Moving roads

This Chapter deals with Moving roads only. Roads without cars have different rules and are described in another chapter.

These moving roads can be easily used almost like static roads of fixed height as there is no extended operation of cars like that of trains over the end points. The difficulty is two fold: These macros affect scenery buffer and frame rate more than the rails and they are rather long, typically a multiple of 800m. Buffer considerations make the use of very long pieces mandatory for FS98 and reduces the number of possible macros to very few for FS95. This may make it difficult to place them, other than on very long bridges, into scenery with dense railways. My recommendation therefore is that you lay the roads first (planning where the bridges are expected to cross over rails), the moving railways second, the static railways third, and other 3D-objects last.

The cars that move are defined in a car list. The cars run at 60 km/h. The traffic is repeated every 8 slots.

As usual the strategy for bridges has to be different for FS95/98 and FS2000.

The following moving roads are available:

M8Ro0600 Length 800m
M8Ro0800 Length 800m
M8Ro1000 Length 16000m
M8Ro1100 Length 1100m
M8Ro1200 Length 1200m
M8Ro1600 Length 1600m
M8Ro2400 Length 2400m
M8Ro3200 Length 3200m
M8Ro4000 Length 4000m
M8Ro4800 Length 4800m
M8RC10 Curved 10 degrees, 3 x 800m
M8RC20 Curved 20 degrees, 3 x 800m
M8RC40 Curved 40 degrees, 5 x 800m
M8RB0800 Small road bridge 800m for FS95/98/2000 to cross a small river, road, or rail.
M8RX0800 Two moving roads crossing asymmetrical. Secured by signal lights.
  FS2000 only:
M8RBi800 800m bridge for FS2000 only.
M8Rc0458 456m ramp climbing 4m.
M8Rc0800 800m ramp climbing 7m.
M8RR0458 458m ramp climbing 8m.
M8RR0800 800m ramp climbing 14m.
M8RR1600 1600m ramp climbing 28m.
M8RRx800 800m ramp climbing 28m.

Shorter road macros also exist that keep the traffic for only two instead of eight time slots. You always have to use these in a row of 4 before you can continue with an M8... macro. FSRail automatically attaches a suffix letter to the M2R - macro name to ensure proper timing and chains them up in order a-b-c-d.

M2ro100 100m road with speed 30 km per hour
M2ro150 150m road with speed 45 km per hour
M2ro200 200m road with speed 60 km per hour
M2ro250 250m road with speed 75 km per hour
M2ro20c 200m road with speed 60 km per hour, climbing 2m towards northern end
M2ro20d 200m road with speed 60 km per hour, descending 2m towards northern end
M2rb100 100m road bridge
M2rb200 200m road bridge

All moving roads are called with the same parameters:

Parameter Value Meaning
%1   Geographical width
%2   Geographical Length
%3 0 Road is placed on the surface of the FS terrain.
  Unequal 0 Absolute altitude of the road above sea level in m
%4 0.250 Scale. Should always be 0.250.
%5 Orientation Orientation of the road on the terrain (0 = south-north direction)
%6 0-10 Two digit number.

First digit >= 1 switches on lamps and night illumination

Second digit switches on a line of bushes or trees with height of second digits.

%7   Car list 1 - 9
%8  
  • Car list of the second road on a cross
  • Bridge rail for bridges
%9 0-105 Embankment color

0: No embankment

1-FF: FS color

100-104: Texture

105: Seasonal texture

%10   Range in m

Road is visible if within range. Typical value is 7000.

The last digit is used to encode the road texture.

 

 

Hints:

You can modify the sequence of cars by editing the files ..\includes\rolistn.inc. The current implementation of cars is optimized for size, not for frame rate, to allow their use in FS98. This may change in a future version when usage in FS98 is no longer needed and multi-megabytes of free memory are available in system and video RAMs.