Morning everyone, just wanted to share some workflows/best practices I discovered while making the big S1 layer for Nahverkehr Dresden. These made working with the timetable easier for me, hope someone else also finds them helpful. Figure out what the trains do first. On Dresden's S1, trains will arrive at Dresden Hbf either as a playable ECS run from Dresden Altstadt, or as an AI only revenue service spawning at the Pirna portal. They then do the S1 service to Meißen Triebischtal. A few trains now do an ECS run to Meißen and sit in the siding there for a few hours before returning ECS to Meißen Triebischtal, but most turn around within just a few minutes. They then return to Dresden Hbf and either continue to the Pirna portal or do an ECS run to Dresden Altstadt. Comments are a great layout tool. With this knowledge, we can now, using comments, make some boxes to put these different kinds of services into so we'll know where to find what kind of stuff. Don't worry too much about the size of these - when you drag a comment around with your mouse all the instruction nodes it contains will follow. That means if I later find out the Meißen ECS moves need a bit more space I can easily move everything to the right of it out of the way by just ctrl-klicking the relevant comment boxes. Think of this as a table, with "what the trains are doing" in the columns, and the individual trains in the lines. For my needs determined from Step 1, I made these columns/boxes: Dresden ECS, Dresden AI, Dresden-Meißen, Meißen ECS, Meißen-Dresden, Dresden AI, Dresden ECS. Depending on how many formations and services you have and how much they interact with each other, you might want to have a separate layout for each formation or just chuck all of them into one. Keep things aligned. Putting things into boxes will help you find services more easily when you're diagnosing problems, but that won't help you much if it's then difficult to find and select the nodes you need. Keeping similar nodes aligned with each other is super helpful for this. Vertical alignment: I put "stop at" nodes up, "load and unload" nodes down, and everything else on the centerline. You can use a comment as a guideline to keep it straight. I delete them once I'm done though. This way, you can click and drag to select all "stop at" or "load and unload" nodes on a service, which is a godsend if you want to, say, change dwell times on all the stops on one service... Horizontal alignment: I don't stack nodes for the same service on top of one another. This means my timetable gets very wide, but if I keep my services aligned with each other it also allows me to click and drag to select every "stop at" or "load and unload" node for a specific station. Super handy if it later turns out you need to change a "dispatch beyond..." setting or tick "reverse from portal" for every service. Label things. As you can see, I put an extra comment box containing the train number(s) for that line to the left of my services. This is helpful to find your way around a large timetable, but it is also what allows me to keep the horizontal alignment of everything so neat! Here's how it works. Once you've created your basic service(s), which you will copy and paste to make the others, and labeled it, select both that service and the label comment and drag them out of the layout: Now, when you copy and paste this service into the actual timetable, make sure to include this comment box! Making the box sit flush (use the arrow keys rather than the mouse for the last couple of millimetres) with the edges of its neighbour is much easier than trying to figure out the spacing based on the nodes alone. This way, all your services have perfect horizontal alignment (and, as a bonus, vertical spacing) with one another. And you can clearly label them in letters large enough to read when zoomed out! Working this way, I've ended up with a timetable that allows me to quickly find a specific train, or all trains that do a certain move. It also allows for different multi-select operations, so if I need to untick every "dispatch beyond" at Coswig, that's easy! It also looks very neat, and thanks to that last comment box trick, was actually super easy to make once I had the template to copy. You will probably need to adapt this to fit whatever you're working on, and how you personally like to work, but I hope it gives you some helpful ideas! PS: There's currently a bug where you can't create new comments on layers. Work around that by creating a comment on the main timetable page. You can then copy and paste this to your layer. PPS: this might be a worthwile inclusion for the tutorials masterpost, dtg_jan
Thanks for this, will come in useful. Do you know if it is possible to select a certain livery to appear on timetable mode. As an example, I would like to use the reskinned GWR HST in BR Blue, what I don't want to see are the Green GWR HST's running around on NTP and TVL, I only want BR Blue ones appearing, is this possible?
So if you want a specific livery to show you would need an RVD that is linked to the RVV which has the livery applied to the skeletal mesh. The RVD is linked into a train formation data asset and then the train formation asset is put into the train entry in the timetable on the blue Formation node so the start node that only have an out pin.
Yes! You set all of that stuff up in a formation data asset, which you then use when making the services in the timetable.
Thanks for the replies above, not sure if I'm doing it right though. I have selected a formation assets that consists of a 47 and MK1's and a GWR HST set which I want to change livery, but can't seem to do so - do I have to create my own formation asset, if so, do you know how I would go about this?
Yes, you can't edit the ones included with the game. You can make a copy and paste them into your own plugin though, no need to start from scratch.
Hi there, I'm coming back to this rather old post since I have built my own timetable for RRO, however I am stuck with the default liveries. Is there any guide (which goes a little deeper than the previous posts on here) out there on how to implement Creator's Club liveries into a timetable? Cheers!
As far as I know, the reason why there isn't a tutorial for how to do that is because you can't do that.
Press C to add a comment box. It will appear on you main timetable layer if you're working on another layer so you have to copy-paste it from there manually if necessary.
Does anyone know how to "Stack" Active AI trains on platform, example Train A arrives at 08:30 and departs at 09:00, Train B arrives on the same platform at 08:40 and departs 08:50, platform can accommodate both trains in length without overlapping signals. How to i signal Train B in to Train A's section (i have chosen Specific stopping points in the timetable setup, so there's no risk of crashing) at the moment train B waits for train A to depart, defeating the object of the exercise, i've ticked "dispatch beyond", but still no joy. Any idea's?
You have to add a dependency from service A's "stop at" instruction to the one from service B. Then you have to enable "call on dependency" (all the way down in the instruction details) on service B's "stop at" instruction. That way the player (or AI) will be able to ask for permission to enter the occupied track.
On top of that, the original service that is blocking the track must have ended. Even with call on dependency you cannot enter a block with an active service.
I'm not sure how you "You have to add a dependency from service A's "stop at", could you screen shot that option for me please?
Thanks for mentioning that! I'm not that far along yet, but I would have been pulling my hair out trying to figure out why that wasn't working.
