Port Ogden and Northern

[Dralex]

My favourite railway is and was always Port Ogden and Northern by Jim "Sniper" Ward. Now of course I tried to run it in OpenRails and ran into several problems. First, the runactivity.exe lists a whole bunch of errors which can only be caught in a screenshot. Mainly it was about some dynamic track portions not found. Then a system exception "the wagon is on a piece of track not found" or so. It should be fairly easy to reproduce the problem.
After some time the simulation screen came up, and I could finally start driving. The consist I had chosen has two GP-38 back to back. These were separated by a rather big gap into which a third loco could easily have fit, but I cannot see anything there. Anyway, the whole consist started moving in the end.
Next: at many places the trees were growing right out of the tracks.
Also, the cursor would not be visible on the screen; only when I moved it off the game window it would be visible. Which of course prevented me from throwing switches - G and Ctrl-G would not work either.
Finally: would it be possible to capture the output of runactivity.exe in a text file which one could then add to any error report that might come up. Might give you a lot of additional info you need to improve the program (so far it is really great, considering that you are not so long on the air).

Greetings,
Dralex

[sniper297]

Hey Dralex, long time no see. Few problems to start, PO&N 10 and 11 use aliased track sections, ORTS uses a different method for loading the track database, so I can't get 10 or 11 to run at all. PO&N version 9;

ponver9.zip

Runs as well as any other route since it doesn't have the aliased track in it.

Other problem, you have to keep in mind that the current version of ORTS isn't even a beta, it's actually a pre alpha, so a lot of stuff isn't completely functional yet. AI traffic is rudimentary, signals don't display, and a lot of the vegetation objects will need to be moved around or rebuilt since there's something different about the numbers for centering. As for throwing switches, hold down the ALT key on the keyboard, that will make an arrow appear and you can click on any switch.

[Dralex]

Thank you, Jim. That was really quick!
The reason why we didn't meet on the forum was that I got disappointed with RailSim (nowadays called RailWorks) because all the good stuff is payware there, in contrary to MSTS and Trainz (they are now at TS2010), where almost all the good stuff is for free.
Now I want to have a look at OpenRails, and I like very much what I have seen so far. Some incompatibilities with MSTS are only to be expected, and your answer tells me that almost everything I noted is on their to-do list. Except perhaps my idea about putting runactivity.exe's output into a text file. I do believe this will give a lot of additional info.
I gather Phil Skene never sent you screenies about his version of PO&N. If you want some, I can provide them, sending them to you by e-mail.

Greetings,
Dralex

[sniper297]

Funny you should mention that, I just got TRS2004 as a gift last Saturday, downloaded Phil's PO&N yesterday. I have seen screens of it, right now I'm looking at it firsthand.

[Dralex]

RailWorks is not even installed any more on my computer. I hope we'll meet a bit more often now on the OpenRail platform. I am curious where this will lead us
I am on TS2010 right now, and I like it very much. Alas, they don't support the scenarios any more (at least officially; TRS2004 is the last level where they are supported. A lot of possibilities there). So is TRS2004. Both are a lot more stable than MSTS ever was; looped rails are supported, and the front coupler always worked.
I am also very curious about what you will make out of TRS2004.

[Dralex]

In the meantime we got v360, and now at least we have the switching aid, which is working ok. Trying it now on Phil's Dragon Bay route for MSTS. Not yet tried; don't know which PO&N version works with ORTS ... yet.
One problem I would like to solve (or have solved for me): I live in Austria and have a German keyboard for that reason. This means I do not know exactly which keys to press for various purposes. The documentation assumes an English keyboard. So I know for certain that they do not test the ASCII code, but the scan code instead. I could find out for myself, but to do that I would need the source code for inspection. If somebody else could help me there, this would be the better solution.

Alex

[csantucci]

Here can be found the german keys to be used:
http://www.tssf.eu/forum/index.php?a....0;attach=5323
I hope you don't need to be registered to download it
Unfortunately this refers only to V128.

Carlo

[OTTODAD]

Hi Alex from Austria !

I am from Vienna, in the UK since 1956.

The keys MSTS and ORTS uses are the same, ORTS having added a few new key functions.

The W, S, D, A, ', ;, Spacebar and other MSTS keys output from a German keyboard should be read by Windows and programs using them the same as on any other language keyboard using these characters in the language it is for.

Some of the keys may be in different locations on the key board. like the # and @ keys but nevertheless function the same.

Been a while since I set up my Bavarian cousin with a computer and can't remember what I had to do to use it's German keyboard.

This might help: http://german.about.com/library/weekly/aa072798.htm

O t t o

[longiron]

Otto,
We are working on supporting international keyboard setting and custom key setting - this was raised here

http://forums.uktrainsim.com/viewtop...f=324&t=109397

Don't have a time frame, but it's definitely on the high priority TO DO list
chrisvw

[sniper297]

"don't know which PO&N version works with ORTS", disregard my previous post, they all work - versions 9 to 11 sometimes bring up an error message on loading and it appears to stop loading at that point, but recently I found that if you do nothing and wait a minute or two it loads and runs the activity anyway.