I opened a support ticket about the issue of not being able to add trains to portals in the editor so they spawn during the scenario, one of the updates last year broke this functionality. It has been possible to do this for 17 years. This is the reply I recieved about it. "Welcome to Dovetail Support. My name is Chris and I look forward to helping you with Train Simulator Classic today. On further investigation, it appears that players have been using portals for something they were not designed for. Therefore, portal were never intended to support spawn AI trains, as this would contribute to overall memory usage and potentially cause performance issues and crashes. Portals were only intended to despawn trains to conserve memory. We apologise for any confusion this may have caused, and we are aware of the desire for such as feature should it become a possibility in the future. However, at this time using portal to spawn train is not supported for the reason given above. Thank you for your understanding. If you have any further questions or concerns, please do not hesitate to reach out to us." So there we are, it seems that adding trains to portals (portals that have a user interface with add and remove buttons) was not supposed to be used by players in this way and now that it has stopped working Dovetail don't seem inclined do anything about it. Fantastic.
Aren't workshop authors, such as RBJets, using it extensively? It has been recommended specifically as a memory lightening idea, also easier for the dispatcher, supposedly - by only having a few trains on-line at a given time, surrounding the player. One of the British regulars (my edit: removed names, clearly neither of them) commented on it, too, that having the entire network programmed is rare (edit: my example being the old O-P and E-G scenarios). What about 3rd parties?
I said I bet it was down to memory leaks a while ago, can't find the post now though. Well if the feature is removed then surely that answers your question?
The write-up is a little bit revisionist, but they never worked reliably for spawning trains so it's probably for the best that the feature has been permanently removed - at least from Tec Supports point of view! I daresay that if there is enough interest someone will produce a mod that enables train spawning sooner or later.
I thought you could only remove trains via Portals and not add them I did not ask a question - Just posted what I read somewhere
Don't be pedantic Peter, doesn't matter what you thought or what you read there was the possibility to add loco's to portals and it was widely used by those that knew, in fact I'll bet you've played scenarios that utilized this, and now you cannot because it's been removed. It's not really a conversation it's fact, it was a thing and now it is not, your comments are a mute point and have been corrected, move on.
"Not supported" is really the only accurate part of that statement, I doubt the correspondence can now be traced but long ago this was indeed said by Railsimulator.com and the reason given was nothing to do with memory usage but actually because it wasn't safely compatible with the signalling - i.e. it is possible by that method to inject more than one train into a signal section and run the risk of two AI trains colliding. John
Can confirm this when I made scenarios I used to send trains into portals rather than having them driving. The route taking up resources and woukd have them spawn out of portals to enter service.
We can't place trains in portals, ok. It was never officially supported. Question: Do scenarios made before the editor code got removed still work? Can anyone give an example scenario, I'm not aware of any.
I don't have specifics but any scenario that placed multiple trtains in a single portal are liable to break the moment the first train moves as they all start spawned ontop of each other.
But there should always be another way to do it, just spawning them behind each other. Eventually the player will be past the point where he sees these trains, and a train that's not visible to the player shouldn't be in the scenario. So take them out of the portals and line them up using v72.3b editor.
triznya.andras mentioned that RBJets uses them in scenarios on the Workshop. I'm not sure what route the scenarios are made for though
Pot and kettle Peter, maybe look at your own replies before judging mine! Ok.... (I know better than to argue with you Mr never wrong)
I never figured out how to spawn trains in with portals so this change doesn't affect me and seeing what people have said the feature seems like a weird oddity rather than something intentional. My main concern is, like others, what happens to scenarios that spawn trains in with portals. While I'd assume these trains would just not appear, meaning they will still work, if the game decides to spawn them all in from the start that would be disastrous for those scenarios. However, I doubt that is the case. EDIT: Link if the video doesn't load. I found an old video which talks about portals and it covers spawning trains in them. Based on the UI for the portal, it seems to me to be more than an unintentional feature, and I assume it's more like the older explanation for its removal which was that it caused signalling issues.
You are absolutely right, and I have to apologise, because the words I initially wrote have turned out to imply the wrong thing to many that have read it. When I said that Railsimulator.com had said the spawning of trains at portals was "not supported" I should maybe have said "no longer supported" because they used those words too. There was every implication in that correspondence that this once was a feature. Although my use of the game doesn't go back to Kuju Entertainment days, I suspect this feature was introduced in their time - probably when AI traffic first appeared in the game which may or may not be when the game was first created. At that time, scheduling AI traffic was very basic, I gather you could set only a start and end of the journey (perhaps both only at portals) and the only way to control the speed of AI trains was by dual speed limits for passenger and freight traffic - you could not set them to run at a percentage of line speed as you can today. That is also what has led to many developers still using the un-realistic and sometimes limiting feature of dual speed limits in many routes. Apologies again for causing the confusion. John
On Railsim some people are saying scenario creation is dead and they won´t make any more scenarios because of the whole "trains can´t spawned from portals anymore" thing. Is it really that dramatic?
Strange because that is what you do all the time. Yes, I make mistakes but I admit to them. Unlike some people.
I shouldn't think so. I've created quite a few standard scenarios over the years. I've used a portal to spawn something in maybe once or twice and it's certainly a nice option to have, but at least in my experience, not essential. I never found it to work reliably so I used it as a last resort, and I don't think it will make any noticeable difference to anything I create. That said, I would prefer that DTG try to fix spawning from portals than simply disable it, as it's always better to have options than have them closed off.
I've never played stuff from rail-sim.de, my source is the workshop. I've got about 5000 scenarios, and the amount of those using portal spawning is probably negligible. And, there's always an alternate way to accomplish the same outcome. And, according to a post on the Steam forums, renowned Workshop scenario creator Coasty has mentioned the old scenarios still work, you just cannot create new ones using the function. If you wish to do so, making them on a v72.3b installation will work.
As a journeyman author myself, shouldn't be. The basic way is to place trains at various strategic locations on the rails, setting their start time to before the player train would show up. So it's just an illusion of oncoming traffic. As long as there are full signal blocks between trains, they won't collide, at least in my experience. Of course I've come across scenarios - including official DTG ones - where AI trains were still stationary with me passing by. I've also seen trains pop out of existence right in front of me, because I was a couple minutes late. At the very least we should get a converter (even one that works when loading a scenario) to place trains at the portal location. The problem is when multiple trains are queued from the same portal. The challenge is when you want to run a full day in a single scenario, or sort of. I've come across an interesting workaround, Koblenz-Trier, which has a lot of fictional yards where you can place trains. While most scenarios are at most end-to-end, there are several up-and-down, particularly on short ones like Falmouth. So running a bunch of incoming trains can be a challenge. The same with Canadian Mountain Passes, except it's long anyway. Another solution-example is Donner / Sherman, where there are major yards at both ends, so you can keep starting trains every 10-20 minutes for quite a while. Except, of course, having 20 full trains can result in a slideshow.
Interesting to hear scenarios will still work - it makes me consider that it may be possible to reverse engineer the feature by editing a scenario's XML file.
That'll be hard - considering all the dispatching data in the scenario.bin. Considering it's not a supported feature atm, it might be better to not use it.
KTL_Rob Powell So, to dispel the rumours I've made a simple test. Fired up v72 and created a simple scenario. It has you waiting at Peterborough, and three northbound HSTs spawning from Nene Valley Portal will pass you by (staggered their service starts by 5 minutes). Started the scenario on the current version, and it works - so old scenarios are compatible. So if there's a need for using portals, download the 72.3 core and edit your scenario there for the time being. I think the reason for removal is, as the services are not really spawned but all there for the dispatcher right from the start, you have multiple services occupying the same signal block (which was always shown as a fault by the editor). That was the cause for issues probably - because strictly saying this must not happen and can lead to other problems or needs a deeper rework of that code section (like introducing virtual sidings inside a portal).
Thanks for researching Just one thing: I did this intentionally on routes without a yard at the end if I wanted to spawn / run multiple services. Can make a moot point that it's a route design technical mistake, but anyway. So the fix for this kind of issue on dispatcher's end is to consider the actual path. A simple example is my 47+158 rescue scenario you ran about two months ago. Yes, it show the conflict, but no, it's not in the way.
Brilliant detective work there. Thankfully projects I'm working on right now don't require me to do so but it's good to know that it hasn't broken pre existing scenarios built on earlier versions of the sim
Absolutely not! Most scenarios that depend on spawning from portals have their trains in the system for much longer than necessary for the player train's driver to see them. In extreme cases where it does prove absolutely necessary, you can line the trains up on the track and separate them with a scenario specific invisible block signal - I use the Newbouy one where appropriate. Agreed that you can't use those in a scenario to upload to Steam, but in practice I think only a small proportion of us do that. John
