Gazz292

I would love to see an occasional service that uses these old coaches on a passenger run, as a sort of emergency replacement train perhaps? A scenario being: the regular train could not be used for some reason, so they ran around the depot looking for any carriages they could to make up the train, but due to the usual standby replacement stock being in use that day, all they had were the old carriages that from a heritage steam service a few days ago. So they used them anyway as an alternative to canceling the service. : Are dynamic train compositions possible, so an alternative of a replacement train made up of older stock being a regular repeated thing, it could be perhaps decided by the 'Ai' after each server restart to pick a random service and substitute it with an alternative.

oh dear, how will the train go around corners now they have deleted the steering wheel 🤪

i used to use a few of the apps that turned my android tablets into external monitors for my laptop, they can be pretty laggy using wifi, getting the USB connection to work was hard but was a bit better, but they ultimately use more resources than simply plugging a proper usb / display port or even VGA/hdmi monitor in... things may be better now we have WIFI6 and even wifi7 in newer computers. But it's a local app i'd really want to see, which would require access to the data on your pc (pretty much the I/O api a few of us are waiting for to enable us to make 'home cockpit' indicator lights. gauges etc work with the sim) So it would be just like the telemetry data from race games, or the SDK we had with Omsi back in 2012 to read out almost any data variable in the sim and control dashboards, ticket machines, IBIS units, destination displays and so on.

oh i bet a lot of people bought the cargo pack DLC after seeing the ET22 thundering past them when driving other trains, or as you say, as a dispatcher see and hear it going past and thinking 'dang that's cool, i want it'

even if it was £/$/€1 for the DLC, there'd still be people complaining it's too expensive 🤑 Having seen the quality of the cargo pack DLC, and the sheer content and quality we get with the base sim, to me what ever price it is will be more than worth it. As for integration, there was talk by a dev on discord a while back of it being on a separate server, but i think we'd switch servers automatically when driving off the edge of the current map and onto the DLC map ... if you don't own the DLC you'd see the tracks and scenery at the edge of the base map, you'd just get kicked to the menu as you do now when you reach the end of the map, but you'd see the other trains coming and going along the tracks to and from from the DLC area i believe, kinda like how if you do not own the cargo pack, you see the ET22 and the freight waggons it comes with, you just can't drive the ET22 which is a much better way to do it than the tsw way, where you need to buy 10 other DLC's just to get some variety in NPC trains... otherwise you see the same dosto repeated all over the entire maps.

i guess this is where the idea of professional and general use servers pops up, Professional servers would be for those who want to 100% pretend they are a real train driver driving a realistic tight timetable and having to follow all the real life rules. General use servers would have slacker timetables and less focus on rules and regulation adherence,

then if you can drag them onto other screens, make an android (or apple if you must ;p) app and have the chat box on your phone, use the phones onscreen keyboard to send replies, then it's like getting text messages on your phone whilst you are dispatching / driving rather than on an imersion breaking box on the main screen.

Whilst waiting at a signal, i got out to go and talk to the workmen the other side of the level crossing, and found they were all almost up to their knees in the mud: Camera location: S: psary_opoczno_terrain_x98_z76, P: (50468.65, 271.35, 39260.04), R: (8.43, 149.24, 0.00)

i actually like that SimRail is doing things more realistically, before the timetable overhaul it was hard to not arrive 20+ minutes early at some stops on the 141xx / 411xx services, Now it's more like real life, you have a tight timetable and once you start to lose time it's hard to make it up, as you begin to lose your time slots along the line. I know in a 'game' people want to get maximum points and be on time every time they play, but treat SimRail as the simulator it is, as if you are driving a real train, delays happen all the time and it's just part of railway life when other peoples actions affect your trip. To me this makes the simulator more exciting as you need to be constantly aware of what's going on around you and think ahead etc, rather than figure out after a few drives that if you put the train on cruise control at xx km/h, you can sit back and watch the scenery go by and you will arrive spot on time, then watch the points / trophies accumulate, then next day do the same until you are bored of everything repeating.

i've noticed the 'nuclear detonation flash' at midnight is a little tamer now it seems. Before it used to be a really short pulse where the screen went totally white and blinded you, now it looks more like a slow lightning flash... or at least it did to me when i just drove a train going past midnight.

This one is an immersion enhancement of sorts... real lights that mimic the cab lights (to an extent) EU07 Cab Light Switches Operating Real Lights .mp4 The video is showing: At 1 second i turn on the 'Oświetlenie Kabin' (Cab Light) switch. The drivers side cab light in the train illuminates, and the the spot lamp to my right turns on at 35% brightness and 3000K colour temp. At 2 seconds i turn on the 'Oświetlenie Ogólne' (Overall Lighting) switch. The left hand cab light in the train illuminates up and the bedside lamp to my left is turned on as well (again at 3000K and 35%) At the 3 second mark i turn on the 'Przyciemnienie Kabiny' (Cab Light Dimmer) switch. This does not have a keybind to dim the cab lights in SimRail unfortunately, but it does dim my room lamps to 1% brightness. At 5 seconds i turn the dimmer switch off, and the room lamps go back to 35% brightness. At 7 seconds i turn the cab light switch off. The right side cab light in the train turns off and the bedside lamp takes a second to fade to off. And at 8 seconds i turn the overall lighting switch off. The left side cab light turns off in the train and the spot lamp to my left fades to off over a second. Why and how i did it: I drive the trains in SimRail mostly at night, so i often have the room lights off to add to the immersion that i am actually driving a train in the dark, but just like a real train driver at night i often want to see my controls for a brief moment, usually to find the correct button to press or switch to move. So like in a real train at night where you would turn on the cab lights to see the controls, i wanted to do similar by switching on and off lamps in my room via the switches on my controllers, at the same time sending the commands to SimRail to operate the cab lights in the train. The process: Fit smart bulbs to the lamps. Put an ESP8266 board in my lighting switch controller with the cab light switches connected to it, that board is running ESPHome. ESPHome sends the switch states via wifi to a Home Assistant server that i have running on an old raspberry Pi (i already had that and use it mostly to view camera feeds from my 3D printer). Home Assistant sends the smart bulb control signals via wifi to the lamps in response to the cab light switches on my controller being operated. The STM32f bluepill board that was already in my controller still sends joystick button signals to the computer, which Joy2Key changes to keyboard presses that SimRail can read (if i was any good at coding i would probably do all this on one board, but these microcontrollers are very cheap and i find it easier to keep input and output stuff separate) Then i had to set up the switch logic and smart bulb settings in Home Assistant. The above took me over a week to figure out and get working, using point and click GUI based programming tools which wrote the code in the background, then programmed the PI and ESP boards wirelessly (that's how ESPHome and Home Assistant works thankfully, as trying to write code fries my brain) As the lamps in the room are also used for general illumination, when i turn the lamps on via their wall switches they illuminate at 4000K colour temperature and 100% brightness. When i turn a cab light in the sim on with a switch on with my controller, the relevant room lamp also turns on at 3000K and either 35% or 1% brightness depending on the position of the cab light dimmer switch.... (i really appreciate the dim position in the dark for preserving night vision) If a lamp is already on at 4000k 100%, it will change to 3000k at the brightness matching the dimmer switch position. Then when a cab light switch is turned off, the cab light in the sim turns off and the relevant room lamp fades out, this is to try and copy how bulbs turn off in SimRail (and i presume real EU07's) ... As they run on DC in the train they take longer to extinguish than AC powered bulbs typically do. The colour temperature thing is to try and mimic the tungsten filament bulbs in the train, so i sort of have a general room illumination mode, and an EU07 cab light mode.

i think it's more like real life now, Before i was always thinking i'd left the cab light on at times as the moonlight was illuminating the cab interior so much, i could see all the forrest clearly around me, and the tracks ahead for miles when i was out in the middle of nowhere a long way from civilization, when in reality it should be pitch black due to there being no artificial lighting in the area (except the trains headlights and carriage lights shining out) The other thing is that... especially in the older trains, their headlights were pretty poor, that's why their reflector housings are the size of 10 gallon buckets, to try and amplify the meagre light you got from tungsten bulbs, A modern LED headlight can be the size of a soup can and illuminate 20 times as much as the old style headlights can, you really notice this when you have a pendolino coming towards you in an EP08.

Still got this issue, it also affects the new 'Train Heating' keybind we got with yesterday's patch. I'm not the only person who has this, asked on discord and someone else tested it in EU07-241 and they found the exact same thing... first press of the key for those switches does not respond, second and all other presses work fine for the rest of the trip in that train. Exit to menu and take another train, and it does the same thing again. I guess most people do not notice this, or think the sim has just not picked up on their key press, and it's easy to re-press a keyboard key to get the switch to move, But as i use 3D printed controls to drive, it means my switch will be in the on position when the one in the sim is still in the off position as a result... and it'll be the same for anyone else building a 'home cockpit' or driving controls. : Would really like to see all keybinds like the earlier ones, where there's 2 keybinds per toggle / rotary switch, i.e. one for on, and another for off. Then the ability to set the same keybind for both the on and off positions for those people who want to do that.

I've just got myself a few 'hall effect potentiometers' thanks to your suggestion before, Quickly connected them to an 'arduino beetle' board: The precision is pretty amazing, the best bit, absolutely no noise or jitter, and these will never wear out like mechanical potentiometers do (the potentiometer in my EU07 train brake lever is wearing out after a year of use) Rather than using a carbon track that a wiper physically moves over as traditional potentiometers use, these use a magnet on the shaft, and hall effect sensors read the magnetic flux as the magnet and shaft rotates to determine the position... so no contact at all and nothing to wear out and produce noise that results in the signal jumping. The ones i got have no end stops, the reading simply goes up to 980, then changes to 40 as you rotate it past the 'end' (they do not read 0 to 1023 like mechanical pots do, but that is easy to account for if you really do need zero or 1023 in arduino's with the mapping function) . These hall effect potentiometers come in different styles, i got some 360 degrees ones, but if you are only going to move the potentiometer say 180 or 90 degrees, you can get ones that have that amount of rotation, this will give you the full resolution over that smaller angle... i.e. the full 40 to 980 for 10 bit ADC reading, unlike regular potentiometers which reduce the resolution if you restrict their movement... i.e. you'd get say 0 to 250 if you only moved a traditional potentiometer 90 degrees, so there's no need to use big gear ratios anymore to ensure the potentiometer moves the full amount. The other thing to be aware of is their operating voltage, i got 5 volt ones that do not work on 3.3 volts that STM and ESP boards use, but it's easy to take 5 volts from the USB pins on those boards and use the input pins that are 5v tolerant, or use a level shifter.

I think i might have made all the 'controllers' i need to drive the EU07 / EP08 style trains at my laptop desk now, it's only taken me 2 years : Gone is the radmor style 3D printed USB microphone that sat in it's holder on the side of the lighting switch panel (and the tacky 6 key plus rotary encoder mini keyboard i used to change radio channel and press the ZEW buttons) 😊 I now have a 3D printed Radmore style radio 😊 As with all the items on my laptop driving desk, the radio is sized to fit the space i have, i reckon it's about 3/4 of real size, i also deliberately reduced the height of the radio's main case as i needed the radio to pass over my legs when i move the overbed table out of the way, yet still hang off the front of table dovetail mounts so the top is below the main switch panel. The radio is made up of individual panels that screw together to make the main case, the case is then screwed to the switch panel from below, with the push button mounting piece screwed through the top of the switch panel, a 1mm thick 'text plate' fits over the buttons and hides the screws (which is handy as it took 2 hours to print the text plate alone, and i printed about 10 of them before i got one as good as i could get it, thank bod the 3D printer does the work and not me) A dovetail mount screws to the rear of the radio, allowing the radio to slide onto the mounts on my table like any of my other controllers. A base panel that houses the microphone board screws to the bottom of the main case, the microphone is a seperate item that's a little smaller than my self contained USB mic (to match the scale of this radio) this mic only houses a mic element and a switch, a coiled 4 pin headset cable connects the mic element and PTT switch to the microphone board (the switch goes to the STM button board) The microphone board is the circuit board out of a cheap desktop 'streamers echo mic' ... shown as i bought it to the left. This 'streamers mic' has a soundcard built in, so it can play audio from the computer via a set of headphones plugged in the 3.5mm socket, This could be handy if it ever becomes possible to route the radio's audio to a seperate speaker in SimRail (like some games can route the VOIP chat audio to a headset whilst playing the main game sounds via the main computer speakers) This mic also has a 'monitor' function where it can play the audio from the mic over a headset, so my radio's speaker is plugged into the mic board for this reason, allowing me to check i have not set the echo control too high or i'm getting feedback.... Feedback was an issue i had when using the monitor function when the mic was sat in it's holder, as this places the mic very close to the speaker, so to get around this i routed one of the mic element wires through the (double pole) PTT switch so the mic is only live when the PTT switch is pressed, this is how it's done in a lot of 2 way radio mics... it also means my mic is always muted when i am not deliberately pressing the PTT button, so google is not able to listen for advertising keywords either. The mic board plugs into a USB port, as does the STM microcontroller board used for the buttons and switches, so i used a USB C bulkhead fitting (gives you a USB C female socket on either side of a panel) into which a 3 port USB hub plugs inside the radio, then the mic and STM boards plug into that hub using short cables, leaving me one USB port for another board in the future to run the LED's properly. I used 3 x 12 position single pole, 30 degree per position rotary switches, one with the lock out washer / position restrictor set at 10 positions for the channel change switch, one at 6 positions for the volume switch, and 3 positions for the 'Nazłuch' switch, Only the channel change switch has keybinds to do anything in the sim, you can move the other 2 knobs with the mouse, the volume one adjusts the radio speaker's volume.... i've never actually tried doing this when someone is talking in MP. And the Nasłuch switch i think selects which ZEW tone the radio will respond to when you have the radio in 'Do Not Disturb' mode (where you put the microphone in the holder backwards, so the ring around the mouthpiece presses on 2 metal pins, the radio will then be silent except for one transmision after someone presses a ZEW button on their radio, something that is not simulated in SimRail as the ZEW tones do not play over other peoples radios) The push button switches are 'piano switches' that are commonly used in real radio's. Usually these come as multiple switches in a row fixed on a long metal mounting piece, with an 'interlock' function, so only one button locks down at once and pressing another button releases the last one... as found in 1980's era hifi equipment for source selectors etc. I don't need the interlock function for the radio's switches, and you can remove the interlock bar and make the switches independent, but i also needed to set each switches spacing differently to how the ones i got are on the single piece mount, you can get different switch spacings, but i found it easier to just get individual piano switches, rotate them 90 degrees and make a 3D printed mount for them... but that does increase the distance needed between the piano switches and rotary switches. I also need some latching versions of these piano switches, as that's what is used for the power, squelch / noise block and radiostop buttons, for the ZEW buttons i need momentary switches, but thankfully these are old skool switches that allow modding, and you can pull the little wire piece out that provides the latching function to turn them onto momentary switches... some of these switches need the end under the spring in place to stop the switch springing all the way out, so cut the latch wire in half and place just the top (dog leg) part back under the spring. The the brain of the radio is a STM32F microcontroller board running FreeJoy that i've used a few times before in other switch panels, the hope is one day we will get joystick support for SimRail and then the sim can read the joystick buttons directly (and hopefully also joystick axes for the levers) But for now i use JoyToKey running on my laptop when SimRail is running to change the joystick buttons to keyboard key presses. I used 29 of the 30 pins on the STM board for rotary switch and push button inputs, the final 'spare pin' i connected to the red 'SFN' led which lights up when i press the push to talk button on the microphone as shown below: That red SFN led should also light up when the ZEW and radiostop buttons are pressed i believe .... to show it's transmitting, i hoped to do that with FreeJoy, but it turns out i can only set it to turn the led on from one input (the piano switches are multi pole ones, so i could re-wire things to get the SFN led lighting up when the ZEW and radiostop buttons are pressed too, not that they do anything in multiplayer mode in the sim, i imagine the ZEW tones are not played to everyone's radio in range because of trolls who would press them all the time to annoy people, same as why the radiostop only works in your own train if you press it) I connected the green power led to the power switch, so it simply turns on and off as i use that switch, In the future when we get the I/O API in the sim, i will add a second microcontroller board to run the led's, then i can have the power led turn off if the loco's battery is off, or the radmor power supply / cab selector is off or set to the wrong cab, and maybe even have the SFN light only work (or illuminate dimly) if there's someone in range... kinda how the mic icon next to the text chat box will only go green when someone is in range to hear you .. so i know not to bother hyping myself up to talk on the radio when there's no point (i have issues talking on phones, the radio is easier as i'm in control with the PTT button, but i still don't use it much because of my 'issues') : Finally... a view of the top of the radio, the tamper seal on the radiostop button is a 3D printed distressed 'seal tag' and a few strands of thin electrical wire for the break wire, i heated the ends of the wire to melt it into the seal tag. The radiostop buttons surround screw posts are 2.8mm diameter with a 1mm hole in the sides of them for the tamper wire to pass through, i was struggling to fit that stuff together even using tweezers and a magnifier. And really finally this time (i've spent 3+ hours typing this wall of text!) The radio from the front with the mic sat in its cradle, as it spends 99% of it's time when i'm driving a train. i used flash for these photo's so it shows up every little imperfection of the 3D printed parts that you don't usually notice with your eyes in normal light.