Gazz292

that is a great video, really shows how much you bounce about in these old trains. i can imagine that maybe one reason for very small 'head bob' movements in the sim is some people use the mouse to drive, it's already hard at times for me to operate the switches that are mouse only atm as i use TrackIr (well, a Tobii eye tracker webcam, with FaceTrackNoIr to convert the signal to TrackIr) and if i move my head whilst aiming the mouse for a switch, i will miss it. So maybe a way to have the mouse pointer move with the cab sway would be needed, or have a keyboard key to hold down to temporarily disable cab sway, operate the control with the mouse then release the key to get the cab sway back. Or just give us the ability to map every control to keybinds... and / or joystick buttons / axis, and there'd be no reason to touch the mouse once you've clicked the on screen button to turn the bot off and take over driving, The mouse would then just be used to move the view around.

i remember reporting things like this in tsw, and being told, it's low down on the bug list as it doesn't break the game, so may not be fixed for a while... a while was 2 years and counting in some cases.

ahhh... they had the horn key binds backwards in a lot of trains... i noticed it as i use a 2 way joystick switch as my horn lever (EU07 based) so left should be high tone, right low tone. The keybinds were fixed with the last hotfix update.... but i guess there was more to it than just switching the key binds, and the animations in some trains need changing too. Any drivers of the other trains that were affected with the reversed horn keybinds noticed if the horn lever / switch / pedals move the wrong direction?

yes, having a slider to set how much sway and bounce you see would be nice, i know some people hate cab motion, i recall they had it in tsw but people were complaining it was making them 'sea sick'... so rather than give players the option of turning it on or off, or varying it's intensity, it was switched off altogether for a while.

before the update, most servers had 1 or 2 players in them, even EN1 could be deserted half the day. So add in private servers taking away people, and the official servers would be even more depopulated, how long till the dev's think 'hardly anyone playing, may as well cancel the project and shut everything down' ? a lot of people who want private servers say they want them so basically 'they can play god' the 'my server, you play it how i like or get out' i know some people just want to mess about, crash trains, go as fast as they can in reverse and do other 'weird' things. But SimRail is supposed to be a consumer version of the professional train driving training simulator, i bought it so i could pretend i am a real train driver and drive as if it was real life, each time i drive i try to learn something and do better than my last run, be it learning the route, braking points, running to schedule etc.

the timetables should all be the same size no matter what train you are in, i 'think' in real life they are printed on A5 paper, or 2 parts of the timetable side by side on A4 in landscape format? but i could have that totally wrong here. i presume the driver would pick up a print out of the relevant timetables (and O orders etc) when they book on duty, i'd imagine they are printed on demand nowadays. Some 1980's German cab ride videos i've watched showed the driver preparing for his duty, where he was handed a typewritten scrap of paper with his duty on it from the booking on clerk, Then he went into a room and picked out the relevant sheets of pre-printed paper to make up his timetable and 'notices' from a load of pidgeon holes under a very long desk.

The past few months i've mostly been enjoying SimRail... plus getting back into my Omsi bus driving cab build ... I began to get the bits together for the force feedback steering system i'm building for my bus driving rig, i'll be using 'EMC-FFB' software, and it's firmware that i loaded onto a STM32F black pill board, a 4000 pulse per rotation optical encoder will sense the wheels position, a 150 watt E-scooter motor will provide the force feedback (add in a couple of big H-bridges and a 24 volt 30 amp power supply, i then just need to make the mechanicals to connect the motor and encoder to the bus steering shaft. But that's in my shed, and winter is here and it's far too cold to be in there... so i'm waiting on having a wall taken down in the house so i can have a nice warm simulator room. So i had a play with the encoder at my laptop, just to prove that part of the system works, it does... i have a full 6 and a half turns lock to lock (or about 2360 degrees) so i will have 1:1 steering in the sim, miles better than using the consumer FFB wheels that max out at 900 or 1024 degrees (half the number of turns a bus has) I also had a play with a different way to get the dashboard data out of Omsi using BusBoardInterface2, and managed to get a few things working that weren't possible using Komsi : Anyway, enough about the bus sim, this is the SimRail forum... Whilst i had the encoder mounted on my laptop desk i decided to try and use it to control the EU07 in SimRail, i tried 'Joystick Gremlin' to read the encoder rotation and send button pulses every few degrees, which JoytoKey made into the up and down keyboard presses to control SimRail. That kind of worked, but with no notches it was very hard to control the train, so i 3D printed a mini EU07 style wheel and a notch wheel, and thinking ahead i made the 'twanger' that the notch wheel flicks as the wheel is rotated hit microswitches, so turning the wheel one way hits the up microswitch, turning it the other way the down microswitch is hit, all the time giving nice heavy notches to push the wheel past to move it. The Fusion360 render below is showing how it works a little better, the yellow 'twanger' has a pair of springs going from the end hole to the holes in the plate, and the microswitches are not shown in the render either, but you can see them in the photo above... this is just one way to get notches, (i have a better more compact method that i'll show in the next post... but it doesn't hit the microswitches, so instead i use a potentiometer to read the position, then an arduino to read the position and send keyboard commands as the controller moved from notch to notch... that is going to take a lot of messing in the code for the 43 notches, but it can be done.) The microswitch method actually worked pretty well so i gave up on using the encoder (i might try again reading it with an arduino some time) But for now i was using a STM32F blue pill board loaded with FreeJoy to read the microswitches, i've mentioned these before as i use them in my button boxes and i highly rate them... Especially as the cost is about £5 for the STM32F board, plus £3 or so for the programmer (one time purchase, you use it again on other boards) And the FreeJoy software is as it's name hints at... free). I did get a bit of contact bounce if i rotated the wheel too fast, but when i tried again with an arduino and using interrupts to read the switches, i was able to spin the wheel far faster than i would normally and the wheel in SimRail moved perfectly in sync with it..... That is until the November 2023 update, i think the new animations on the controls are messing with inputs, as now if i rotate the wheel faster than about 3 to 5 notches a second the wheel in SimRail stops moving 😞 I get this with my macropad's encoders too, so i can only hope that something can be changed to allow faster inputs again, or i'll be stuck waiting for the joystick axis input to be introduced to the sim (which i really thought was happening with this update, but apparently it was a miscommunication and it was gamepad support we got in this update...... ....erm, ok.... ...thanks.... .....i guess. 🤨 I really am not a fan of gamepads for train simulators, leave them for the shooting games where they belong, there are just too many buttons, switches and levers to operate in the good train sim to make a gamepad of any use i think... but others think differently, and some think me messing about making controllers is madness when the keyboard and mouse can do it all, but i do like immersion, and having to drag a lever or push a button with a mouse breaks immersion for me. Right, i've got a 3D print that's finished, so i need to go and get it and start another, next post i'll show one of the mini controllers i am building right now for the EN57.

have you driven a 141xx / 411xx service yet? from Katowice to Warsaw takes about 3 and a half hours if all goes well. some people say that's too long !! Then when you get to the end of the map and get kicked out... (because not all of Poland's rail network is modelled in SimRail ya know, 'only' 500 Km worth of it ... so at the end it really is the end, you can't keep driving as there's no more scenery to drive on (yet) ... you can always take another train back in the opposite direction... just like a real driver would ... so they can go home after finishing their shift (after a rest break of course) i don't think you'll get much more realistic that SimRail, it is based on the simulator used to train real life train drivers (parent company SimKol makes them, what we have is that software slightly modified for consumers) We don't really drive scenarios, that implies scripted runs and events, i.e. the same every time, in multiplayer you will never have the exact same run twice, other humans driving trains and human dispatchers mean things can't be scripted, even the Ai has to be able to make 'decisions' to adapt to what's happening around it. In the paper timetables there should be a ;zd for the entry for Katowice and Warszawa Wschodnia, that means 'crew change' i.e. thats where you'd get off the train and take a break, there are laws regarding how long a train driver can be at the controls for... but we can spend 20 hours driving in SimRail if we wanted, just chose from the many different services in the timetable (hint, chose an empty server to see all the services available, should be 70 or so every hour)

I've posted this in the 'community made content' part of the forum, but i can imagine a lot of people don't know that exists, I made an explanation sheet to help understand what is going on with the drivers timetables we now have in the sim... As usual, pictures with text seem to be shown fuzzy in the forum preview, click the picture and it should open up much clearer... a .pdf version is also included. Let me know if i've got anything wrong and i'll correct it asap. Timetable explanation for SimRail.pdf

Thought this might be of use to people now that we have realistic drivers timetables in the sim. The preview looks fuzzy, click it to see the sheet in full resolution, also included is a .pdf version. Timetable explanation for SimRail.pdf

Is this thing i made of any use... sorry i couldn't make it neater, but there is so much info in the timetables all over the place. Please click the image to see it clearly, it is fuzzy in the preview only, also included is a .pdf version. Timetable explanation for SimRail.pdf

it's the same in the EN57.

easier to have the conductor tell you over the radio that you can depart now.

and you lose points for flushing the toilet in a station!

as mentioned above, most Polish trains do not have the shunting / auxiliary controls mounted by the side windows that trains in Germany have, so you'd need very long arms to be looking out the left hand window and operating the power wheel and brake lever. It just takes 1 or 2 key presses to get the view looking backwards from the front of the train, i do this all the time, it'd get annoying fast to have to keep clicking with the mouse to open the window, select the look out option, move the view to be looking backwards, where as pressing number 4 you are looking back along the train in 1/4 of a second.

So, today i had a little play, i dug out some old 'minimus AVR' boards that i run KADE on, which gives you a USB A plu with a PCB on it, that you connect switches to the solder pads, then program it in KADE to make it into a keyboard, a game pad, a mouse/trackball/spinner and so on... it only does digital inputs, so no axis. it was brought out about 10 years ago for the MAME scene... arcade emulation. So, i set the KADE programmer up to set 2 of the input pins send the keyboard key for power up and power down. Programmed the board, connected my mini EU07 wheel to it, which is just 2 microswitches, one is tapped each time i rotate the wheel right, the other tapped when i rotate it left, so it should be just as if i was tapping the keyboard keys. I opened notepad, and spun the wheel fast to the right, i got a nice line of letters which i counted... exactly 43, i spun the wheel back to zero even faster, exactly 43 letters that in the sim would move the wheel left. I have no problems with contact bounce, skipped inputs or anything, i always get exactly the number of key inputs i need. Started SimRail in the EU07, moved my mini wheel to the right, if i go more than about 3 clicks a second the wheel in the sim stops moving. It seems to be the new animation that needs time to move the wheel 'smoothly' similar to how we can no longer hold down the ZEW buttons on the radio, there's now an animation that releases the button after one beep, even if your still holding the keyboard key down. i know there are a few people trying to make controllers for SimRail, and this new animation thing has just messed things up for us big time. Personally i preferred the old way, where the controls moved instantly when you operated them, and you could keep the ZEW buttons held down and make it beep 3 or 4 times before releasing.

well, the idea of leaning out the window was to lean from the drivers seat, I don't bother with it anyway, as i drive with TrackIr all the time, and that only works on the driving / in cab camera, if i go through the process of dragging the right hand window down, clicking then selecting 'lean out' then wait for the animation of me to do so... i'm looking forwards, and TrackIr is not active, so to look back along the train to see if it's safe to close the doors, i need to drag the view with the mouse.... Much easier to just press number 4, and it's looking back along the train kind of as if i was looking ot the window... press 4 again and it switches to looking back along the left hand side of the train (tho on the EU07's etc, number 4 has you looking back on the left side first... someone needs to get all these interactions synced with all the trains really) Re the mirror, lots of things are being changed with hot fixes and updates right now, so one of the updates has knocked the mirror camera's view off, it used to be correct, but the other night i was in the EP08, and the top half of the right hand mirror was a view of the driving desk in the cab!! bottom half was back along the platform as it should have been.

yup, dev's have answered this on discord a few times, the lean out of window thing is to simulate leaning over from the drivers chair to look out the window, something you can't do to the left window, and the same reason that the loco's with tiny side cab windows placed far from the drivers seat can not be leaned out of.

voltage drops are active in the sim now, people are tripping the overload due to icy overhead wires reducing the voltage available to the loco, so hopefully having things happen if you forget to move the controller to zero when passing a neutral section can be added easily.

it seems that the variable overhead line voltage feature has been enabled in SimRail with the latest update. Some people have reported seeing the line voltage meter's needle moving as low as 1.5Kv (normal is just over 3Kv) And as the voltage drops the current drawn will rise, so if you don't catch it in time and 'load shed' you will trip the breaker. When i had this happen to me, it was the sound of the converter winding down that alerted me to the fact i'd tripped out, as i was cruising along and not accelerating so didn't expect the trip. *no transformer in these loco's, as they run on 3Kv DC from the overhead line, so use a 'converter' or motor generator to produce the 110 volts DC for the low voltage circuits like the controls etc.*

it would be nice for each loco variant in SimRail to have slightly different sounds, especially for things like the horns which will all sound different due to aging, the air circuits being partially blocked, the diaphragm wearing etc,

Just like real life, these trains get so crowded that people sit on the floor in the corridors, makes getting to the doors at each end of the coach a little hard:

i too have experienced this a few times, had it on one of the EU07's and the EN57, washer button is pressed but it's out of water.

Would it be possible to have a way to adjust the drivers view camera angle and position in the different trains, and save it? Kind of like adjusting the drivers seat, everyone will have a slightly different preference to how they like to have their view set, and it's different in each train type. In the EN57, i'd like to have the 'seat' a little lower and the view tilted downwards slightly, so i can see the control panel from the brake gauges up, and still see out the window properly. Yet in the EU07 i'd prefer to have the view a little higher due to how the control panel is positioned on that train, i also like to have the view angle a bit narrower on that loco than in others,

just noticed that EN2 has a 12 hour difference, was that implemented recently? sure it used to be just 1 hour is any different from EN1. it's nice to be ab le to drive in the daytime, i've been driving on EN1 in the dark for tooooo long.