It wasn’t planned that way, but there were developments that caused us to release yet another non-editor version of CTC.
What happened is the speed issue. As some of our customers have noticed, the trains are somehow sluggish as far as acceleration is concerned.
The handling of that is based what we called the brake factor and acceleration factor. These are rather abstract numbers. We’re still using them, but it is now derived on parameter that can be better explained, and will be used for the editor. The territory files will have now these data instead of the factors.
One of our customers suggested that we implement the stop-and-proceed option, i.e. after a stop at a red signal a train may proceed with caution without the need to get an order from the dispatcher. Of course, if you take advantage of this feature, you have many more incidents of having more than one train in one block, and this revealed a few problems within CTC. There were unintended collisions – with problems on their own when trying to cleanup.
In short, a lot of debugging was going on. And we wanted to fix as many problems as we came across them.
So, besides the speed issue, a lot of other corrections went in.
As for the new feature, we decided to make it available only for the full version of the territories. Here you will have an option the stop-and-proceed feature for invisible signals only, or for all automatic signals – which includes the invisible signals and the visible ones where you set the automatic signal option on. If, however, such a signal would be able to clear a route running over switches, crossings etc., the stop-and-proceed function will not be applicable (this information is stored in the territory files). In a way, stop-end-process works very similar like pass-on-red, however, you don’t have to watch out for conflicting movements (except trains moving in from the other end into the destination block).
We have now updated all our territories and we expect to have everything released and uploaded in a couple of days.
Your WebRailRoader Team.