Train Slows Before Waypoint

[JimTM]

I have a bit of a mystery in an update to the train mission from pg. 70 of the manual. My updated mission (attached) makes the train run continuously between Pravoe and Stepnoye stations, with a stop at Alexei Station in between. The train does the Westbound trip fine, but on the Eastbound return trip, it slows down before reaching waypoint "Eastbound WP 1", just before Alexei Station. I was expecting the train to maintain full speed until it reached the waypoint and then slow until the engine reached the far end of the station. Instead, the train stops before the station.

 

Does anyone know what's happening with the waypoint behaviour? Is it a terrain effect? All the other waypoints behave as expected. Needless to say, time acceleration is your friend when troubleshooting this one.  :-)

 

I placed a control tower at the waypoint to make the location easy to see from the nearby camera. The effect happens with or without the tower. 

 

Thanks for any ideas!

 

Cheers!

 

Jim

 

FMEManualMakeATrainFollowARouteROUNDTRIP.zip

 

FMEManualMakeATrainFollowARouteSHORTROUNDTRIP.zip   <--- Shorter version of the route in the mission above. Alexei Station is in the same place but Pravoe and Stepnoye moved much closer.

 

FMEManualMakeATrainFollowARouteKUBANROUNDTRIP.zip  <--- Kuban version of the short mission above.

 

Edited October 20, 2018 by JimTM

[Thad]

Salutations,

 

I have done a check of your train situation.

 

Indeed... the westbound train form Stepnoya inexplicably slows down dramatically for a short time several times on its' way to Alexi and again as it continues on... once on a steep downward slope. The early stop at Alexi and none of the slowdowns are explainable.

 

My check in the editor doesn't reveal anything that would or could cause this anomaly. Sorry. ☹️

Edited October 19, 2018 by Thad

[JimTM]

Thanks for checking Thad. I thought that the slowdown at Alexei may be caused by the train going uphill before the station, but the terrain appears to go slightly downhill in that area. I suspect that the other slowdowns you saw are happening for the same reason as the one near Alexei.

[Gambit21]

I’ll take a look at the logic later, then post it in the beta forum.

 

 

[JimTM]

I posted a new version of the mission with a much shorter route for convenience. Alexei Station remains where it is and I placed some land canvases to number the locations for each camera. The behaviour at "Eastbound WP 1" is unchanged.

 

Thanks for your help Thad and Gambit21.

 

I suspect that the AI train simply slows down at certain points in the terrain, regardless of where the waypoints are. I may have to instruct mission builders to place the waypoints according to the small chart on pg. 70 of the manual and then adjust the placement to account for slowdowns.

Edited October 19, 2018 by JimTM

[Gambit21]

Just tested a bunch of times.

I'm not getting any slowdowns, only that it comes to a final stop in a different position relative to the waypoint compared to the Eastbout trip.

It might be terrain related.

 

Jim, can you paste this logic onto a different map and see if you get the same behavior?

I'd have to do that before I reported it as a bug anyway...have to eliminate any variables we can on our end first.

Edited October 20, 2018 by Gambit21

[JimTM]

1 hour ago, Gambit21 said:

Just tested a bunch of times.

I'm not getting any slowdowns, only that it comes to a final stop in a different position relative to the waypoint compared to the Eastbout trip.

It might be terrain related.

 

Jim, can you paste this logic onto a different map and see if you get the same behavior?

I'd have to do that before I reported it as a bug anyway...have to eliminate any variables we can on our end first.

 

Thanks Gambit.

 

I added FMEManualMakeATrainFollowARouteKUBANROUNDTRIP.zip to the opening post. This time, the train made it almost to the end of Alexei station after it passed "Eastbound WP 1".

Edited October 20, 2018 by JimTM

[Retnek]

Since we can use bridges again now and I'm a bit into trains and logistics, I tried to re-build a supply-train. If the tracks were ok the Germans used "standard troop transport trains" consisting of 54 two-axle wagons with a length of 550 m. Even the somewhat reduced trains on light local tracks had 35 - 40 wagons and a length well over 300 m.

That would be an impressive train! Not to compare with those tiny model-railroad-10-waggon-trains usually offered to us by tight-fisted mission-designers

 

I gladly add some more historical data about railroads, procedures and logistics relevant for realism-oriented mission building. But first there's nasty problem to overcome. Being a mission-building-greenhorn I simply tried to enlarge the trains in Jim's example in SP-mode first (see attached).

 

FMEManualMakeATrainFollowARouteSHORTROUNDTRIP Retnek mod.zip

 

- long trains > 15-20 wagons start to slow down the trains max. speed. But not it's ability to climb steep slopes.

- somewhere from 25 to 29 wagons the starting of such a train might block the whole sim-engine for a few seconds (one CPU 100%) until the trains slowly starts to move. After that bottleneck the sim-engine is fine again. Train won't go much faster than 10 to 20 km/h. But still there's no hill it won't climb.

- around 30 wagons the game engine partly freezes as soon as train is ordered to start. Train won't start moving. One still can provoke some input via "esc", but it seems there's an endless loop eating up all the CPU. No way out of it (for me) except killing the games exe by the task manager.

 

My impression is some computations to simulate the growing length / weight of the train more and more overshoot and finally block the sim. The effect is limited to the starting of a train and limits the maximum speed, too. Once the train started there is no effect on the ability to climb a hill. The distance of the trains braking imho is just influenced by the speed, not by the weight of the train.

Looks like a bug, a function out of control when some starting parameter become too large. Anyone willing to check my findings, please? Is it worth to ask the developers for a solution?

 

Even without that "starting-bug" - next question would be how the sim-engine would deal with 40-wagons-trains compared to the usual 10-wagons-setup? Is one wagon a workload comparable to one truck or so? Or hopefully just a dumb element trailing behind his somewhat resource-eating locomotive?

 

btw: anyone here able to point on sources about the Soviet war railroad system, please?