Ohio Rail update: Activity Pack patch

[rgarber]

I will be issuing a patch that will include patches to fix several activities.

Activity #2 - the reversing points are too close to the switches which is why you can't get through the wye.

Activity #4 - this one I believe is doable if you do it the following way:

First drop off at least one engine. Second, do your pickups in Swik proper first. Head on up to the yard and do the drop-offs for Volkwein's and the coal place. Then do the coal car delivery. Then come back and do the yard pick ups. Then do the Swik proper drop-offs.

I'm going to try adjusting the path to be more accomodating to variations.

Activity #6: You shouldn't be getting very far with this activity and you should be getting the activity to complete successfully. Simply, the version of the activity included is not the finished version.

Besco Glut: Same with Activity #6.

I'm also having some internet troubles where I can't log on to the internet through our network so bear with me on this.

Rich Garber

[black5]

Thanks....I thought it was me that was useless....
Georges from London.
I normally don't like freight activities but yours are great...and mine are all steam 'powered'.

[JivaGoswami]

This is a long post with a little over 1,800 words. What follows is written by and intended for one who knows very little about the intricacies of fashioning MSTS compatible products.

The Ohio River & Wester RR Build 8 Version 7, is totally beyond even near comparison with any other product; commercial or free.

Seaview2, for example, is another ultra glorious contribution, but of a different nonetheless spectacular flavor.

Here then, for your enjoyment, in approximate chronological sequence, are a few experiences I’ve had with this fantastic fine offering by Rich Garber and Leith Platten.

CREDITS:

Throughout the 10 step tutorial, Rich’s pop up messages point out the many astonishing sights along the way, and give credit to the wonderful contributors.

DOWNLOADING:

At long last I’ve been compelled to get one of those down load interfaces. The one recommended here at TrainSim.com is “GetRight.”

I could not remember the name of the application recommended here, so I went to ZD net, shopped around, obtained some download shareware, and endeavored to use it.

With this shareware, I experienced the same downloading problems as I had without it, so I looked more diligently here at TrainSim.com, got the URL for GetRight, and I am so glad I did.

All bells and whistles ... doing whatever I could ever hope to do ... this is a great product and worth every penny of the $20.00 GetRight asks for after a month.

WHY FREE

It is ironic that this nice downloading utility costs more than Mr. Garber’s fine product itself, but hey, I believe in Rich and his associates, we’ve the privilege of interacting with the new and appropriate yet revolutionary way: Some things are beyond cost.


Priceless might as well mean free.

Here at the dawn of the end of the fossil fuel age, we’re starting to ask: “How do you charge money for something which is beyond cost, yet easily shared for free by others?”

I’m not kidding here, I feel the same way ... my field is Science Fiction ... I’ve the credentials of a professional SF writer, yet today, I post quality material on the web for free. See (http://www.scifinoir.com/gallery/bluegum.html)

Why fight it? I (we) do what we do best regardless of prospects of remuneration. We can’t help it.

These good old days mark the start of a new way of exchanging that creative deliverable, and money perhaps never was the righteous via medium.

THE PRODUCT ITSELF

I don’t think so. As a professional writer, I could well describe this Route, but I’ll save that for another time.

For now just consider: if a picture is worth one thousand words ... how many words will it take to describe a package with an infinite constantly mutable number of pictures?

I’ll get back to you on this one! :)

OR&W documentation is superb and comprehensive. Because I am too literal sometimes, I did get myself a little lost, but the application of common sense coupled with adherence to the copious and ample instructions saw me through.

However at first I did undergo ...

INSTALL DANGERS:

The beautiful flowing river waters ... I believe one of those rivers was flowing north, as comedian Kevin Meeny (sp?) Used to say, “That’s not right!” But then for all I know, maybe that is right.

North, south, what does it matter when it comes to a flowing river in a railroad simulation? The important and unusual thing by my lights is that the rivers flow at all.

And they do move so nicely. Makes you want to jump from a tire swing while one of the really beautiful new locomotives that came with the concomitant activity pack goes thundering by overhead.

BUT there has to be Sky!Conductor skies, right? In the read me file, it is written, one may expect that Sky!Conductor and the beautiful flowing waters are not compatible.

However, in keeping with the total consideration evidenced by Ohio River & Western RR, this potential shortfall is corrected by the invocation of a handy patch, included in the updates folder which is installed with “Bodiddly RR”

Now one of the first things I had done was pack Bodiddly (the name now again used for OR&W RR) in Route Control. When I added Sky!Conductor skies to Bodiddly, I stipulated the “RtCntrol-route” folder in the Sky!Conductor choices, because Bodiddly was packed away and then placed in the folder called the RtCntrol-route as per usual excellent Route Control standard and practice. :)

Are you seeing trouble ahead? :). Yes. The new skies were beautiful, but the rivers were now just mud green plates. This was predicted.

I went then to the aforementioned updates folder, followed the explicit and get this: ILLUSTRATED directions :) . And went back to driving after running the water patch program included with the wonderful OR&W RR.

This did not fix the water problem. Everything esle was fine. I was trying to do one thing at a time in order to keep things working, and have a good grasp of what caused a problem when one arose.

As usual, the problem I was looking at already was caused by me. I decided to live with this green slate mud water for a while, and ran the concomitant activity pak installation. These two activity packs are typical of the rest of the products coming from Mr. Rich Garber and associates.

They are replete with easy documentation and absolutely minimize the potential for user foul up.

Unless that user is me or someone like me. After I’d run the activity pak installers, you must have seen this coming, those new precious activities were no where to be found.

It may be well and good to install an activity by running it through tsunpack.exe in the TrainSimulator Utility folder, or to hand place requisite files in appropriate directories, but running a smooth installation file which is in all probability looking for a folder called BodiddlyRR, will not work if your Bodiddly is now ensconced in a folder called “RtCntrol-route!.”

Suggestion? For the idiots and absent minded among us, like the guy I see when I look in the mirror, a note to this kind of hazard would be good to include in the instructions. Also, I wondered about the sequence in running that included water patch called “AWE-SC3-BoDiddly.exe.”

We should run this file before adding Sky!Conductor to our new Bodiddly railroad.

The patch, like the activities I was trying to deal with were diligently looking for the BodiddlyRR folder, and of course, thanks to me, that folder was no longer where it was supposed to be.

SOLUTION:

When I realized the likely hood of my miscalculation, I tried uninstalling Bodiddly RR and activities from the START PROGRAMS menus. Then I went to where Route Control had compressed the original OR&W, unzipped the files and cut and pasted them within MSTS. The result? Havoc.

Then I got OR&W off this system (I have the original zip files). Carefully reinstalled, ran the AWE-SC3-BoDiddly.exe from where it was supposed to be run, installed the double filed stack of delicious activates, and do you know what? Now we’re talking clockwork. Got the flowing rivers, the Sky!Conductor skies and best and above all, the Ohio River & Western RR itself.

By the way, OR&W RR doesn’t take up all that much room here anyway (Somehow). For now, I’ll just keep it out of Route Control ... not due to any problem at all with Route Control ... just to keep OR&W easily accessible for now.

I’ve already noted how nicely OR&W runs from RC. No problem no problem!

I saw from Mr. Garber’s site that there is going to be an extension which will include Wheeling, the “city” :) where yours truly lives now!

I hoe future updates will be backwards compatible. In other words, activities for this new railroad system now have to be marked and intended for OR 8 Version 7.

Here’s hoping subsequent editions will have that legacy simpatico we PC Mac and other denizens of the digital crave.

PROBLEMS

Activity 1, B8-1 OR&W Mainline worked like a super charm. The engine is exquisite. On some of those long down-hills, you should take one of those stationary outside views and just stand there as that big beautiful brown engine goes barreling by with the dynamic brake just thundering and rattling the windows. Yes, I said Doppler, in an earlier post, and believe me, Doppler; yes! In pitch and volume. I said: TIMBRE!!

Activity two has problems. The copy talks of 13 wood cars: I saw only 7 empties. Turning around at Marietta did not work for me. Oh, I was able to back in the wye and roll over the turn around markers, but then upon trying to reenter the main line, I had a red. With the tab key, I got permission granted to pass. I did do this, after a long long wait, and the simulation did not halt.

Shortly I was at another red light and after more waiting (I’d wait as long as I need to if I could be sure I wasn’t just doing the equivalent of you know ... flushing the toilet to see if that is what makes the phone ring, like the Yogi in Steve Martin and Lily Tomlin’s comic movie “All of Me.”)

So with permission now consistently denied, I crept forward and did get the termination dropped on me.

So I’m asking ... what happened to the 13 logging cars? Even though I believe I’ve gone over the turnaround rollovers properly ... I can not get around the subsequent red light, which is usually a sign of not tagging the rollover properly, but I did ... the first in order to get to the switch which enables one to back into the wye, and the second one in the wye itself. At the end of the wye, I even went to far as to push the train against the “steel” :) yellow barrier to insure that I’d gone back far enough.

Since first writing this I see a patch is available for the wye and other problems. Looking forward to this!!


Activity #3 is a charm: The Besco Delivery Pickup. Notes say, “Hope your front coupler is working.” I did too. It did not. Hard to figure out what to do in that event.

You know ... by the way, all this tinkering and tooling with MSTS is to me precisely what it takes to keep me very very fascinated. These kinds of adjustments and investigations take the place for me of handling our virtual locomotives.

We can’t pick up a toy Lt. Mountain and add a smoke cartridge, and we can’t actually throw coal or add water ... but we can and must get into the product and diddle.

For me, this brings the physical into the virtual.

Bottom line here? I may have to go and finally make adjustments to my front couplers huh? Perhaps there is a driving work around here but this morning at 4, I was too weary to try it!

One message I keep hearing (reading) from the offices and auspices of Mr. Rich Garber is: “Have fun!”

Well Rich and Friends, thanks to you I can earnestly respond: “I’m is!”

Ardently

jivajvia

[kevarc]

As a bit of an experiment I used RC, full version, on ORR and got all kinds of weird things happening. I deleted it, reinstalled and ran Route Riter and did not have any problems running it. So I tried Route Riter on Rich's EMRR and again did not have any problems after. I am really impressed with Route Riter and even though I like RC, it has taken a back seat to Conbuilder and Route Riter. Now all we need is an utility to edit the loose consists in activity files.

[DTA]

Re the 13 logging cars, build 8 vers 7 only has 7 once the patch is installed. Likewise the problems in activity 2 are fixed.


David