CKPR

I have been helping out Ben Yates with his CKPR route and decided to try and resurrect one of the TSM models from my MSTS version of the route.

Was a bit of a pain, firstly I tried the new Italian shapefile converter, but it didn't work. It does seem a bit hit and miss as it has worked on other models. Anyway, I had try another method which was to import the .dst file into 3DCanvas then export it to a VRML file, which was then imported into 3ds Max. 3DCanvas does export 3ds files but Max doesn't like them, says they are an invalid format!

Having imported the file I tidied up the mesh (I wasn't a very good modeller back in the TSM days) then applied some shaders and voila....




Not the best model I ever made and certainly not to the standard I would currently expect to achieve, but not bad for a tweaked TSM import.

An apology to L&B fans

Regretably, due to ill health two of the main contributors are unable to continue at this time.

Kevin, who is contributing rolling stock (Lyn) and Gary, who is the route builder are both unwell and unable to continue for the present. I apologise to any L&B fans reading this blog but there will be limited development on the route for the foreseeable future.

However, both Gary and Kevin have expressed a desire to finish their work when they return to better health, so all is not lost.

On the goods news side, Captain bazza's dead computer has been replaced and work has restarted on the Manning Wardles.

We wish Gary and Kevin well and look forward to the day they can return to the route.

Cauliflower update

The loco and tender are now in game and working.



There's still alot of work to do but at least its a positive step forward.

Unfortunately, I am having my usual difficulties with the coupling of the rolling stock as I get overlapped buffers, and failure to couple, problems. Its one area of RW I've always had difficulty with, so if anyone out there knows how to do it, let me know!

CKPR

I live in the Lakes District where there are two railway lines of particular interest, the Furness Railway and, my favourite, CKPR(Cockermouth Keswick Penrith Railway).

I spent several years researching the route and developing it for MSTS, but never released it. Consequently, I was very interested when Ben Yates started to produce a version for RW and a great job he is doing of it. Ben and I have had some correspondence on the route and he expressed a desire for a Webbs 18" Goods 0-6-0 loco, nicknamed Cauliflower, as they dominated the traffic on the route upto and into, the 50's.

I had a similar desire when I was doing my MSTS route and as no one expressed an interest in helping, I made my own.




As I understood Ben's frustration I decided to try and resurrect my old model. Firstly I imported the .dst files into 3DCanvas from which I exported the files in .3ds format. These were in turn, imported into 3ds Max and I had myself a model of a Cauliflower.



The mesh was a mess and took some sorting out but finally I was able to export the loco as a RW scenery model.



Still a bit of work to do on textures and shadows but not bad I thought, for a first loco!

Then I started on making it a working model for the game. Spent days wondering why it wouldn't show up until I realised you have to have a simulation blueprint before it will appear as an engine. Since then I have struggled with blueprints for bogies, couplings, brakes, cabs etc etc etc not to mention scripts and csv files, animations and audio. I'm nearly bald with the hair tearing frustration. Still, the engine now appears in game, although I get a SBHH system crash if I go anywhere near it!

So watch this space for imminent reports of my early demise from RW Physicsitis.

Aaaaaargh.....!!!

The amount of work I put into modelling for Railworks is a good demonstration of how much I like the game, but occasionally it makes we want to tear my hair out. I hadn't intended to post anymore on the subject of the Transporter bridge but I thought I'd give a liitle background on my last few days, in the hope it may help someone else.

I have been trying to add sound to the model and had endless problems. It took longer to add the sound than to build and animate the model! As too often, the wiki is worse than useless and only confuses rather than informs, so the only way to go is looking at the work of others, for which Mike Simpsons RWTools is invaluable.

The problem I wish to draw attention to is caching by the asset editor. Here's a comment from Pete(karma99) which I found invaluable.

Sounds like the asset editor and it's infamous caching.. if you try and rebuild with a file that's older than the last one it saw, it will ignore it.
It's trying to save time recompiling everything on every build, but it's a pain in the ********* butt if you don't get every single part of the export perfect on the first go!

If you go to the Assets/Kuju/Shapeviewer folder and delete the appropriate folder in it (ie Scenery) you should be able to get a fresh export without it remembering everything.
Note: DO NOT delete the files in the route of the Shapeviewer folder. If you do this the Asset Editor can sometimes die horribly and just stop working altogether until a random point in the future!

Whilst this was good advise, I found it was also necessary to delete the entries in the relevant assets folder as well. Not certain but perhaps the .tgt files may be the culprit here?

Anyway, I found that everytime I made a change to the sound file it was necessary to undergo this tortuous procedure to ensure the changes took effect, otherwise I was never sure if I had made a mistake or the system was just messing about.

Ok, rant over, but I sometimes wonder if the phrase "user friendly" was ever used at Kuju?

Quick update and a problem.

I decided that a transporter bridge needed to move, so I created an animated version.



Whilst doing this I came across a problem. Both the bridge and the gondola have night textures which illuminate parts of the model at night, by use of the AddATex shader plus the suffix -night on the object name. e.g 1_0512_decklights_night

As the gondola is now moving, its night textures had to be seperate from the bridge ones, so I split them accordingly. Consequently, neither appeared in the game as, apparently, RW only supports one object with the -night suffix! Not an issue with static objects, but certainly a problem with animated items.

Very big crane!

Many of the counties in the UK have significant rivers flowing through them, Thames, Severn, Avon etc. but I was born and raised in County Durham which is (I believe) unique as it is associated with three major rivers. There is the Tyne to the North, Tees to the South and the Wear throught the centre.

Each of the rivers has iconic bridges associated with it and I grew up seeing them on a regular basis. Kuju have already created the Newcastle-upon-Tyne crossings for railworks and Darpor is currently doing a great job of the Monkwearmouth bridge at Sunderland, but there was a recent request for a model of the transporter bridge across the Tees at Middlesborough.

If you have read the earlier entries in my blog you'll know I like cranes and the transporter bridge is a very large variation on a crane, so I was unable to resist the challenge. So here we have it, the Middlesborough Transporter Bridge.




This is an extract from a history of the bridge...

The Middlesbrough Transporter Bridge has been a symbol of the area since it was opened in 1911.

It is a total of 851 feet (259.3 metres) in length which makes it the longest of those remaining in the world. Its cantilever construction has three main bridge spans that give it its unique appearance. The bridge is, effectively, two almost independent structures joined at the centre of the River Tees. Each half of the bridge has an 'anchor' span of 140 feet (42.6 metres) and then cantilevers across the river some 285 feet (86.8 metres) from the tower leg to meet its twin from the opposite bank. The passenger gondola is suspended by steel cables and runs on a wheel and rail system approximately 160 feet (48.7 metres) above the River Tees.

The Middlesbrough Transporter Bridge is fully operational and provides a regular quarter-hourly service between Middlesbrough and Port Clarence for 18 hours a day. It remains the largest of the Transporter Bridges operating worldwide, and provides a valuable public transport service, crossing the river in two minutes.