Hello all, I'm in the process of building a passenger rail route, and I will have to include a lot of AI trains in my scenarios to simulate a busy passenger line at peak times. I've run into a problem with the rolling stock I'm using, though -- the trains accelerate ridiculously slowly in AI mode, and I can't find a way to speed up their acceleration to match that of a typical electric passenger train. The particular stock I'm using is RScott's Croydon Tram vehicle, which is probably the most well-known light rail vehicle in TS. I've gone in and edited a couple of the traction effort vs. speed/throttle position curves to slightly improve the train's acceleration, which has worked fine when driving the train myself, but when the train is under AI control, it accelerates far far slower than it does when I'm driving it myself, even when I have the AI performance setting in the dispatcher set at 100%. Does anyone know why this is happening? Do AI trains reference a different set of performance metrics than player-driven trains? The aforementioned stock brakes just as fast in AI mode as it does when I'm driving it myself, so the braking isn't an issue, but its acceleration is atrocious when being driven by AI. Is there a way to speed up its acceleration in AI mode? On a side note, I'm thinking about also using some rolling stock from the Frankfurt U-Bahn DLC in my route, and I'd like to go in and edit the performance metrics of that DLC stock as well, but there doesn't appear to be any editable files in its folders like there are for the RScott train -- the only files there are "blueprints.pak" and "Frankfurt U-Bahn AI_V2Assets.ap" which I can't do anything with. I'm assuming this is because the U-Bahn route is paid DLC and maybe they don't want you messing with the files, but is there a way to open or extract all the typical Asset files with TSTools or something? Any help on either of these inquiries is greatly appreciated!
.ap files are there because 1. download speed is increased by 10 2. 100,000 single files have a negative performance effect on filesystems like FAT and NTFS 3. easier to maintain and only have one checksum to check for validity 4. it is an uncompressed zip archive, and as TS doesn't need the complexity of an OS filesystem, file access is quicker using zlib.dll, which the game is using to access the files inside. Just like any modern game comes with .pak, .pk3, .iwd etc. instead of loose files. 5. Simply extract the file you want to modify, edit it and put it back into the corresponding path it is located inside the .ap. Create that path outside of the ap. ("RailVehicles\...") 6. Allows non-destructive modding (Override instead of Overwrite). If you don't like a mod, just remove it and the game will access the original data in the .ap. Before, you had to make backups of files modded, that's not needed anymore. As for AI acceleration, I'm not sure. I've experienced otherwise, accelerating too fast. VirtualRailroads even used a bulk load for AI to make them slower. Other AI in basically all DLC scenarios has correct acceleration. I have not experienced the AI behaving wrong in Frankfurt U Bahn scenarios. If your AI is literally crawling along to its first waypoint, give it a stop instruction at its spawn location first.
