ORTS / Passing Routes?

[billbloggs]

Hi all,

" Originally Posted by R. Steele
You know, this may have been proposed by in the early MSTS days....my experience does not go back that far....but payware activities...not a bad idea. Although there may be pitfalls I'm not aware of.

This thread, post #25 https://www.trainsim.com/vbts/showth...-Content/page3 contains an insight provided by Sean Kelly on the subject of payware activity packs. Subsequently an expansion pack containing 9 activities was released for Mullan and as Sean alludes to perhaps this is the only financially viable way to see activities commercialised, at least for payware vendors such as TrainSimulations.
My post #21 prompted his response which was appreciated.

Cheers
Duncan

[wwhall]

Pre-packaged activities are always a problem. First, any that are provided by payware route creators always use the equipment included with the route. So, you get an activity where the player meets 10 AI trains with identical locomotives and stock to the player train. I have spent hours taking a "ready to run" activity and replacing stock and locomotives with ones that are unique. Big pain. Second, with freeware activities created by other simmers, you get an activity with a list of stock a mile long necessary to run the activity, some of which is often payware, unavailable freeware, or ancient ugly stock that most simmers deleted from their sim years ago. So, my answer has been to create a lot of my own activities with no intention of distributing them. I use the stock that I want and that I know that I will keep in my sim. I do some of my own re-numbering of both payware and freeware, so no one else has those items other than me. Finally, and I have posted this tip before, I often set up my activities such that I can run it in OpenRails with the original player train and path, or use OR to "jump" to an AI train and run it as the player train. That way, I can run the same activity several different ways.

[CSRX]

Second, with freeware activities created by other simmers, you get an activity with a list of stock a mile long necessary to run the activity, some of which is often payware, unavailable freeware, or ancient ugly stock that most simmers deleted from their sim years ago.

This is why I've been trying my best at making larger packs with various car types and commodities recently, to help reduce this. However considering they are mixed use of freeware and payware, it's still I suppose, frowned upon and ignored.

I've tried to do activities myself and release them to the public, using as little additional stock outside of what is offered by Trainsimulations, but even then, they can be messy for those that don't have the appropriate stock, or ignore the readme files completely.

[CNW 5099]

The issue with replacing stock on AI trains/player trains/static consists isn't really a big deal for me. Placing consists and building trains is still something you'd have to do if you create the activity on your own anyway, as well as all of the other components of making a good activity. I'd rather just have a good prebuilt activity (with OR specific features included) and I can customize the consists and trains to my liking from there. Also with a prebuilt activity you can "reverse engineer" it and modify other aspects which gives you a better idea of the nuts and bolts of activity making. Anyone willing to sell their activities I'm interested.

[R. Steele]

The issue with replacing stock on AI trains/player trains/static consists isn't really a big deal for me.....

I understand that...If upon downloading a bunch of activities for a route ( made by one person or several ) I find it easy to replace the stock both in both the activity and consist files at the same time using a program like Search and Replace >>> http://www.searchandreplace.com/.

After that's accomplished I may have to fine tune the stock in an activity ( or correct mistakes by the author ) but that's no big deal.