Gazz292

i guess i play games where you are either first person view or 3rd person view, not a mix of both depending on whether you want to pose for a screen shot or not.

What happens when you are stopped and have left the cab to wander around, and someone else comes along and see's you sat in the cab... but it's not really you, it's a 2nd version of you as a placeholder, Going to get mighty confusing when there's 2 versions of you, one sat in the cab the other getting into the cab and sitting down on your doppelganger and merging into one. Then if i want to get a photo of the cab as it's empty, how do i do that when there's a second version of me sat in it? i guess that most people just want someone in the cab for when they take a photo to post where ever you post photo's of pretend trains you are pretending to drive, so for that something like a generic driver that's put in after the photo is taken???, like how steam can show or hide the overlay when you take a screenshot.

i've just been 'battling' with the lighting but maybe in a different way, i've been getting annoyed with the ghosting i'm seeing at night (due to the DLSS i'm using i now know.. so i'm trying a few different 'nvngx_dlss.dll' 's out to find one that doesn't ghost so much) But also i'm getting a 'halo' of spilled light around the hassler tacho and indicator lights on the desk of the EU07/EP08's that i drive. I found turning HDR off fixed the halo of light, but dammit, i bought a laptop with a HDR certified screen and 500 nits of brightness etc, so i want to use HDR, but no matter how many times i 'calibrate the HDR' i was still getting these 'halo's' they look really bad around the headlights of a train. Then i remembered what it's called... 'Bloom' and there's a setting for it in the 'settings.conf' file, unfortunately it's on or off, but i turned it to off and those halo's are gone, Now this does mean i'll lose the diffused look of light sources like platform lights perhaps, as bloom is a good effect when done subtlety, but i think it's turned up too high in SimRail atm.

why? SimRail is not tsw, it's not tsc, it's not any of the other train games out there, SimRail is doing things realistically, ok you get to do some things you may not be able to do in real life, like levitate outside your train (a feat only Polish train drivers can do apparently... same with their teleporter technology 😉) but think about it.... The driver is not visible in the cab because he's looking in the cab from outside holding the camera, so it's perfectly right for you not to see yourself in the cab when you are not in it, This is also something other players will see but you can't... as in real life. It's similar to why there's no visible driver in Ai driven trains... those trains are being driven by a computer, so you shouldn't see a live driver in the cab.

Hopefully when we get the SDK's that will allow us to read the data out of SimRail on our local computer, someone can make external versions of things like the chat box, would be nice to have that displayed on my phone or a tablet instead of on the main screen,

That's something i was wondering about, Aparantly dispatchers don't hear all the sounds we do as drivers, and some are saying that the carriage lights are off in the trains as they go past, yet are visible to the drivers.

i thought they did? i know when i've just teleported into an EU07/EP08 hauled train, whilst the Ai is still in control it will sound the horn when we go past W6b signs (it does a 1+ second blast of the low tone)

i don't get this 'it'll bring immersion to the sim' thing. This simulator is about driving and dispatching / signalling the trains. how can jumping out of your train at full speed, letting it carry on driverless whilst you fart about on the track side taking photo's result in 'immersion'? Immersion means realism, making you believe you really are at the controls of a train or operating a real signal box, hence SimRail is more immersive than the other 'train driving games' out there because it won't let you jump out of your train when you are moving (try pressing number '3' to exit the train when moving) Even the number '2' external camera breaks immersion, but at least the SimRail dev's knew that and you do not get to see yourself in the driver's seat when you are levitation outside the train holding the camera.

When it's night time for me in the uk and i want to drive during the day, i simply go on the Australian server which runs 11 hours ahead of my local time,

not all timetables have been made yet, as it takes quite a while to scrape all the data needed to make each services base timetable together, I'm having similar 'issues' with my "timetables for displaying on a kindle" project, i have to get the data from 3 or 4 different sources, with a lot of manual entries to get enough data to make the timetables look half realistic.

Wow, i never knew that, i guess the line from 1984 "It Was a Bright Cold Day in April, and the Clocks Were Striking Thirteen" no longer means what it was intended now that some public clocks do actually strike past 12.

I'm trying to run HUD'less using drivers timetables, so to do this i need to know where i am along the route, This is done in real life and in the sim (with paper timetables) simply by looking at the hectometer boards as you pass them, which should be placed at least every 200 meters along the line (some places in SimRail are missing these i know) Then you read the timetable's distance entries to know where you are along the route and where a speed change occurs ahead, or your next stop is etc. : But i've found that once i'm upto speed in the EU07 doing 125 km/h, it's getting hard to read the hectometer boards, even when zoomed fully in looking at the side of the tracks, and when doing 140 km/h in the EP08 it's almost impossible to make them out. This is because the view of the tracks ahead seems to 'skip or judder' the faster you go, it's no longer a smooth view, if i look closely i can see the catenary masts juddering along rather than passing smoothly as they do at slower speeds. I'm getting about 50 fps on average, running my monitor in G-sync mode at 165Hz, and running all the SimRail graphics settings as high as they will go except clouds (i find i get a 5 to 10 fps increase by having medium instead of high quality clouds) i've tried the 1/2 resolution setting thing, but that makes it worse i find. I'm running a gaming laptop with a RTX 3070 Ti GPU, running Nvidia driver version 517.0. and i have the laptop in high power mode, allowing upto 150 watts to the GPU (hovers around 120 to 145 watts running SimRail) I've tried using Vsync on (thus turning off Gsync) but found no difference. I'm running at 2560 x 1600 resolution, the native resolution for my display (16:10 screen) and 165 Hz refresh rate (i get the same juddery view at speed when running at 60Hz refresh rate) : Are there some of the Nvidia settings for the gfx card i could tweak to get smoother frames at high speed? Below are my current settings for SimRail, pretty much left them all standard except for Power management mode :

i notice on my system monitor that when i get those ~1 second pauses, my SSD is doing a massive ~750MB/s read or write. I also get most of the route running at 40 to 60 fps, but it will drop to as low as 8fps in little sections.

i hear a few dispatchers telling me and other trains that we have a clear run through their section, or that they should expect a yellow or red signal due to a slower train ahead etc. If i've been running on all greens for many kilometers then it's not really usefull info, But when the Ai dispatcher has been changing signals to green only when i am within ~450 meters of them and so have been slowing down expecting a stop signal due to the last signal being a 'S5' being told i'll get a clear run through a section can be welcoming. As only some dispatchers do this shows that they are real live people there, and not an autonomous robot reading from a script.

Regarding stopping freights, the Polish drivers timetables have letters at the bottom right of each station / post entry, showing the radio channel in use, interlocking type and so on, And if there's a 'T' in there, it means that if a freight train is stopped at the signal (i presume any of the signals controled by that post), it may not get going again due to the gradient. So there are points along the line where the dispatcher really shouldn't stop a freight unless its an emergency (i don't drive freights so i don't know if there are any of these places in the SimRail universe of lines) There is also a sign that can be placed on automatic signals.. W22, a black diamond with a white T on it, That means a freight train can pass that signal at 20 kph if it's red... the usual procedure is to stop, sound the horn / whistle then pass the signal and do no more than 20 km/h until you pass a normal signal / stop before the train ahead. But again, it's there for the long heavy freights that should not be stopped due to the gradient of the line. : So many people think freights are the lowest of the low regarding movements, and are to be delayed and stopped at will, but not many people think about the time taken for the freight to stop, and then get going again may well be much longer than if they'd just let it run through whilst it's running at it's max speed.

i think some people think that at the end of their run they get to park the carriages up in the sidings, uncouple the loco and take it to the depot, use the turntable and stable it in the loco shed, Thing is, that only happens to the last services of the day. during the day your 14100 service turns around and becomes a 41100 service going back the way it came, so at most you may move the loco from one end of the cariages to the other, but looking at Polish railways maps, some terminus stations have a loop line that allows you to turn your train without disconnecting the loco. : Last night when i ran the 14133 service, when i got to Katowice ;zd, ph. i got out of the loco and gave it back to the bot to drive, as the ;zd bit after the station name means this is a crew change point, Then i watched the train drive away standing on the end of the platform, eventually i got the 'you are too far from your train' message and was teleported into the cab, and about 5 seconds later was kicked to the 'end screen'

i'm all for realism regarding the driving, but to make a 'rule' about no non railway talk might be going a little too far, Maybe have one server for 'driving and dispatching as if this was real life' and leave the others for people who want a more relaxing time in SimRail? kind of like they have done now with one server that bans track closing due to the problems it causes. But i know the dispatchers get bored waiting ~20 minutes between trains at times, so being able to chat on the radio / phone in the sim keeps them entertained, and in the UK back in the days of mechanical signal boxes, the signallers would be on the signal box party line (phone line shared between all signal boxes) all the time chatting away, some even practiced their opera singing over the phone line... as soon as a train arrived they stopped and did their job, but the alternative was to sit in the chair and possibly fall asleep from boredom,

that is awesome, one day we will have proper joystick support in SimRail, it's a pain in the ass having to use things like joy to key at times for sure. each update of SimRail i eagerly check the buttons.conf folder to see if anything new has been added, all i noticed was one of the 'test' entries was removed,

One problem is that some people literally spend all day in their favourite dispatchers post and will not give it up to anyone else unless the server restarts and someone else manages to get into it before they do. As a driver, it's no really problem for me to simply take back the train i was driving after the server restart, if someone else gets it before i do, i simply go to another server and carry on my journey with the same train (i like to drive the ~4 hour services)

well, really we do need a different set of "user assignable" keybinds for each train, as not many trains share exactly the same controls, i.e. there's no cruise control lever / buttons in the EU07, and no shunt regulator lever in the elf, trax, pendolino etc.. the modern trains have all the computer screens with ~10+ buttons around their edges, and often a single rotary switch for head and tail lights, the EU07 has ~5 individual switches for setting the head and tail lights for the different codes they display. The problem will be in 5 years time when there are 50+ different trains to drive from around the world in SimRail, but only one single menu for setting up all keybinds, it'll take 10 minutes to scroll to the end of it due to all the different controls for different trains, and if you are stuck with assigning a single key to a single control, things will get very messy fast. So having maybe a global basic controls menu for the main controls that all trains have like throttle, brake, horn etc, ideal for those who just like a 'go and stop' style of control. Then have seperate menus / files to change for those who want to adjust the individual controls that apply to certain trains, with the ability to then spilt out the control assignments if you wish, i.e. to set say the arrow left and right keys to move the EU07's power wheel left and right, and the arrow up and down keys to move the elf's joysticks style power / brake lever up and down and so on. : : But where that other game went wrong was getting different people to set up the hard coded binds on the raildriver, one person thought 'i'll have the first 3 buttons for PZB', then the next person thought 'i'll have PZB on the last 3 buttons' they did the same for the levers too and it was hell trying to remember which button / lever did which. If they'd given people the ability to set the controls how it suited them, the end user, things would have been a million times better, as no 2 people want the same control layout. But they didn't, they thought they knew best and had a 'take it or leave it' attitude to the control schemes, and a lot of people left it and moved onto other simulators, even going back to a 15 year old train game because it gave them the freedom to set it up to suite them, the end user.

You are the driver, other people can see you in the cab when you are in it, just that when you activate the outside view, you teleport outside the cab and are levitating, so the view you have is true to if this was happening in real life... there's no driver in the cab as the driver really is not in the cab, he's holding the camera to take the picture 😄

you could do what some people did to hide the next signal aspect that shows in the top right corner, place a sticky note / Post-It note on the monitor's bezel so it covers up the part of the screen that you don't want to see the 'cheat info' Would be nice to have an option to set the alerter on the HUD only appear if you are outside the cab (playing about getting screen shots, or using the rear camera to see when the last coach / wagon of your trains gone past the speed limit sign etc)

Where is the data for the 'switch / points' speeds coming from? if it's a real track railway site, then remember that is likely based on the situation today... 2023, and SimRail is based on how it was in 2018, so things may have changed, what is now a high speed set of points may have been a much slower set 5 years ago.

ahh yeah, i suggested that the flies are wiped off the screen when it's raining a while back... just one of these 'realism things' that most people don't notice or think about, but makes SimRail stand out with realism even more. I'd love to be able to add my own keybinds in the buttons.conf file, So say i want the washers on a key, i'd make a new entry that read something like: 'Washers=X' This would mean knowing all the possible button / control names in the various trains tho, So maybe have the buttons.conf file filled with all possible controls, but list the unassigned ones like : 'Washers=NUL' and we replace the 'NUL' with the key of our choice... it's obviously upto us to ensure we don't assign 2 or more controls to the same key. Of course we will eventually run out of available keys if we are stuck to the standard keyboard keys (~76 of them) with no modifier keys allowed, But if 'shift' 'control' and 'alt' can be enabled as modifiers, that's about 300+ possible key combos.

so... there are supposed to be a left and right hand cab light switches? I too wondered about the 'overall lighting' switch that did nothing, thought maybe it was supposed to turn all internal lights off with one switch. The other switch for the 'high voltage compartment light' i guess is for the 'middle part of the loco' that we don't get to enter (yet?) I'm really hoping that one day we will get more keybinds to operate all these switches, maybe using the 'buttons.conf' file to set them up so as not to have a massive list of controls in the settings menu's. Could really do with a 'windscreen washers button' keybind... as we can operate the wipers with a key press, but most of the time we put the wipers on to clear the bugs off the windscreen, and that needs water from the washers, which is a button you need to use the mouse to operate 😞