to buy, but haul masses of stuff with perfect reliability and low maintenance costs, along with great pax appeal.

Ok, so if that's a possibility, how to handle stations? Again, just a skinning problem. There's no reason why one unused architectural style couldn't be co-opted to give stations that look like steamship ports. If only using Victorian, Tudor and (possibly) Clapboard station styles for a UK scenario, that leaves the Kyoto and Southwest styles up for grabs. So, just skin them up as ports and set the architectural style to suit for your steamship territories.

So, we could, within the limitation of no electric locos on land, get steamship lines that look like steamship lines.

[Gumboots]

Here ya go. Basic proof of concept.

So the deal is that all the game knows is that the first cargo car attaches to the "rear length point" of the loco or tender, depending on if there's a tender or not. In this case, obviously there is no tender.

So, if the rear length point is defined as being about 20 feet back from the bow or whatever, the game should handily suck all the cargo cars up inside the ship's hull. Nothing else will be following the ship anyway, so no problem. As long as the ship is about 10-20% longer than the longest load you want to haul it should be fine.

The only caveats are obviously to do with behaviour around corners, and behaviour at stations. Since any ocean routes should be pretty straight, corners shouldn't be much of a problem. The ship is naturally going to be three or four times the width of the cargo cars anyway. That means there should be some tolerance for shallow angles in the track, so as long as you can give the ship a fairly straight run into port and put of port it should look fine.

Behaviour at stations is still likely to be a bit odd, given how RT3 likes to pull cargo cars out of thin air sometimes, or to double them back up the track in front of the loco when starting off. Nothing to be done about that except live with it, but it shouldn't be too weird, or not any weirder than RT3 already is.

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Another possibility for freight haulage would be to make a small tramp steamer that hauls a barge. The barge would be the tender, and the freight cars would sit on top of it.

[Hawk]

Now that's an interesting concept.

[Gumboots]

Isn't it just? Ever since I thought of it I've been thinking this is so cool it's just got to be done. It's an ideal way of extending the locomotive roster and scenario options for us players who never like electric anyway. You can have diesel or steam locos on land, whichever you prefer, or both, and still have a good and completely new use for electric track, and open up new ways of using oceans in scenarios. Quite apart from the general visual coolness of having steamships at the dock, loading your stuff.

The only other catch apart from corners is if we also want to go with multiple freight cars. If the length of the consist is doubled or tripled then, since the cars are one-size-fits-all and can't be assigned via territory, obviously the length of the ship would also have to be doubled or tripled to fit them all in. At some point this is likely to get unwieldy.

Still, I think this concept is definitely worth messing around with.

[Hawk]

One thing I wonder is how you're going to lay track in the ocean.

[Bcbuhler]

You could take this steamship idea so far as to have a scenario that covers the whole world and try to transport stuff across the globe. Although map size would limit it it would be cool to try and run the whole worlds transportation network.

[Gumboots]

One thing I wonder is how you're going to lay track in the ocean.

Predetermined shipping lanes, starting and ending at defined port territories. There are two ways this could be done. One obvious way is to mark out the zero altitude land bridges across the ocean, without changing the background colour of them (they will just stay blue). In this case you would lay your own "electric track" when you wanted a trans-ocean connection. Since the ocean is free, I was thinking of using territory tricks to set track laying cost and track maintenance cost to zero (or -100% in event terms). I'd also set sand and oil consumption to -100%. Station building cost should probably be doubled, at a rough guess.

The other option is to pre-lay the track on the land bridges and then set it back to ocean in the editor. You can actually do this and it will work. I tried it last night. That way your shipping lanes would already be in place, and all you would have to do would be drop a station (skinned as a port) at each end of the shipping lane. This may be a better way of dealing with it, at least for some cases.

TBH I haven't fully thought through all the possible strategic options here. There are going to be several of them, and different scenarios will probably use different options.

You could take this steamship idea so far as to have a scenario that covers the whole world and try to transport stuff across the globe. Although map size would limit it it would be cool to try and run the whole worlds transportation network.

Go for it. I'll be making ships anyway.

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I've just taken a bit of a look at the track skinning. So far I don't know where the actual base track .3dp is defined, but in this case it doesn't matter. I've found the .3dp and skin files for the catenary, which is the bit required. The catenary maps to the *Catenary*T_body.3dp, Infrastructure_*.dds, and TrackTexture_*.dds files. Pix attached.

These are quite simple skinning prospects. The skin for the overhead wires in TrackTexture_*.dds can just be alpha'd out. The pylons and other bits in Infrastructure_*.dds can be re-mapped to the same areas but with different graphics, or to blank areas of the same image. Since there appear to be substantial blank areas anyway this shouldn't be a problem.

Obviously it would also be possible to change/improve the track and infrastructure skinning at some point, if anyone wanted to.

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Infrastructure_A-copy.jpg (83 KiB) Viewed 18204 times

LCatenaryDT_body.jpg (7.16 KiB) Viewed 18204 times

[RulerofRails]

Way to go Gumboots! That will make for a most interesting and unique scenario.

[Gumboots]

Yeah the concept is starting to take shape now. Obviously it's not even to alpha stage yet, but I'm thinking the map should include a lot of area that isn't actually usable by your (land) trains. Normally this would be a bad idea, but I think in this case it could work well.

The inaccessible areas in the UK itself would be the other UK railways, which would be coded to provide competition in some form (revenue targets, loads hauled, mergers, whatever) or just to supply the heavy freight from outside Southern's area. I'm even toying with the prospect of allowing the player to prevent nationalisation in 1948 if they play well enough, so if you're good enough you won't lose chairmanship and will be able to keep sandboxing, or maybe even make this a Gold requirement. Not sure. All still up for grabs, but it'd make sense to include areas of shared track with GWR to mimic the way it actually was. There may be a connection and/or haulage competition in the shared areas.

Anyway, the other big one is France. That wouldn't be accessible or mergable, but would be a great generator of cross-Channel express and freight in the pre-war years. So although a substantial portion of the map will be ocean, using that ocean will be essential to your strategy. Obviously the war will knacker all that trade, but I'm pondering ways to simulate the evacuation of Allied troops in 1940 with massive troops haulage, probably at a loss. This would be reversed in 1944, when you'd have to ship heaps of all sorts of stuff to France, probably at a loss again. May also add "U boats" and similar evils to the shipping lanes in the war years, with the open ocean to the west possibly allowing convoys, etc.

Lots of scope for all sorts of things anyway. Will just be a matter or nailing it down to something good. TBH I don't really like the idea of bringing wars into RT3, since one of the good things about RT3 is the lack of fragging, and wars are generally not a good thing anyway, but in this case putting up with a few years of simulated war could work. I already have some good ideas for some apocryphal Winston Churchill quotes.

[Gumboots]

I just ran a quick and rough test on this shipping idea. I took the old H10 Double Header test model and changed the length points on the "loco" (ie: first/loco tender combo) and the "tender" (ie: second loco/tender combo) so that both had their rear length points in the same place as their front length points.

As you can see in the screenshot, what this does is suck the second loco/tender combo right up forward so that it is in the same location as the first loco/tender combo, giving the appearance that there is only one unit. The cargo cars then start from the same "rear" length point, which is now at the front, so the first cargo car is entirely within the loco/tender unit, and the second cargo car is approximately half embedded, with the rest trailing behind as you'd expect.

This makes it clear that if the tender body had been extended far enough backwards, all cargo cars would be embedded inside it. I thought it would work, but given how RT3 has a nasty habit of throwing weird curve balls at strange times and for no apparent reason, I figured I should do a basic check before getting carried away. Looks like it's all good.

Quick_shipping_test.jpg (81.94 KiB) Viewed 18179 times

[Gumboots]

Have done a bit of playing around with sizes for ships and consists, using WP&P's groovy custom cargo cars (which is what I always run).

If I'm going to use electric track for the shipping lanes, that rules out any ships before 1904 if you want to lay your own shipping lanes during the game. I've tried making electric locos available earlier by event, and the locos do become available, but you still can't lay electric track for them before 1904.

What will probably work for 19th century shipping (haven't tried it because just thought of it) is if the scenario author sets the date in the editor to post 1904, pre-lays shipping lanes with electric track, then sets the date back to 18-whatever before saving the scenario. If that works, then no worries for 19th century shipping.

(Edit: Ha. Doesn't work. Just gave it a quick test. The electric track will be there in 1830, and the electric loco will be available, but the game still insists the track that was laid as electric can't be electric before 1904. That screws that idea.)

Anyway, I've set up a basic Blender model with imported body .3dp's for all the express coach eras, along with a single AutoB freight car for a quick comparison. The express coaches seem to be the longest single cars in any era, and the AutoB is the longest freight car.

For this Southern Railway scenario I'd be stuck with the C era stock. I could finangle things again to change dates and sizes, but the C era carriages are about right for scale for SR in the 1930's so I figure use them. The result is that for a full 8 car consist, the length required is greater than an actual SR ferry of the period. These were in the 300-350 foot range (about the same as a naval destroyer of the period) and an example is shown at the bottom of the picture, alongside a standard RT3 dock. It fits the dock nicely but is too short for a full express consist.

To get a full express consist in safely, I'd need the larger ship shown at the top of the pic. This is more like a trans-ocean liner in size, rather than a cross-Channel ferry. It's a bit long for the dock but would be fine once underway. Since this ship is getting pretty big it's probably close to the limit of what should be used, so if I do multiple freight cars for this scenario I'd sorta be working backwards from a reasonable maximum ship size, then seeing what fits in that. This will mean some freight cars will stay as singles, while some may be ok as doubles or triples.

Obviously it would be possible to have both faster express ships with great pax appeal, with cheaper, slower and uglier ships for freight. It would also be possible to do smaller and cheaper ships for shorter consists, if there turned out to be any use for them in the game. These would have to be coded with low free weight, so their speed dropped off dramatically if they had a consist sticking out the back, to stop people using the cheap ones to haul long trains and looking stupid.

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Edit: Just had another thought for added fun. I'd already figured that you could do also do paddle wheel ships just by setting the paddle wheels as RT3 "drivewheels" in the coding. That's easy. There's no way of coding propellers, but they should be underwater anyway so you wouldn't bother. However, ship rudders are often partially above water and they could be coded as trucks. By setting the truck attachment point correctly relative to the ship's rear track attachment point, it may be possible to get the rudder behaving properly around corners. Not that anyone would give a rat's when the thing is going 35 knots in a straight line out in the ocean, but having thought of it I'll have to try it sometime anyway.

[Gumboots]

Ok, got together all the cargo cars for the relevant period and sized them up. Without going to crazy big ships, which I don't want to do right now, the story is that for this size of ship the automobiles, flat cars, goods wagons, stock cars, tankers and all express (troops, mail, passengers and dining car) are all too long for doubles and will have to stay as singles. I figured express would only ever be singles anyway and I'm not too fussed about the others.

The good news is that boxcars, fruit cars, all hoppers (covered and open) and reefers will all fit in the ships as double units if we want them (and we does want them) providing the bauxite hoppers are changed to use the same body as the other open hoppers. I figure this is ok since they can still be skinned as bauxite hoppers, they'll just be a bit shorter than they are now.

So the upshot is that about half of all freight can easily be done as double consists and still fit in reasonable sized ships.

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[Gumboots]

Ok, this is back on. No good roughing out five million locos and not finishing one of them. Since I'm now over the initial buzz of actually being able to model things conveniently, I'll get back to working on the Schools class. The plan is to get it finished by the end of this month.

I have managed to get my hands on some works drawings for a range of components, including a GA of the whole loco. I'll do some corrections on these for distortions tonight, then use them to do a final check on the model.

[Gumboots]

Ok, I now have the thing set up with about 30 different accurate drawings for various views. This is cool.

This may seem over the top, but the good thing about it is that there's no need to guess. All I have to do is build over the drawings and everything will look right. This saves a lot of trial and error, as well as a lot of head scratching and swearing. It also gives me more of an insight into how the whole thing was put together. I find this interesting in its own right, but an advantage of understanding the construction better is that when the drawings aren't clear on some particular point it becomes easier for me to figure it out. Everything just starts to make sense.

It turns out that I had a lot of bits right, but other bits wrong. The wrong bits won't be hard to fix. This should give a more convincing model for people who are familiar with the class. There should be fewer of those niggles where you know something aint right, but you can't quite tell what it is.

The drawings I've been working from are scans of old works drawings, and these often have various distortions in them. Often a GA will be split into two scans, and each one may have a slightly different orientation and scale. Various bits of each scan might be stretched or bent or skewed slightly too. This all sounds like trouble, but I've found it's easy to fix if you just give it a couple of hours in Photoshop. GIMP would be just as good, if you prefer to use that.

The first thing I do is to start by taking lines which I know should be straight and horizontal. The ground level in a GA profile is an obvious case. Getting it straight and horizontal is usually just a matter of arc warping the whole layer to some fraction of a percent, and/or giving it a slight rotation. In bad cases it may be necessary to chop one section into a new layer and treat that separately, before merging it back into the first layer. This doesn't take long to do in practice. The next bit is to take the lines you know should be straight and vertical, and fix them so they are. It's basically the same process as fixing the horizontals, except that you use a skew transform instead of rotation.

The next thing I do is to look at things I know should be round, and check them for height and width. This will often require a slight scaling one way or the other to get heights and widths matching. If the drawing is in two halves, I'll then cross check both to make sure they are scaled to the same size before I join them. I'll also use a calculator to do proportional checks against known dimensions, such as comparing wheel diameters and wheelbases to overall length and height, etc to make sure the whole thing works together.

Once I'm happy with the drawing I'll load it into Blender as a background image, then position it and scale it to suit the units I'm using. Blender allows very fine control over position and scale. With a bit of messing around, it's not hard to set things up so that what started out as a comparatively rough drawing ends up being accurate to a fraction of an inch, in any direction, over the entire locomotive. At this point, building the model mesh becomes as easy as playing with Lego blocks.

[EPH]

What a cool modding/skinning concept.

'British Miracle' as you say does run simple track over blue-painted land to simulate ocean traffic - it is hard to talk about the British economy without overseas trade.

But I didn't invent the idea. I seem to remember I borrowed it from 'Men and Seals'. Just to give correct attribution.

[Gumboots]

Ok, having had a break and tackled some easy stuff, finishing this mongrel of a thing is back on the agenda.

I've fired it up again and done some more testing on the rough beta model. Stats are now where I am pretty happy with them. IRL they were a moderate sized choofer rather than a heavy duty one, and generally ran with a 5 car express consist. I've used that as a basis for my latest round of testing.

Pulling power and free weight have been wound back slightly. On my Royal Tour map the Schools will now get to 70-ish between Sydney and Newcastle, and 80-ish between Newcastle and Port Macquarie, which is about right for what they should do with 5 express cars. Going down a 3% or 4% grade (like Dunedoo down to Muswellbrook) it'll still touch a top speed of 94. That was only ever done briefly on a downhill stretch by the real thing, so that fits too.

Performance up grades is still useful, meaning it can actually be run just about anywhere. I've also increased the maintenance cost from $8k to $11k. This will still allow a fairly long economic life (15 years or so) but is a bit more in balance with stats for some other locos. The Schools is now as good as it ought to be, but not over the top.

If anyone wants a zipped copy of the latest .lco file, it's attached at the bottom of this post.

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Ok, so next bit is the gnarly stuff: deciding which details can be kept, and which have to be ditched or simplified to keep the verts and tris count under my chosen limit. I went through it yesterday and have knocked it back to 150 under the limit. It'll still look just as good when finished, but there's now scope for adding a few more bits that were missing.

I've also decided I'll have to re-scale the UV mapping to give a bit more space for things, so will be knocking that back from 24px/RT3 unit to 22px/RT3 unit. This part isn't actually that big a deal. Working out how to UV map everything and pack it all in is most of the work. Rescaling bits is easy.

Should have a new beta version fairly soon, with tender and all sorts of stuff.

Edit: Old zip removed. Use the one in this post if you want to try it out.

[Gumboots]

I was going over this again and had a brainwave. Said brainwave resulted in a lot of verts and tris disappearing without having to compromise the looks at all. The total count is now about 240 less than it was on Thursday.

The brainwave was to do with the modelling of some details for the tender. I had modelled the leaf springs and axle boxes on the tender, since with this style of old English tender those are quite prominent details. They're not modelled to the nth degree, just blocked out enough so that graphics can take over fooling the eye.

Anyway, this resulted in quite a lot of verts and tris since there are three leaf springs and three axle boxes each side, plus six large bolts each side to hold it all together. What I just realised is that with the tender having its own skin image, which has quite a lot of available space on it, there was no need for me to model each side separately for these details. I could simply join them up underneath the tender, and thereby not only halve the numbers of verts and tris, but also halve the number of separate meshes to be rendered. This number of separate meshes is, AFAICT from reading up on this stuff, pretty much as much of a performance hit as the numbers of verts and tris.

So anyway they're joined up now. They look solid at the moment because they aren't skinned yet, and just have an overall material applied in Blender. Once they're skinned the alpha channel will be doing its job and they'll look like the real deal.

[Gumboots]

Ok, so 2 and a 1/2 years later... ... I might actually finish this thing. I've been over it again and have managed to knock the poly count back to something reasonable, while still keeping it looking good enough to keep most sane people happy. Poly count is now down around 1940 (may change slightly) which is about 60 less than the infamous double Mikado.

That should be ok for performance in most games, but the only way to find out is to try it. The poly count may less than the double Mikado, but this is a faster locomotive, so it may get choppy when it's winding out past 80 mph. I'll run some tests with it before I get into serious skinning, just to check the frame rate is reasonable.

[Gumboots]

Got all the bits hooked up, and it's working now. This is after I made every beginner's mistake in the book, including exporting the tender files when they were set back behind the locomotive for a loco+tender display in Blender, instead of having the tender body separately placed at the geometric origin (0,0,0 on X, Y and Z axes) which is what you need for exporting.

Having decided to give up for the night, go to sleep, and then try again in the morning the mistake became obvious. Frame rate seems fine with basic testing just running a few trains. I think it's the overall amount of stuff in a scenario that really loads the game engine, and not so much the poly count of a few individual locos. Unfortunately I cleverly deleted all my old large scenario saves a while back (no idea why, and can't remember) so I'll have to build up another one or two for more intense testing.

Anyway it works now.

[Gumboots]

Just did a bit more testing to fine tune a couple of things. Skinning is still very basic, and the UV mapping is just a quick "get it all running" job, but it's usable if anyone wants to play around with it while they're waiting for better skinning.

Stats are set to match my custom express car pack in the pre-1950 era, so it will be a little bit underpowered with default PopTop express cars. It's set up the way the real thing was set up: as a moderate-sized choofer for five car consists on secondary express services. I'll balance the running costs so the economics works for that, once I get some more testing done.