Since FSX we've had cars and trucks on our highways/roads, also boats and ships on our water ways.  I was wondering since railroad tracks are part of vector data, is there a possibility of ever creating moving trains on our railroads tracks ? 

Edited May 3, 20206 yr by vcarlo

5 minutes ago, vcarlo said:

Since FSX we've had cars and trucks on our highways/roads, also boats and ships on our water ways.  I was wondering since railroad tracks are part of vector data, is there a possibility of ever creating moving trains on our railroads ? 

I did. But the performance impact of AI controlled trains is so massive, that it did not seem worth the effort to continue with my train runner app. Especially when using connected simobjects in P3D, the simulator is so busy that it can't do much else besides calculating train movement and waypoints.

These are screenshots from FSX, where connected objects are not possible anyway.

Best regards

Edited May 3, 20206 yr by Lorby_SI

Just now, Lorby_SI said:

I did. But the performance impact of AI controlled trains is so massive, that it did not seem worth the effort to continue with my train runner app. Especially when using connected simobjects (in P3D), so the train doesn't look like this:

Best regards

Thank you sir !  Would it be any different in today's DX12 world ?

3 minutes ago, Lorby_SI said:

I did. But the performance impact of AI controlled trains is so massive, that it did not seem worth the effort to continue with my train runner app. Especially when using connected simobjects (in P3D), so the train doesn't look like this:

Best regards

Should you ever come up with something usable and not too much of a performance impact, I would be gladly prepar3d to pay for it. I am all but an XP addict but their train traffic - despite a few shortcomings - adds a lot to the immersion.

Kind regards, Michael

1 minute ago, vcarlo said:

Would it be any different in today's DX12 world ?

I don't think so. The issue is not the graphics, it is the processing that the sim has to do regarding the moving objects. But even if you calculate all train engine and carriage positions externally (every single frame!), that doesn't help much. It is just too many objects - even AI traffic is more or less trivial against this.

If anything, this app is more for the low&slow flyers, who don't have a lot of AI traffic (preferably none).

Another issue is, that there aren't any railroad tracks in the sim. No, I really mean that. What we have are hundreds of thousands of tiny snippets of tracks, not longer than a couple of hundred feet each, with no information how they belong together. It takes an insane amount of time to create a proper railway route network from that mess. Imagine starting the app and the initial compile time for parsing your scenery library and creating the network would be several hours, maybe days.

Best regards

 

6 minutes ago, pmb said:

Should you ever come up with something usable and not too much of a performance impact, I would be gladly prepar3d to pay for it. I am all but an XP addict but their train traffic - despite a few shortcomings - adds a lot to the immersion.

Kind regards, Michael

Hello Michael,

Personally I think that the sim should do it.

But I imagine that the problem is the same for the sim - the route data is made for visuals, it isn't really suitable for this task, see above. It is the same with the roads, at some point the track snippet ends and the cars disappear. Before you can have proper traffic, you have to piece together the routes.

Best regards

Thanks Oliver... appreciate the response, oh well.  What about a railroad texture that contained nice looking static trains instead of just empty tracks and rail yards ? 

We have had a few  moving trains in FS2004, by creative developers, such as Bill & Lynn Lyons.

19 minutes ago, vcarlo said:

What about a railroad texture that contained nice looking static trains instead of just empty tracks and rail yards ? 

I think that there was a product that did this. But it was a long time ago, possibly for FS9?

Best regards

It was for FS2000. (The good old days)

51 minutes ago, vcarlo said:

Thank you sir !  Would it be any different in today's DX12 world ?

Solution to your longing....buy an XPlane licence..:)

1 hour ago, Wobbie said:

We have had a few  moving trains in FS2004, by creative developers, such as Bill & Lynn Lyons.

There are a few trains for Prepar3d, I think at ORBX LOWI and Aerosoft EDDM. As Oliver describes it, these are very short tracks and the trains disappear immediately afterwards. Nice for the surrounding of an airport but nothing for even regional use.

1 hour ago, Sesquashtoo said:

Solution to your longing....buy an XPlane licence..:)

I did long ago. It's sitting mostly idle on my machine. I am well willing to invest time any money into one sim (Prepar3d), perhaps two (add AeroflyFS2), but not three in parallel. 

Kind regards, Michael

My favorite is the Skytrain servicing CYVR done by FSDT.

3 hours ago, Lorby_SI said:

I think that there was a product that did this. But it was a long time ago, possibly for FS9?

Best regards

Sounds like a job for REX, I'm sure they want a new project to tackle 😄

In the Avsim library, John Watts has used SODE to create an animated train running past Orbx's EGKA.
Orbx themselves have animated trains for their EGHI and NZGS airports.
Additionally, FSDG have added an animated train for their new LFMU scenery.

Plenty of others have added static passenger or freight trains, carriages and box cars to give more life to their scenery. Drzewiecki is good at that. Seattle and Chicago have lots of placed objects.