Recently discovered a new way to have AI and Freeroam together. 1. Go into a quick drive edit and select a starting point for your player train. 2. Go to track selection and select Railfan invisible track and lay a tiny amount of it off your starting point track as a siding in front of you. 3. Place a destination marker on that invisible siding and name it whatever you wish. (e.g abc) Save and Exit. 4. Go now into scenario edit and place a Player Start point marker where your train will be starting from. 5. Select this marker and name the marker (e.g in this case Bay Platform starting point Chinley) Now press the arrow to select a destination, which will be the new destination on your invisible track (in this example named abc) Move to that on the map and press mouse button to select it as the destination point. 6. Save and Exit 7. Go into route build and convert any points (switches to our American friends!) you wish to have control over, into manual use from automatic. (There are tutorials out there on youtube for this) Save and exit. 8. Go into quick drive. Select the route. You should see (in this example) a quick drive possibility for Bay Platform Starting point Chinley to abc 9. Drive! You will now be able to go anywhere (given the points you’ve changed to manual) and any previously set up AI trains on the route will show and move too ! Very occasionally you and AI will fight for control over a junction but bear in mind that once the AI train has passed the junction, control of that junction will pass back to you . (Note also that AI will sometimes lock a double line junction to you despite the two trains , (yours and the AI train) not being a conflicting collision move – in this case although the points may appear to be set against you, in reality you can drive over them without chance of derailment ! (I know, odd!) This opens up all sorts of possibilities in operation to us and I hope you get as much enjoyment from this as I have. Len
I don't fully understand the post. You can place any number of AI trains in a Free Roam. You place static consists as usual. You add the driver icon as usual. Thus far it's just a usual free roam. Then you go to Timetable view - or double click a driver icon - and add instructions. However, you are talking about a Quick Drive. In Free Roam all switches are manual. Some scenario authors do the same with Standard scenarios, building one complicated scenario and then releasing a number of versions with different trains chosen for the player and possibly varying objectives. The biggest concern in a free roam is that lacking objectives you'll never have priority. So if you just want to have a couple trains released ahead of you to block some signals, or a couple oncoming trains for fun, that's cool. But I've had the pleasure of waiting 30 minutes in a siding for a train in Portsmouth (I was driving the express and the passenger train behind was slow, so I couldn't turn back). Thus, you can dedicate free tracks and their sidings to yourself, but never cross over. Which means, single track sections can be blocked virtually forever. Anyway, it's a good learning experience on your end, just saying that it's not great on the long run. It's much easier to hop into the editor and set new objectives for your train. Would be great to do it without the heavy lifting scenario editor (hence the concept of quick drive), but it's what it is.
