Normandy Steam Trains - Work needed.

[michelip]

There have been several posts about the deficiencies of this asset. My own efforts to make realistic missions with it have been frustrating in the following ways:

1. M.E. will sometimes refuse to allow waypoints along the rails in a particular direction. E.g. if you try to send a train East from the rail yards near Houlgate. You have to reverse the direction to satisfy M.E. There seems no logic to this fault.

2. Trains will not stop at a final waypoint even if you set a "Hold" command in the advanced waypoint editor. They just reverse back & forth along the line for ever.

3. Trains will not obey waypoint speed settings, so you can't slow a train as it approaches a stop. They seem to go full throttle all the time.

4. You cannot have a chase (F7) view of a train, so you can't follow it as it travels and see it from various angles, as with other vehicles.

5. When setting triggers, the items of rolling stock (wagons) added to the locomotive do not act as units even though they appear in the Triggers columns as units. For example, if you have a loco with 6 wagons and you want to have wagon 4 as an ammo wagon explode after 8 gun hits, you can't use "Unit hits" as a Condition, or "Explode unit" as an Action.

 

6. The graphics of the loco's exhaust steam movement are very jerky and well short of the FPS of other smoke effects such as chimneys, smoke markers and explosions.

 

 

The steam train is an important asset in the Normandy setting but it is spoiled by a failure to attend to a few details.

 

 

If anyone knows workarounds for the above faults, please post them.

 

 

Regards,

Mich.

Edited January 21, 2019 by michelip

[FlyGuyF119]

I agree, there are SOOOOO many good missions to be made with trains since they were instrumental during WWII.