Creating underground railway (U-bahn) in LOTUS?

Bzmot332 · 1. Januar 2020

Hi all/devs!

I'm thinking about starting an underground railway map but I have a few concerns about it. I know that tunnels are not supported yet (levels below zero), but I'm curious if there's any suggested way to start building a metro car as well as the rails and splines (third rail eg.).

That's more likely a question to the game developers: will there be a new kind of pantograph in the content tool (pantograph shoes on each side of the train...etc) as well as the third rail as a "catenary" spline? Should I just leave the pantographs for later and complete the scripts later when these features are implemented, or should I make, I don't know, 4 pantographs on the vehicle at the level of the "pantograph shoes" and make "catenary" splines at that level?

Marcel Kuhnt · 1. Januar 2020

Hello!

There is no problem if you start developing vehicles for the underground!

- Pantographs: You will not use the current pantograph feature for third rail pantographs since they don't move (very much) relative to the vehicle. So I think, the only special feature will be an option to set the position of the pantographs for checking, if they touch the third rail.

- Third rails: Please design only a blender model of it. But I cannot say in which way we will implement them.

- Scripts: There are no limitations programming a script, just the "voltage check" cannot be done yet, so just set a single variable always to "1" (= full current) (like panto_voltage_{a}) for use in your scripts.

Bzmot332 · 1. Januar 2020

Thank you very much for the fast respond!

Only for curiosity, will there be any variable about the catenary voltage in the future? What I mean is something that we could set the voltage on different tracks in the map editor (maybe added to the catenary spline itself, so the trams, U-bahn, railways...etc wouldn't have the same voltage) and with this variable in the vehicle we could use this data later on (with power calculations, ligth flickering...etc).

Marcel Kuhnt · 3. Januar 2020

We definitely will include a voltage variable. But I it will be not an absolute voltage (e.g. 750 V) but a relative voltage (1.0 = normal voltage). Otherwise, vehicles of subway system A could not run on subway system B, if the both system have different voltages, and this would be very sad.