A great Driver Aid addition would be a little pop-up window with four arrows, left, right, up, down - matched to the keyboard arrow keys. This could be activated by a hot-key to show / hide the pop-up. It's function would be to move the driver's in-cab view position, left or right, up or down to get the best forward view along the boiler of steam locos. This would really help with driving steam locos in particular, where the driving view on most steam loco models is at the boiler back-head instead of through the front facing window. Also the head-out position is much too far out on some models. The cab view is presumably defaulted for diesels/electrics and DMU cabs. This facility would also be a great help with the Class 20 being driven cab-rear.
Slight correction, there are 3 dimensions - left-right, up-down, forward-back. I would love a (user friendly) way to preserve those positions. I really like the misplaced Shift+2 camera on some old SD40-2s, riding on the front bumper. I kind of like the excessive lean out on steam locos, with the boiler (long hood) being less in the way. Although with sounds only in one ear, I stopped using it and I'm effectively anti-steam. Hence, let me place ride on the front and I'm happy!
The Cab and Headout camera blueprints are easy to edit - on my install I've adjusted almost EVERY cab camera, always the first thing I do after installing new content, and only a matter of minutes. Still thinking about getting TrackIR...
There used to be a commercial cab view editing tool IIRC? Ideally, such a tool puts your "head and eyes" gizmo inside the cabview model. Note the current 'cinematic' cab view camera can have a large number of positions both inside and outside the cab available under the arrow keys in sequence, but you'll hear the 'inside' sounds unless some very clever sound occlusion is included. Like Spikee above said, experiment at will until you're satisfied with your views.
Yeah, the values in the blueprint are metric, so it's fairly easy to adjust these by saying "my head needs to be 15 cm higher", then just add 0.15 to the Y value. You can do this on the fly, I'm editing in the background, (assigned serz.exe as default app for .bin and .xml, so I only need to double click to convert between xml and bin), alt tab, restart scenario, check, tab out, readjust, done. Open the .ap, copy the camera file, create the folder structure in the asset folder (RailVehicles\Diesel\ClassXYZ\Default\CabView) according to the .ap file structure. Good thing it needs no cache clearing, the blueprints.pak only hold the binary model geometry cache extracted from the GeoPcDx files which the rendering engine can't access directly.
Thanks for reply. As regards the forward/back view movement, I left those out because rolling the mouse wheel does that, to a reasonable extent.
Wow, thanks for that, I will certainly try this out, to see if I can understand the process. So hoping I can do it, as it will transform my experience of the legacy steam engines I have
Yes, though I recommend Notepad++, the best free text editor. Note that Vertical Directional Freedom is limited to 90 degrees up/down (pi/2, to avoid having the camera turn upside down), so values higher than 1.57 will be capped by the game.
Thanks very much for all this. So looking at the left/right X value, on a LHS drive steam loco (most UK), to look through the left front window along the boiler, instead of the boiler backplate in the cab, the X value would need to go smaller than 0.57, e.g 0.3 to move the view towards the cab side plate?
Just had a thought, is the X/Y number referenced from the front looking to the back? If so, the X would have to increase rather than reduce to move the view nearer to the left cab side when driving.
X: increase to move rightwards, decrease to move leftwards. Zero means you're in the center looking at the firebox. Y: increase to move up, decrease to move down Z: increase to move forwards, decrease moves you back The XYZ values in the <CameraDirection> section are for defining the angle the camera is using (yaw, pitch and roll). I like to put Y values like -0.2 which has you looking down a bit, depending on the cab, you'll have a quick default view and better see the instruments... Values are metric. 0.1 means 10 centimetres. Now experiment
Tried using Serz and Serzmaster to covert the .xml to a .bin file after I changed the X camera offset. They both come up with an error message box:- "Cannot find Tool exe". Something wrong with the setup of serz, I think...
I think my pc has a problem where it will not auto-register .ocx and probably..dll files. Probably because Windows 10 was an upgrade from WIndows 7. So I would need to know what add-ins serz.exe needs, so I can manually register what it needs to run.
I never had any troubles with serz.exe. Try this: Drag Serz.exe to your desktop to create a shortcut. Drop a .bin file onto that shortcut. You should now have a copy of that file as .xml.
Well, a big Thank You to all, especially Spikee, for all your help and patience in helping me get this sorted!! I got Serz.exe to work eventually, there was a missing file: zlibwapi.dll. After re-instating this, serz.exe now works. I have at last been able to do something that I have wanted to be able to do for more than a decade! E.g. I have set the Cabview X parameter to -1.00 (for a LHD loco - West Country Light pacific) and can now drive it from the inside cab forward view. Yay!! It doesn't seem to translate to the flipped right hand side view and I notice that the .xml doesn't have a setting for the RHS forward view. But no matter, since I only use the RHS view for sighting and the head out view is fine for that. I can set to work now on sorting out the other steam locos that need correcting in this way (and the diesel class 20, of course)..
