Invisocar, the phantom AI sound car.

Coupled behind the lead engine of an AI train, this car will blow a horn (diesel) or sound a whistle (steam) when first approaching the player train, within 900 meters and again at 500 meters distance from the player's viewpoint. Works in cab, passenger view, or externally. Zero meters long and invisible, it leaves no gap between couplers, so can be used for any AI unit train as well as mixed consists.

To use, add to an AI train consist with Conbuilder (current version is cb_160f.zip at www.train-sim.com file library), behind the lead engine for diesel, between the engine and tender for steam (ignore warnings about incompatible coupler types, it's an AI train). Works with any engine without interfering with normal AI engine sounds.

I don't suggest using the activity editor consist editor because the texture is invisible, so the activity editor consist editor won't show it. In addition to that the wagon is zero meters long, so even if you add an actual texture it still don't show up, I tried it. It is just possible to add invisocar to a new consist, by adding the engine, then invisocar (dragging from the blank window!), then the rest of the train, but since it's impossible to tell where the car is you really can't edit it afterwords. If you have another program that displays cars as icons you could probably use that instead, but Conbuilder works for me.

I haven't tried adding this to a player train, bcause what would be the point, so I have no idea whether the coupling/uncoupling works or not. The coupler break strength is cranked to 4, and it only weighs 5 tons, so it shouldn't affect AI trains on rough trackwork. I've only tested it on PO&N6 and NEC4, no uncouplings or derailments.

There are two .sms files in the \Sound folder, one for diesel and one for steam, you can open these with wordpad and change the distances just by changing the "Distance_Dec_Past 500 PlayOneShot" number from 500 to something else. As far as I can tell these don't work beyond 950 meters, so changing to 1500 or something is not recommended.

You can also change the horn or whistle sound, either by changing the name of the .wav file in the .sms file to the new .wav file, or rename/copy AIsteamwhistle.wav and/or AIdieselhorn.wav to a backup, then rename the new .wav file to match what the .sms file is calling for.

If you make and upload an activity that uses this car in your AI trains, don't forget to include invisocar in the zip. The whole thing zips to less than 350k, so including it with your activity instead of instructing the activity player to download it shouldn't be a problem.  


Model and invisible texture by Harold "RailBug" West

Sound effects programming by Stuart "Scefhwil" Williamson

Project coordinator and general instigator, Jim "Sniper297" Ward 

EULA

This wagon and sounds are freeware, the end user (that's you) hereby has permission to use, abuse, fold spindle and mutilate, upload to other websites and distribute at will in any freeware add on.
This software is not to be used in any commercial or shareware venture without express written permission from the authors on penalty of getting your legs broken.

Jim Ward
Chicago, USA
email, jwarde@ameritech.net