Coal wagons, loaded and unloaded.

[simonjackson1964]

Hi again.

You can always tell the newbies, we ask a lot of questions... So.  I'm not even sure if this is possible, but the only other way I can think of doing it is really clumsy.

The Güterwagen Railion lang ("Freight Car Railion long" according to Google Translate) has two options

One with a load of coal, and one without.

Guess what I'm going to ask...?

Is there a way of making the wagon change state automatically, as it passes under a hopper or stops by a machine?

There must be a variable on the object, but how do I find out what it is called in order to set an event to change its value? (I'm guessing the values will be 1 and 0 respectively)

For that matter, is there a way of listing all the variables that an object has? The variable menu lets you create new ones, but that doesn't help in this situation.

The only other way I can think of doing this other than manually changing the load state of each wagon, is to use a hidden layer and somehow flip the wagons between layers. I'm not entirely sure how to do that, either, but someone mentioned it as being a better option that turning things invisible...

[maxwei]

Hi Simon, it's an easy way to do this.

just use the empty wagon, put in a selfmade rectangle mesh, texture it  with a coal texture, so you have a filled wagon,

to fill or empty that wagon use the EV, make it visible or invisible, it depends.

greets max

i forgot, you have to connect the mesh to the wagon

Bearbeitet 11. Juli 2018 von maxwei

[simonjackson1964]

Thanks Max.

That seems easy enough. It just seems a shame when someone has gone to all the trouble of actually doing it for me but not made it obvious how to change the state...! You'd have thought they would have realised that people will want to do this and made an easy way to make it happen.

Simon

[simonjackson1964]

So... Follow-up question...

HOW?

I have my empty wagons (I decided to use a hopper wagon rather that the open wagon, as it has a more realistic emptying action). I have my coal textured mesh, linked to each wagon. The wagons are numbered (1-18) and the coal meshes have the corresponding number.

The coal moves with the wagon, no trouble at all, whether visible or invisible. My issue is, how do I make the coal become visible as the wagon passes under the coal hopper? I've tried creating an event for when the wagon enters the track length that is under the hopper, but it doesn't do anything. I suspect this is because the wagon is not defined as a "vehicle". I typed the wagon name into "User Defined" vehicle, but it doesn't seem to do anything.

The only way I can think of doing it is to make sure my coal wagons are always in the same order, and put six track lengths the same length as the wagons in front of the coal run, and have a variable that is set 1 to 3, so that as the loco pushing the wagons enters each section it triggers the event for wagons 1, 7 & 13, then 2, 8 & 14, 3, 9 & 15, etc, and which wagon is dependent on the variable. I don't like that idea, because it mucks up my track geometry. If it's the only way I guess I'll bite the bullet and do it.

Unless I attach an invisible car to each wagon?

[simonjackson1964]

Nope, tried that too. It didn't work either!  (The invisible car, I mean).

Bearbeitet 12. Juli 2018 von simonjackson1964
Adding clarification.

[BahnLand]

Hello,

only vehicles which have been defined as "vehicels with engine" in the train studio may be identified and addressed when a whole train enters or leaves a piece of track. The identified vehicle then is the "driving locomotive" of this train. Vehicles not being an engine can only identified with the event condition "vehicle is located on a track/street" where the name of the vehicle must be known because it must be referred.

If you know the names of your vehicles and their order within the train composition, you can exactly use this condition to verify, whether a certain vehicle is located on a certain track to initiate then a specific action (especially unloading the vehicle).

If you don't know the order of the vehicles within the train, you can identify these vehicles by their names only by scanning all vehicle names while a certain wagon is located on the checking track. If you don't want to write a specific event specification for each veihicle name, you must name your vehicles only with consecutive numers (e.g. 1, 2, 3,... or 1001, 1002, 1003, ... or others), so that you can specify them by an arithmetic operation (e.g. +1 or -1) using variables.

For example see the layout "Ablaufberg" (Content ID = BF1E3582-32E9-4074-AE25-5F55DED16C28) in the online catalog. Try to understand the event specification part when uncoupling the wagons for sorting them (part "Automatik-Aufteilen-Eselsrücken"). Sorry, that the event specification is only in German. I hope that you can understand the event definition anyway.

Many greetings
BahnLand

Bearbeitet 12. Juli 2018 von BahnLand

[simonjackson1964]

Yeah, thanks.

I realised that after trying to do it using "vehicle enters track" events on six lengths of track triggered by the loco hitting the track! Couldn't figure out why it didn't work in the direction I wanted it to but did in the other one... Tried it again, having a fair idea suddenly what was wrong. Sure enough, as the lead wagon (being pushed) hit the first track length, BINGO, there was the coal!

So, I am going to use the numerical order of the wagons, a variable that counts 1 to 3, but is set to 0 when not loading the wagons, and a variable that counts 1 to 6... Somehow. Details still being worked out in my head!

Thanks for the tip!

[simonjackson1964]

And the joke is on me...

I switched to using the Falns 81 80 D DB hopper wagon

It's a great rendering of it, by the way!

 

I have a train of 18 of these guys that gets hauled from a coal mind to a power station and back. So, filling at the power station, all working. I made a little rectangle of ... Well, if I was doing this for real, I would have used plasticard, so whatever the virtual equivalent of that is - painted it with coal paint (Hey, get me a can of tartan paint? No problem! Computers are the solution to old jokes!) Popped it in the wagon at the top, linked them, and then copied the wagon 17 times.

The load sequence works perfectly, dropping coal into the wagon, the when that stops the coal "card" becomes visible and hey presto! The only thing was, that, as I was watching from very close to as the wagons passed beneath the camera, I spotted a dark shadow in each one. Oops, they are already loaded. Oh well, too late now. Besides, I had to look really close to realise it.

And then I took the train down to the power station to unload it...

So, I knew one of those two animations opened the doors at the bottom, but not speaking (or reading) German, I had no idea what the other one did..

Until I tried it. Well look at that! It empties the wagon. I still think my coal layer is more realistic, but if only I had realised this at the start I could have saved myself the trouble!

Moral of the story: Always check wa=hat all the animations do before you start!

[Curt84328]

I use a half cylinder primitive sized to fit a hopper car and paint different textures on it for simulating loads like Iron Ore, Grain, Potatoes, etc.   you can make the primitive invisible to simulate unloading.

[Curt84328]

some of my custom hopper and flatbed loads

[Curt84328]

A few of my textures.   

textures1.zip