Light rail modding help

[the7trumpets 10]

You got it mikeseith.

I'll try to type up very clear instructions on what textures we need to create to get a skeleton system together. Most of it should be fairly simple, basically taking the track texture off of the elevated rails and overlaying them on top of networks. The avenue will require some creativity, but I'm sure it'll be fun. I've gotta go now, but I'll be back later with specific instructions in a (hopefully) simple explination.

[Edman_123 11]

Date: 8/13/2004 7:07:56 PM
Author: the7trumpets
You got it mikeseith.


I'll try to type up very clear instructions on what textures we need to create to get a skeleton system together. Most of it should be fairly simple, basically taking the track texture off of the elevated rails and overlaying them on top of networks. The avenue will require some creativity, but I'm sure it'll be fun. I've gotta go now, but I'll be back later with specific instructions in a (hopefully) simple explination.

quote>

I think this is a pretty cool project. I looked at the first post on here, and was pretty much amazed. I hope you get this to work completely. So many people have wanted light rail.

[Swamper77 90]

Daeley,

Once you get these new occupant groups set up, would it be possible to make a transit-enabled lot that blocks particular types of vehicles? That way mikeseith could keep his trains on separate lines. I use a pair of custom lots on my rail grids. One of them blocks passenger trains and the other blocks freight trains. I do this because the tracks run parallel to each other and I use the Roadtop Railway Stations. For some reason the passenger trains try to use both tracks in this setup...

-Swamper77

[Mr_Bentley 0]

looks cool r u still going to finish those request for those cars

[Daeley 46]

Mike: yes, that would be something in the nature of what I need is that lot from ST, SCC or another site?

 

edit: okay, found and investigated that lot. Even though the way he does it actually works, I'm afraid this could raise compatibility issues. You see, he edited the simcity vehicles.lua file, a file that only gets loaded once. So unless we keep a central point with all our custom vehicles (and run the risk of having multiple wrong versions in ciculation) I'm going to try and make it a standalone plugin.

 

Swamper: blocking vehicle acces is done through transit enabling... and unfortunatly, as far as I know you can only block parent automata groups, i.e. trains, trucks, cars, peds. Besides, These are actual automata used by the sims to transport themselves. The cement mixers I did on that lot above are purely cosmetical and serve no purpose at all.

 

 

[Daeley 46]

update: okay, I think I got it

 

for this picture I made an occupant group that spawns Lamborghini trains

 

so if you just give me your trains and your lots I can build a little LUA file to make them work together

[mikeseith 457]

That is fantastic Daeley!
Just send me your email addy in a PM and I'll send you the trains and stations. I plan on making larger stations also and making them work with the new groups should be easy (I hope)?
Thanks for your time and effort. I spent most of yesterday trying to make sense of the occupant groups and got nowhere. This is great! 5 duckies for you Daeley .

[Daeley 46]

progress report: Almost done here

 

 

Red, yellow and green function correctly... but for some reason the blue one also spawns geen trams... I've checked all the occupant numbers and there shouldn't be a problem, but I'll give it some more thought

 

oh, and Mikeseith, would you mind sending me those tramway textures?

[Zeddic 3]

FANTASTIC WORK! If you really get those trams work functionally, it's almost the greatest thing ever happened to our dear game, don't you think? If just world was full of people like you... Well, not full, it's nice to have some noobs to help.

Combo! «»

[mikeseith 457]

Truely impressive work there Daeley...The textrues have been sent.
ah, make that textures.

[Daeley 46]

okay, work on this is pretty much complete

The blue stations were spawning green vehicles because you had given the blue and green S3D train models the same instance number. I changed that to another and now everything should be fine. I've been toying around with this in some test cities and I must say it's really fun!  This was a great idea!

 

you can't make out the tram colors all too well, but here's a little picture of a yellow and a blue tram circuit intersection

 

Mikeseith, I'll send you the files right away

 

and Swamper, I'll start building a little file for you too... just got your vehicles from STEX

[mikeseith 457]

You know, when I started this thread I didn't have too much hope of really being able to have the different color lines. Now with some tweaking, this will be the best thing to ever happen to mass transit. Big round of applause for Daeley!

Just one thought though. Now that the genie is about to be let out ot the bag so to speak. Do you think there should be a new thread somewhere in the mods section of simtropolis to register new occupant groups? It could get messy if alot of people start messing with them without a central register. Or can there be a bunch of new occupant groups (like instances) where it wouldn't be an issue?

[Daeley 46]

well that depends... for now I have used some easy values, I mean occupant groups with 4 digits... If occupant groups can have 8 digits, there shouldn't be too much problem... If the can have only 4 digits, that might not be a bad idea....

[DuskTrooper 314]

I must say- this is a really interesting, and project. And I was wondering- is the rail itself an overlay texture? ( it should be ) so ppl can use bricks and stuff underneath to fit into the surroundings/etc.

[the7trumpets 10]

Mike, here's what we need to start the ANT->light rail project:

 

 

A straight lightrail track with the same track spacing as the eltrain track in FSH 0x08031500 set into the following oneway road tiles:

 

0x09004d00

0x09004b00

0x09001202 (track going east-west instead of north-south)

0x09000f00

0x09001100 (track going east-west instead of north-south)

0x09000300

 

Then we need the following lightrail tracks symilar to the corresponding eltrain tracks placed over oneway road tile 0x09004b00:

 

0x08000500

0x08031600

0x08032500

 

 

This is just the tip of the iceberg, but with these tiles, I should be able to do some conclusive tests to determine whether or not a full-fledged light rail network utilizing the unused network (ANT) is possible or desirable.

 

In addition to these tiles, if I could have your stations, with transit IO properties set to allow el-trains accross.  I know you were using passenger trains, but realistically, more light rail systems are built on the same track width as el trains than heavy rail.  There are a handfull of exceptions, but overall everyone I know of who has had experience and knowledge of light rail systems seems to agree with this.

 

 

So, once I have the stations and those tiles I'll do some RUL and Path coding and do some tests and report back.  If any of this doesn't make sense, let me know and I'll try to elaborate/simplify a little more.  Thanks again!!!

[Daeley 46]

hmm, if you're going to set this to el-trains instead of ground trains I might have to make some adaptions to the tram defenitions... currently they are set to inherit their properties from track checkers. And yeah, over here trams seem to use the same track width as subways.

 

gets me thinking... with some research I might be able to set them up so they run in groups of (randomly?) two or three wagons instead of just one

[mikeseith 457]

Daeley, please check in your game again. I am not getting the same results you are. The stations spawn more of the color tram that we want but they are also spawning other colors too. I removed all of the plugins from mu folder but I get the same results. Check into this for me please. It could still be me, but I don't think so.

This is closer than I ever got, but not quite there I think. See if the same happens on your comp. again. If it works for you and not me, I won't know what to do then.

[Daeley 46]

whoa! weird! that's not supposed to happen :s

 

I'll increase the number of spawns to se if it still works...

[Daeley 46]

ran a few test and everything seems to work perfectly over here  did you change anything to the files I gave you? I already set up all the occupantgroups right, so they're all set to go.

 

0x5550 blue train - 0x5560 blue train spawner

0x5551 yellow train - 0x5561 yellow train spawner

etc.

 

so every vehicle and every station only needs one of these occupantgroups.

 

it's also possible you're seeing something like this:

 

the stations can spawn trams on the tracks all around them, so if you have tracks of a blue line running aside a yellow station, you can have yellow trams on your blue line.

 

anyway, it's past midnight over here, so I'm going to bed now...

[Edman_123 11]

[mikeseith 457]

Hello all,
Daeley, I found out what the problem is. The parent cohort of the trams is the rail checker right? All rail stations, including these spawn rail checkers, and it seems any and all rail checkers in the parent cohort. The stations were rightly spawning the trams in the correct color most of the time until it was real rail checker time. Go back to the game and set up a line with about 4 stations on it and wait 5 minutes, then I think you will see.

Anyway, I think I fixed it. I went into your LUA file and changed the parent to commuter_train_engine. Then I went to all the trams and changed the parent cohort to the commuter train. Then changed the commute train length to 1 and opened up all the stations and removed the original commuter train occupant group, 1305. That way the stations should only spawn the particular color tram wanted. I tested this for a little while and it seems to work properly. Tomorrow after work if I have time I'll test it more, but I'm pretty sure that was it. Also I was worried that removing the commuter train occupant group (1305) would make the stations not work as they should, as commuter stations, but they are functioning fine.

[mikeseith 457]

the7trumpets,
I'll get right on it, and thank you for keeping it simple. I'm sure I'll come up with a question or 2 before I'm done though.

[Daeley 46]

ahh yes that sounds logical didn't think of removing the normal track checker spawn...

your solution sounds good, but like this you can't use both trams and trains as you've also reduced the lenght of normal commute trains to 1... well you can still use them but it doesn't look that great anymore.

 

Personally I'd leave the trams as track checkers so you don't have to set max car lenght to 1. All you have to do then is prevent other checkers to spawn. So just copy the trains.lua file to my automata controllers.dat (it's the file that handles track checkers, it's inside simcity_1.dat) and change the occupant group from 0x1300 to 0x1305. That way, they won't spawn at the stations if you remove 0x1305. (I don't think we can also remove 0x1300... I think that one is required for the game to see it as a train station)

 

oh and btw, good job on finding that... you're pretty good at this

[mikeseith 457]

I'll try it. Personally I liked having them as rail checkers too. That way you can use commuter traint also.

I'll let you know the results.

[eangulus 3]

When do you think there will be a beta version or even a final?

I am looking forward to using this.

[Daeley 46]

hmm just thought of something... if you set them as rail checkers, normal train stations might spawn them... I could set the checker spawn to be influenced by some non-existent occupantgroup (say... 0x0000) to prevent normal stations from spawning them... no station would ever spawn a rail checker again though, but I don't really see this as a big loss

 

I'll try some stuff later... I'll contact you through email if I have some new files.

 

update: I've been able to define the trams with parent train instead of track checker, it seems the class id of each vehicle is a reference to it's properties... The reason why using train as a panret didn't work is because it didn't have a default class id. With the latest update, trains shouldn't spawn from tram stations and trams shouldn't spawn from the wrong station anymore.

[Skippydam73 0]

Just as an Idea Mike, Daeley, I think two cars would look the best. Here in Portland, OR, the Max line uses two cars. They have the small stations. Though I dont know in bigger cities for Trams how long of length they are. Food for thought.

[the7trumpets 10]

Hey Skippydam - since you seem to have some knowledge of at least one real life light rail system, how tight of turns can they make?

I ask this, because if having only two small cars means they can make 90 degree style turns along oneways and avenues, that would make a difference as to how its implemented.

If, instead, they are limited to 45 degree turns like the train tracks and elevated rail, it will be more difficult to do what I'm planning, but not impossible. I was just wondering.

[Speedy 0]

If the stations are to remain as shown above I also think two tramcars would look the best. If you guys make the stations longer it should be three cars. But no more. In Oslo there are both two and three cars, but the trams suck... Almost no money is given to mass transit  anyways... I must say you guys are given the simtropolis community a very nice gift if this is to be released

[Daeley 46]

well I have found a way to make it look as if there are several trams, but they aren't actually connected like a normal simcity train with wagons, they just drive behind each other very close. The properties about wagons are set in an exemplar so it doesn't look like I can create new ones... I'll have a closer look but don't get your hopes up too much...

 

T7T: light rail can make 90 degree turns, at least over here it can. Obviously not at full speed, but I can think of a few avenue intersections where trams are going every direction. Hope that's some good news