Car Spawner Question

LAST EDITED ON Feb-11-03 AT 11:27 AM (EDT)

It appears that there is only one carspawner.dat file. Does that mean that any place I put a car spawner, I am going to have the same mix of vehicles? There are different parts of my route where different types of vehicular traffic would be approprate. For instance, in industrial areas, there would be more truck traffic and fewer cars. Is there a way to accomodate this? Also, in rural areas, there will be less traffic than there would be in urban areas. Can this be done?I haven't placed my first carspawner, yet, so the answers to some of these questions may be obvious when I do so. I backed up my route after working on it last night and I am going to try a carspawner tonight. If it blows up, I'll just restore the backup.Cal Rasmussen
Beaverton, OR
cal.rasmussen@verizon.netColumbia Gorge Route (Phase 1 track completed, road construction resumed.)

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RE: Car Spawner Question, henry3, Feb-11-03, 12:09 PM, (1) RE: Car Spawner Question, gdwrench, Feb-11-03, 01:05 PM, (2) RE: Car Spawner Question, Railfan727, Feb-11-03, 01:29 PM, (3) RE: Car Spawner Question, calr, Feb-11-03, 02:05 PM, (4) RE: Car Spawner Question, calr, Feb-12-03, 11:33 AM, (5) RE: Car Spawner Question, gdwrench, Feb-12-03, 12:13 PM, (6) RE: Car Spawner Question, Coonskin, Feb-12-03, 12:15 PM, (7) RE: Car Spawner Question, dmikulec, Feb-12-03, 12:24 PM, (8) RE: Car Spawner Question, Tree Frog, Feb-12-03, 12:31 PM, (10) RE: Car Spawner Question, calr, Feb-12-03, 12:55 PM, (11) RE: Car Spawner Question, Tree Frog, Feb-12-03, 02:08 PM, (12) RE: Car Spawner Question, calr, Feb-12-03, 02:37 PM, (13) Multiple car spawners, Tree Frog, Feb-12-03, 12:26 PM, (9) RE: Car Spawner Question, Railfan727, Feb-12-03, 04:27 PM, (14)

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LAST EDITED ON Feb-11-03 AT 12:11 PM (EDT)

Unfortunately, I believe that is correct. In my experience all carspawners on a given route will have the same traffic mix. In my case I'd like to have city buses running in the heavy urban areas, but they look really funky at a crossing fifty miles away in the middle of nowhere. I *REALLY* hope that someone will come along and tell me that I'm wrong. PLEASE!!Now you can vary the traffic density and vehicle speed on an individual carspawner, but no such luck for the mix. Maybe in MSTS2.Oh, I do remember that Rich Garber has a batch file in Ohio Rails that will allow you to change the era of the vehicles on the carspawners. It might be possible to do something along those lines, but at a minimum it would involve exiting the sim to run the batch file. The nice thing is, I don't think it would void a saved activity in progress. (One of the few changes that doesn't!)Henry<Edited for clarity and spelling.>

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LAST EDITED ON Feb-11-03 AT 01:08 PM (EDT)

Yes only "ONE" spawner per route.. I have many cars and trucks in mine (36) and I vary the speed and density and the end result is almost liveable... If you want a certain car or truck to appear more ofter just enter it more often in the DAT file..

Fred... "Mr. Goodwrench" a ASE General Motors Master Technician for 45 years in Kingman Arizona...

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Whenever you place a spawner, the maximum vehicle speed you can set is 25.0 min/sec (that unit of measure makes no sense to me...oh well). This equates to roughly 30-35 MPH.However, you can edit the world (.w) file containing the spawner, and set the speed as high as you like. A setting of 42-45 is just about right for a rural Interstate, while 40 works very nicely for a typical state highway.

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Thanks everyone for your comments and answers. I would think that the logical thing to do would be to have carspawner.dat contain the master list of vehicles and then in the properties for each carspawner, have a set of checkboxes generated from the master list and you check the vehicles you want. I guess that is too logical for MS/Kuju. Wishful thinking. Well I guess I will go home tonight and populate the carspawner.dat file with a list of vehicles that would be good for most parts of my route.Cal Rasmussen
Beaverton, OR
cal.rasmussen@verizon.netColumbia Gorge Route (Phase 1 track completed, road construction resumed.)

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Well, I think I've got a handle on these carspawner thingies! My first attempt last night had I-84 in the Columbia Gorge looking like a parking lot at rush hour! Bumper to bumper! I figured out how to adjust the speed and spawning rate and got it to look more realistic.Now I have a couple of questions.
1) How do carspawners affect performance? (e.g. frames)
2) Can carspawners be overlapped. I think the answer is no but not sure.My route runs along the banks of the Columbia River with I-84 along the South bank and Washington SR14 popping in and out of sight on the North. I-84 is visible for almost the entire length of the route. It would be desirable to have four lanes of traffic for the entire length of the route. Since carspawners have a max length of 2 km, if I put them back to back along the entire route, if I don't kill the sim, I am going to have cars popping in and out of view all along the route. What is a good way to handle this?Cal Rasmussen
Beaverton, OR
cal.rasmussen@verizon.netColumbia Gorge Route (Phase 1 track completed, road construction resumed.)

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Check out the CAJON PASS ROUTE and see how they did it from San Bernardino going north on a 4 lane highway beside the main line. It looks real.I have added about 6 more 18 wheelers to it.

Fred... "Mr. Goodwrench" a ASE General Motors Master Technician for 45 years in Kingman Arizona...

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LAST EDITED ON Feb-12-03 AT 12:16 PM (EDT)

Cal:From a total car spawner "never been"... The way I've observed that done on other routes when in RE is by careful placement of buildings or tree groups where/when appropriate. Of course, if you're modeling the great prarie where there ain't no such... then??BTW, last pic of your route I saw was a very nice scene at Wishram... perhaps you'll get around to taking some screens and sharing them with us soon?Andre

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"1) How do carspawners affect performance? (e.g. frames)"I've got a parallel highway and have been placing spawners like mad. Have not seen any real performance issues on my ancient 650MHz machine with 780+ MB of ram. For me it's the trees that cause frame rate drops."2) Can carspawners be overlapped. I think the answer is no but not sure."I've done it and haven't seen any problems. The reason I tried it at first was to see if overlapping would "fool" the spawner into thinking it was one long continuous string and keep vehicles from disappearing. Of course that experiment didn't work but I've not had any problems with the overlapping.Dave Mikulec (dmikulec@bellsouth.net)
Ohio Southeastern System - a freelanced route
http://www.rdimages.com/OSE/

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Cal,What do you mean by overlapped car spawners?Bill Burnett

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Andre, on most of the route, the Interstate highway is out in the open...no way to hide the beginning and end of a car spawner range.Bill, by overlapping, I mean having one start slightly before the end of the previous one. I was thinking that this might slightly camouflage the appearance and disappearance of vehicles.Cal Rasmussen
Beaverton, OR
cal.rasmussen@verizon.netColumbia Gorge Route (Phase 1 track completed, road construction resumed.)

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Cal,You do have to find some way to hide the overlap, even if it is not prototypical. Anything like hill, building, tunnel, group of trees, or more distance from the tracks.Overlapping close to the tracks looks really weird as cars morph into trucks, etc.Bill Burnett

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I could put a stalled semi-truck every 2 km! LOL! The State Police might wonder about that!Cal Rasmussen
Beaverton, OR
cal.rasmussen@verizon.netColumbia Gorge Route (Phase 1 track completed, road construction resumed.)

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Hi Cal,The single car spawner is hard coded and we are stuck with it. Right at the top of my wish list for MSTS2 is multiple car spawners. Multiple car spawners would open up a whole world of possibilities:More trucks in industrial areas.
More cars in residential areas.
Fire engines and police vehicles rushing to an emergency.
Boats moving up and down rivers.
Airplanes flying overhead.
Etc
Bill Burnett

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How do I get the cars to stop short of grade crossings?The gates are placed just off of the tracks, and yet the cars are stopping directly under them. When a semi is first in line, the cab hangs clear out onto the track.The carspawn.dat is set as follows:for cars: CarSpawnerItem( shapefile 10)
for trucks: CarSpawnerItem (shapefile 20)The numeric values are higher than those used by MS (I believe a higher number increases spacing between vehicles), yet MS's cars stop well short of the track.I've also had cars pile up when stopped at crossings.What are the proper settings to get the cars to stay clear of the track and not pile up?

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