- Messages
- 5,214
Hi,
I do not tire of trying to find some new things to do in FSX, I cannot help it.
I was, just out of curiosity and trying to get my own experiences conveyed to an FS friend on KDLS, looking at how I could liven up the (magnificent) scenery around Dallesport (OR or WA?).
And, behold, there is a railroad at both sides of the Columbia river.
Now, why not try and have a train on this railroad?
Just a matter of making a sketchup model, exporting it as a dae file, open it with MCX and make it into an mdl. Add this mdl to a new simobjects vehicle folder, adapt a vehicle sim.cfg and add an airfile and the texture and you have your scenery model.
Only thing that remains to be done is to use AIBTC and make a traffic file for the train.
So far everything OK.
But I also know that the reference point of the train.mdl is also its pivoting point and as that railroad in the Columbia river gorge happens to be full of curves, it is not good idea to have a mdl that is too long because that would lead to front and back not following the rails any longer.
I then thought, what if I split up this train in several parts?
I did and made several entries in the simobject\groundvehicles for each part of the train and applied the same route to them with the same plan.
And, and here comes the crux of the problem (at least for the moment), the different simobjects act like one.
Here is a screenshot to show what I mean: these are two models, two simobject entries, but with the same route, theire reference points placed in such a way that they touch eachother, the first one from the back, the second one from the front.
I still have to work on this somewhat further but wanted to let you know this funny behaviior of the train and hoping that someone has already been along that (rail)road and knows what the problem is.
I do also know (from searching the forums) that some others have tried to do this with Gmax and animate the train to follow a path but I think that in this case it is not a viable option.
Hence my request: let your ideas run wild and see what we can come up with.
Roby
PS (I am good at PSses): do not mind the textures of the train, I still have to work on that but I first wanted to know if it would work.
I do not tire of trying to find some new things to do in FSX, I cannot help it.
I was, just out of curiosity and trying to get my own experiences conveyed to an FS friend on KDLS, looking at how I could liven up the (magnificent) scenery around Dallesport (OR or WA?).
And, behold, there is a railroad at both sides of the Columbia river.
Now, why not try and have a train on this railroad?
Just a matter of making a sketchup model, exporting it as a dae file, open it with MCX and make it into an mdl. Add this mdl to a new simobjects vehicle folder, adapt a vehicle sim.cfg and add an airfile and the texture and you have your scenery model.
Only thing that remains to be done is to use AIBTC and make a traffic file for the train.
So far everything OK.
But I also know that the reference point of the train.mdl is also its pivoting point and as that railroad in the Columbia river gorge happens to be full of curves, it is not good idea to have a mdl that is too long because that would lead to front and back not following the rails any longer.
I then thought, what if I split up this train in several parts?
I did and made several entries in the simobject\groundvehicles for each part of the train and applied the same route to them with the same plan.
And, and here comes the crux of the problem (at least for the moment), the different simobjects act like one.
Here is a screenshot to show what I mean: these are two models, two simobject entries, but with the same route, theire reference points placed in such a way that they touch eachother, the first one from the back, the second one from the front.
I still have to work on this somewhat further but wanted to let you know this funny behaviior of the train and hoping that someone has already been along that (rail)road and knows what the problem is.
I do also know (from searching the forums) that some others have tried to do this with Gmax and animate the train to follow a path but I think that in this case it is not a viable option.
Hence my request: let your ideas run wild and see what we can come up with.
Roby
PS (I am good at PSses): do not mind the textures of the train, I still have to work on that but I first wanted to know if it would work.
Last edited:
>:
.
