Ever
since I included something similar with my ECML:NE route, i've wanted
to release a range of era-specific Quick Drives for various routes
but they do involve a lot of time and planning, and therefore I never
got around to it. I'm therefore very happy to release version 1 of
this Quick Drive on the Liverpool to Manchester route.
It's
basically Quick Drive as you already know it, but providing you have
a selection of the requirements installed then this particular Quick
Drive will only spawn rolling stock specific to the represented era,
in this case around 2000/2001.
The
beauty of this system is that you don't necessarily need all of the
requirements, it should function in some form no matter what you own.
Despite that, the more you do own should give a better experience
with much more variety.
With
well over 100 consists and fragments included, it should be fairly
different no matter how many times you run it although there will
inevitably times where things can be duplicated. Due to the nature of
how the randomisation works, some runs will have a low amount of
traffic, some moderate and some quite heavy. If you are driving the
full length of the route you might have a clear run or you might get
stuck behind a stopper and encounter adverse signals. Driving through
the central core of the route you might only see local traffic, or
you might see empty stock workings or even the occasional engineering
train.
Please make sure you read all of the included documentation that comes with this release before attempting to run any of the included Quick Drives.
This new Quick Drive can be downloaded from the dedicated page by following this link.
I tried both of these QDs.
ReplyDeleteThe Westbound from Manchester Piccadilly to Warrington curiously started showing 0.49 miles to Warrington, but otherwise worked well with plenty of period trains showing up.
The Eastbound from Lime Street to Manchester wouldn't start, showing driver errors. The timetable editor shows many path conflicts which I couldn't eliminate - changing priorities got rid of some but not others, and I ran out of time to go through them all. I suspect this is an inherent problem with Quick Drives, unless trains are set to spawn at similar times in the same signal block.
Hi Alan, thanks for the feedback.
DeleteI certainly think that distance and ETA have to be ignored, especially when a train is spawned that will interact with your journey.
I must confess that Eastbound has never troubled me once, all of my issues were Westbound and if I did take a look at the editor as you did, it was a different set of problems every time, none of which actually correlate with where any spawn markers were placed in the QD template. Simply quitting the program, reloading and re-selecting my start and end points seemed to cure it enough to have a run though.
Thanks Darren - I'll keep restarting TS then. Looks like there is an inherent problem with QDs where it spawns trains without checking the path. I guess that the more trains you put in, the more likely it is to happen.
ReplyDeleteI really liked your QD scenarios, the rolling stock choices looked great! I have had a few issues where I was forced to tail eastbound 142 services but it was no real issue.
ReplyDelete