SLI/TS Selgman Upgrade

[Don6218]

Hello all! While running the Included Amtrak Activity Southwest Chief, getting an average of 85fps which is good on my machine, I ran into a Signal Issue at East Berry Interlocking. I am faced with all Reds with the switch turned to allow my passage by the Waiting Freight, but it will not change to Yellow.
I had to go into deep Manual Mode and Request Permission to proceed.
Now, I know this is a minor issue, but all the same this Upgrade did cost me $20 Cdn funds and has Activities Written and Tested for OR. I expected more than this. Yes it is a minor issue, I can appreciate that, but I also have many Freeware Routes/Activities that perform extremely well. This is to say a minor disappointment in this day and age of Simming.
Still, the improvements are well received and the scenery is fantastic, well worth the $20.

Well done, overall SLI/TS on this route/activity. I will have to run a couple of the Freights now to see how they perform.

[geepster775]

The activities here did have a bunch of obstacles planted in your face (track inspectors, work zones, outlawed trains, etc). You have to have your options set exactly like shown in the documentation for the route to be successful in getting around them.

If its not that, are you sure autopilot, if used, is not allowing you to run too much ahead of schedule?

[wwhall]

As a person who worked in the railroad industry, well, welcome to real railroading! One of things that is great about OR is that the "Dispatcher" can intervene to break a bottleneck if it happens. One of the issues with any activity with some complexity is that the designer must make a bunch of assumptions about how the player will run it. That can cause problems if the player does not follow the same assumptions. Maybe the player runs faster or slower than the designer assumed when he/she built the activity.

Also, if the designer has designed the activity such that the player passenger train has to run "ahead of schedule," that really isn't prototypical. Typically, if a passenger train arrives at a scheduled stop ahead of schedule, the train usually must wait until its scheduled departure time to leave. In railroading that's called "letting the schedule catch up with the train."

Not likely true in this activity, but a lot of older activities were designed around MSTS locomotive performance parameters that were often completely unrealistic. As I've converted locomotives over to more accurate OR physics, they can't pull as much or as fast as they did with bogus MSTS physics, meaning that the player train may not be able to maintain the pace that the activity designer assumed. Just like in real railroading, that can "shuffle the deck" for the Dispatcher to try to sort out.

[Don6218]

Thank you for explanation. I will look at "Instructions" more carefully now that I know that these "Bottlenecks" ARE being implemented in Activities. It does make it much more interesting and less like a "game".
I have also converted what Physics have been made available here.

I will now be on the lookout for track inspectors, work zones, outlawed trains, etc, thank you for that information. My disappointment has waned.