SP Rotary Snow Plows

By 3D Train Stuff

Customizing Your Rotaries

 

The default drivable rotary snowplows are steam units designed to be used with a cab-forward tender, and to be pushed by a cab-forward steam engine. If you want to use the drivable versions of our electric rotaries, here’s what you have to do. We suggest you read through this whole page before starting. You’ll find it’s a bit of work and you may decide you’d rather be driving trains! Otherwise, if you want to jump in we suggest you print this page to make it easier to follow along.

 

Briefly, you have to...

1.                Decide what you want to use as the “driving” locomotive and create a consist file.

2.                Alias a sound (.sms) file.

3.                Clone a cab (.cvf) file.

4.                Adjust the forward viewpoint in the cloned cab file.

 

 

Create a Consist File  Modern electric rotaries are of course pushed by diesel locomotives. SP typically uses 4- and 6-axle road engines, but anything goes and it’s really up to you. Whether you use the consist editor in the MSTS Activity Editor, or a freeware utility like ConBuilder, the first “engine” should be a rotary snowplow. Look under “Steam Engines” for them.

 

We’ve provided several rotary snowplow variations for you. The units intended to be driven by diesel locomotives were numbered by SP in the format 2xx. Numbers 205 and 208 have no “wings” in the front of the plow, whereas numbers 207 and 211 do. The wingless ones are housed at Sparks, NV and the winged ones live at Roseville, CA. The rotaries numbered 72xx are steam units and should be used with a cab-forward. There are left-throwing and right-throwing rotaries, designated with the letter L or R in the name. All of the drivable ones have snow textures, designated with the letter W. You’ll have to decide which rotary and version you want to use, depending on what part of the route you want to run it on.

 

The next item should be the B unit that corresponds to the rotary. The B unit numbers are the same as the rotaries except they have an “8” prefix. For example, rotary 208 should be paired with B unit 8208. Like the rotaries, the B units have left and right versions of the snow textures.

 

The next item in your consist should be the diesel locomotive(s) that you’ve selected to “drive” the rotary. SP uses as many as four road engines for this purpose, and they often place another rear-facing rotary (with B unit) at the end of the train. If you want a trailing rotary, add the B unit first and add the rotary last. Use the “freight car” (non-drivable) versions of the B unit and the rotary, and “flip” them, that is make them face the rear. The non-drivable versions have the letter O in their file name.

 

 

Alias a Sound File  You don’t want your diesel engine to sound like a cab-forward steam engine, do you?!? We’re going to make the rotary think it’s a different engine by aliasing that other engine’s sound file.

 

First, open the .eng file of the rotary snowplow you chose. Use WordPad (in Windows XP, it’s at Start | Programs | Accessories | WordPad) or other Unicode-compliant word processor. The path to the .eng file is typically ...Program Files\Train Simulator\TRAINS\TRAINSET\3DTS_SP_MOW. For example, if you chose the left-throwing rotary 207, open the file 3DTS_RSP-207WL.eng.

 

We’ll assume you’ll be using WordPad. Search for the string sms using the “Edit | Find” menu command, or hit Ctrl+F. Hit the Enter key two more times and it should land on this line near the end of the file...

 

     Sound ( "3DTS_RSPcab.sms" )

 

Change it to this format...

 

     Sound ( "..\\..\\xxxxxx\\SOUND\\yyyyyy.sms" )

 

In the above line, xxxxxx is the folder name for the engine you want to use. For example, if you wanted to use 3D Train Stuff’s SD70M engine, the folder name is 3DTS_SD70M.

 

The yyyyyy stands for the name of the locomotive’s cab-view sound management file. In the locomotive’s folder you should see a sub-folder called SOUND. In that folder there should be several files with the extension .sms, and one of them should have the string “cab” in it. That’s the one you want.

 

For our example, the revised line in the .eng file should read,

 

     Sound ( "..\\..\\3DTS_SD70M\\SOUND\\3DTS_SD70MCab.sms" )

 

That’s it!

 

One thing we should mention, though. If you want to hear the rotary’s whistle in the cab view instead of the driving engine’s horn, you’ll have to make a cloned sound file. That’s what we did. The concept is similar to cloning a cab view file, which is discussed in the next section. Take a look at the example 3DTS_RSPcab.sms that we supplied in the 3DTS_SP_MOW\SOUND folder to see what the final result should look like.

 

 

Clone a Cab File  This part is a little more difficult. MSTS doesn’t let you directly alias cab view files. Instead you have put aliases inside a clone of them.

 

Once again, open the .eng file of the rotary snowplow you chose and search for the string cvf. The search will turn up this line...

 

     CabView ( 3DTS_RSP-2xxW.cvf )

 

Change this to something else, for example...

 

     CabView ( 3DTS_RSP-207W.cvf )

 

Now find the cab view file for the driving engine in the engine’s CABVIEW sub-folder. It will of course have the extension .cvf. Some engines may have more than one .cvf file, so you’re on your own there. Anyway, copy it to the folder ...3DTS_SP_MOW\CABVIEW. Rename it to match the new name you chose above in the previous paragraph.

 

Open the newly renamed file in WordPad. Find the first instance of something that looks like xxxxxx.ace, where xxxxxx can be just about anything. The .ace extension is the important thing. You’ll have to type in an alias prefix string and cut and paste it in front of all the other .ace file names. The format is as follows: "..\\..\\yyyyyy\\CABVIEW\\xxxxxx.ace including the initial quote mark. (We’ll add a final quote mark, too, but hold off on that one for a while.) In this case, yyyyyy is the TRAINSET folder name of your driving engine, and xxxxxx is the .ace file name in the newly cloned .cvf file. Again, make this edit only for the first instance you find of an .ace file.

 

Once you’ve typed the alias string, select this part of it: "..\\..\\yyyyyy\\CABVIEW\\ (including the first quotation mark) and hit Ctrl+C (or use the Copy menu command). That saves the selected string in the Windows Clipboard. Now go through the entire .cvf file and everywhere you see xxxxxx.ace, paste the Clipboard contents in front of it. Now each of the entries should look like this: "..\\..\\yyyyyy\\CABVIEW\\xxxxxx.ace where the xxxxxx in each case is the original, unchanged .ace file name.

 

The last step is to do a global search and replace to insert the closing quote mark at the end of each .ace file alias. Start by hitting Ctrl+H, or use the Replace command in the Edit menu. Type .ace in the  Find What: box. Then type .ace" in the Replace with: box. Hit the Replace All button. Now all of the file name references should look like this: "..\\..\\yyyyyy\\CABVIEW\\xxxxxx.ace"

 

Open up the example 3DTS_RSP-2xxW.cvf that we supplied in the 3DTS_SP_MOW\CABVIEW folder to see what the final result should look like.

 

 

Adjust the Forward Viewpoint

 

Locomotive cab views are positioned by the cab view’s author so your viewpoint is at the correct XYZ coordinates inside the locomotive. This is done in the last line of the following excerpt from the locomotive’s .cvf file...

 

Tr_CabViewFile (

     CabViewType ( 3 )

     CabViewFile ( 3DTS_CabForward_Front.ace )

     CabViewWindow ( 0 0 640 400 )

     CabViewWindowFile ( "" )

     Position ( 1.265 3.44 6.24 )

 

The last number 6.24 is the key. This sets your point of view 6.24 meters ahead of the engine’s center point. Normally when you’re driving a locomotive, a cab-forward in this example, you should be sitting somewhere up ahead of the engine’s center point when you look out the front window.

 

Trouble is, you’re actually driving the rotary snowplow, but the engine that is supposedly “driving” the train, and where the cab view will be, is several meters behind the rotary. In the default cab view that ships with this add-on, you are in a cab-forward engine about 20 meters behind the rotary. From that vantage point you should see the rear end of the rotary’s tender just outside the front window. To get the right effect, you have to reset the last parameter in the Position( ) line of the .cvf file. The resulting modification looks like this:

 

Tr_CabViewFile (

     CabViewType ( 3 )

     CabViewFile ( "..\\..\\3DTS_CABFORWARD\\CABVIEW\\3DTS_CabForward_Front_N.ace" )

     CabViewWindow ( 0 0 640 400 )

     CabViewWindowFile ( "" )

     Position ( 1.265 3.44 -20.4 )

 

So where did we get the number -20.4? The minus sign is easy. The cab forward, where the cab view should be seen from, is behind the rotary (remember, you’re actually driving the rotary). Minus = behind center, plus = ahead of center.

 

Here’s the hard part and a confession: We came up with the 20.4 by trial and error. First we estimated the distance between the center of the rotary and the engineer’s seat in the cab-forward to get us into the ballpark. Then we iteratively adjusted the number until the cab view looked the way we wanted it to. That means edit the number, save the .cvf file, start MSTS and look at the result, quit MSTS, and repeat it looks right. If you are using the SD70M by 3D Train Stuff, as in the sound file example, the number 23.0 works about right when you’re pushing a modern electric rotary with B unit.

 

You can also change the left and right cab views in the same way, if you want. Use the same number for all three views. Don’t change the passenger view. That’s the view from inside the rotary’s cab that you get with the 5 key. It’s in the .eng file anyway.

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That’s it. If you have problems, look for quality-control things like missing quotation marks, extra quotation marks, mismatched file names and stuff like that.  Good luck!

  

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