Lots of suggestions here

ESCAPE VALVE TRACKS

I knew there was one I forgot.  Obviously like every other region in Run8 there is tons of work to do.  In order to give time I suggest that all industries set a time turnaround of max value which is close to 7 days (6.5 to encourage a weekly pattern allowing time to turn around for next week).  This will encourage all jobs to get run but not guarantee that they all will get run in a week.

To assist jobs from getting done or at least seem like they are getting done, escape valve tracks can be set up as industries.  What this is basically is an industry that is set up inside an intermediate or drop off yard point siding.  Whatever is used by the regionals or locals to start local switching.  Again here another timer as close to 7 days as possible (you can use 6.5 if your trying to encourage a weekly pattern).

So lets say you have a drop off track for a local switching area say the short line I don't know whatever it may be.  He potentially can run as AI to a region if there are no takers from Selkirk or Syracuse depending on where he is built.  The train shows up and ties down on the track.  As soon as he ties down the timer begins.  If someone is available to switch it then the industries are switched.  If however he can not switch it then they turn over and the track itself becomes the industry.  This allows a return to Selkirk or Syracuse.  Ideally this works well with more than 1 track or a long enough siding to fit 2 strings.  It allows the flow of regional and mainlines to continue and take the pressure off the manpower required to switch all industries thus why I name these escape valves.

I have a demonstration of what these do on my YouTube channel in the Sanford Sub videos as these have always been ideal yards for me to use escape valves on.

thanks
Sean

Dummy tracks etc will be coming to FTRS , Keep up the good work Just scraping up funds and parts to retrofit hardware, in the meantime lets keep thinking up those brilliant ideas..
Smiley

I too have my Safety-Valves in SMRY. You folks call them Dummy. Where the trks are setup to generate a report by setting up using passenger car.
Also trks setup to except several industries at once saving spotting industry when manpower is low.
Be warned though if lots of them esp. in the Selkirk areas when you turn on the industry tags it will slow your pc (mine with 8-cores) to a crawl & look very jumbled.
Here's shot see the FPS & having no rollingstock nor activity within, using ExtraBoard. 

Unfortunately I haven't purchase waycross yet, but a good idea will be when I get it that you share your saved world and config file then me, Scott and Smiley can run it in single player and see if we get the same issues call it a "RTS beta run"  with all the same R8 world and config. We all can also pick the same string to hump via your live stream.....

Gidday Sean , As per Martins suggestion if you are willing to email me your saved word and Ind config I will try it in single player on my Waycross and see it we get the same issue.
Be aware tho my machine not exactly the slowest if you guys are interested LOL let me know and I'll tell !!!

Here's my two cents' worth: on Sean Latest Stream (Keep in mind English not my first lang)

Sean your remark of the R8 game engine hit the nail on his head , the programming language is to old and as far as I can remember not supported any more. Coming from the flight sim environment where I and other few developers had extensively build scenery for South Africa "Aeroworx" I ran in the same issues with FSX as we doing now with R8 (Same language) the animations the scenery the AI all gets better and better by every update up until a stage were the language that was developed for 4gb ram and X amount of graphic ram just can't handle it anymore no matter what you do believe me I spend thousands $ on upgrading nothing helped.....except for FSX a SSD drive worked because it was so massive programme it uploaded the game faster to the ram and faster MHZ ram the rest was a wasted money. I left FSX behind in 2013 because there was no update to the FSX Engine in the foreseen future and MS sold the rights....

With R8 I think the Programming Language limitations with Major routes has being reached may be a small branch line here and there and a Expand on selkirk can be handled,  but already now if you jump from one side of a route to a other side of a route and there is traffic and cars on that route it takes a few sec to load because of the limitations . So what do I think and this is my own opinion,  that they are busy reprogramming the whole Sim "V3" on a new (call it) Engine "software lang" and that's why it is taking so long,  maybe UE although its free there is fees to be paid when publishing games where UE4 is used.   I think we are going to be surprised with V3, if not then I will be the first to admit my mistake   

Few things I picked up with R8

My honest opinion is that all the small little nagging things is because of the capability of the programming language and pressing it to its limits, to do what is wasn't intend to do and small little things that causes errors and "hits"

The so called "dummies" is still industry and programming them will have no influence its a line reading data little processing power needed you can check on the whole SOCAL I think it's got close by 500 Ind lines comparison with selkirk and Waycross in saying that here is where things go wrong with the "Game Engine" processing the data:

If you programme 2 Ind with different names and that Line connect with another line example at a switch but you didn't noticed it while configuring it the sim will read one line for 2 Ind and now its confused with the data output the same apply for programming Ind over each other - (Once I did use the same piece of track configuring all my outgoing trains " CHI,KCK and BEL worked for a while the you will get that that surprise of R8 closing down "unexpectedly" and every 2 day server down game closed) ,but you can connect many lines together but keep them as one Ind name and one local..

R8 (Lang) don't like the use of "~ (), "in the config file or Locos its part of the programming (data) "," only to be used where asked for tag separation

All the rolling stock (new Cars) that has being built over the years must be processed adding more strain

AI or any active Loco and loco lights pull resources - this is active data that must be processed , I tied on SOCAL to to run 3/4 max AI and with all the Ind spawned (12000 cars) went nowhere with a so called gaming PC.

Server things

Im hiring a commercial server with 2 x the min requirements of R8

There is now way in hell I can load more than 8000 cars at Industries and run no more than 40 AI on SOCAL, because of the data strain put on the whole network you will then see cars disappearing and reappearing, hump cars run into each over not fast enough registering the coupler possion. The bottom line is AI and if you have a enormous amount of cars loaded on the server this is whole lot of processing especially on big routes. How to overcome the situation is mostly to make the config file available to other users of your server thereby reducing the the amount of data requested by the client, especially on the big routes.

Server graphics settings can be set to all min requirements things like shadows , buildings ect ect the only thing the client PC is requesting is the train data the rest is on his PC. 

I did many more test like you and can mention other things as well, but  as you said the bottom line is the Game Eng was fine  for V1 but is now maxed out, with all the add ons (Shadows, rain, AI, More Cars and Locos and routes) 

In Offline play all the above mustn't have any influence with your R8 there is nothing to be sent anywhere with everything set to max (so waycross is a puzzle) qwote from Waycross Dev "When we were finishing up our Waycross expansion we did a test with 3000 cars in the bowl and I think I was getting about 16 fps but that was with a GTX970"

My personal Wish list is small

I would like if R8 do some cross border routes into Canada (change of Ops you can do just so much CSX and BNSF/UP) 

I think the R8 need something like this biarrirail.com/boss-service-planning/

Then I totally agree with you on revamping the AI  on all the aspect you touched on over the years.

You mentioned something about External Disp the source prog file can be found here : gitlab.com/Hawk777/iecc8

Lastly my connection to F&T is working like a bomb no issues.


Regards

southafricamts@gmail.com

Hi guys:

Sorry it's been a while. I know about a week ago I ran into some minor health issues, and didn't really get back into the swing of things.

I see the server is down for some upgrades.

Run8servers.com btw as Scott mentioned to me recently appears to be gone now. So there is no external advertising for this server any place that I'm aware of.

I've been looking at getting back to my own projects, or possibly taking another break from Run8.

I'll try and keep in touch.

Thanks

Sean