BVETube Updates and Announcements

Good idea; in fact I think we should do that.

Personally, I despise the thing because it literally wasted trains that could have gone on for at least a few more years. The D Stock was known as the most reliable London Underground Stock in the history of the network, and it only lasted 37 years on the network. It is for this reason that they have been partially converted into the Class 230, which, if the South Western Railway's plans go ahead with their relaying of their track at the Ryde Tunnel, will replace the 80 year old Class 483, formally 1938 Stock. The C Stock was only 44/37 years old when it was replaced, and it still could have run for quite a number of years after that point. My personal favourite train the A60/62 Stock lasted over 50 years on the Metropolitan Line, being the longest serving train in the history of the London Underground Network in normal passenger service. That being said, with the cannibalisation, it might have been possible to preserve it as a shuttle service on the Chesham Shuttle in retirement until they completely coiled over. If it wasn't for the fact that they replaced the trains I grew up on, I might be more inclined to support and get behind my team building a train of that stock for openBVE. The A60 Stock will be made again in conjunction with the latest 2009 era, and in order for an S Stock to be built, we will need to completely remake the Metropolitan Line as a new era, which would probably have been 2018. This would increase the time before the total completion of the Metropolitan Line, and longer for our East London Line project in conjunction with one of our members begins. We will probably encourage other developers to build it, and I do not wish to further split my group between projects, as I believe having all of our workers on one or two projects at a time will be much more efficient.

Good plan.

That being said, currently the team is split half-and-half between working on the Class 483, the current train project, and the Metropolitan Line. I would prefer that the team focus on the Met, but I understand why some focus is on the Class 483, as it is an interesting train in the history of locomotion; being in service for eighty years.

Dex Montague

Yeah A stock and D stock progress is slow. In order to assist with the development of the Metropolitan Line I have enlisted the help of two more experienced BVE developers. Delsin has taken over the development of the the A stock and MyNameIsJeff has taken over the D stock development. Unfortunately, due to both of them being very busy progress is slow and I have not heard from either of them for a long time so we will most likely be pressing on with both the A stock and the class 483 depending on the time frames we get to work on the projects

Precisely that. It would have been preferable if Jeff had not, um, left. He left after he realised that one of our members was doing nothing.
In saying that, in my opinion it's fair enough that he did leave.

I may one day extent my Isle of Wight route into Ryde, so the 483 can go a little further... eventually...

That would fit perfectly with our train. Has it changed much in recent years, or does it tend to look basically the same over time?

Apart from a bit of new paint, it hasn't changed in 20 years...

Nice to know. Stations near where I live, like Pinner or Harrow-on-the-Hill, are changing rapidly as time goes by. Pinner Station used to have a subway just a few years ago, but that has now been replaced by a staircase with lift access, which has been described as 'unusually designed' by some. Research I have done purports the reason for the stairs replacing the subway is that it was cheaper to make a brand new walkway than maintain the pre-existing one and add a lift.

Work is currently continuing on the static object of the A60 for the Met Line Route, and the latest pictures of that project are available on the link to the BVETube Facebook page linked just below my profile picture here!

The latest update to the A60 Stock object has been uploaded to www.facebook.com/bvetube

Tell us what you think!

Dexter Montague-Barksdale

Looks fabulous, congrats!

It means the world when my inspiration for openBVE praises our team's work! Can't thank you enough!

Just did a quick conversion of a Class 230 from SketchUp as a test and I will admit it does not look all that good. I'm sure there are ways to improve this.


Converted the 1983 again after the first attempt was lost (although I did not do the original conversion) Note that I do have explicit permission to modify and if we wanted to, release this for BVE

The lag is quite frankly unbelievable.

Just did a quick test conversion of an interior-less 2009 with pretty good exterior. It runs smoothly with the one car, and it looks quite frankly amazing!

SP1900 didn't like me doing this one; but I had to for the sake of testing.

This is perhaps not where we should tread.

If I am honest with you guys, I am lost for words on how good you guys are at doing such things and I hope to be on the receiving end of these excellently made and/or converted trains!

The levels of lag on most of those conversions are quite frankly intolerable, and are pretty much unusable as is. Quite a few of those won't see the light of day for the time being.

You'll probably need several hours of clean-up duty with those models to get them to good performance.

Admin's note: Please refrain from posting small updates every few minutes. We're on a forum here, not a news ticker. You don't necessarily have to reduce your updates to only really major news, but please use the "Edit post" function.

Ah, should have realized; sorry about that. I'll compact the posts now.

(Edit: could the old non-compacted posts that are now part of the one post now be deleted? Thanks)

Admin's note: Done. Thank you.

Of course lag will be and is a huge problem for any developer and unless your doing a low quality model (e.g. exterior only), you will suffer from mass lag unfortunately.

Even models that perhaps do not have a lot of detail can lag. Take the 230 for example; It does not have an interior but it still lags quite profusely.

The 1992 stock, 482 and 1996 stock trains are all hand coded from scratch, top to bottom nothing but openbve basic csv code.

I don't know if your trains have been created by a modelling program but I would suggest hand coding your trains.

Ad1992 wrote:The 1992 stock, 482 and 1996 stock trains are all hand coded from scratch, top to bottom nothing but openbve basic csv code.

I don't know if your trains have been created by a modelling program but I would suggest hand coding your trains.

I totally agree with you on that. The A stock model I built last year was partially scratch coded but the main bodyshell was done in sketchup. It has been a while since then and I have improved my coding skills. If all goes to nothing and Jeff and Delsin aren’t able to get back to me by the new year I will take to scratch coding both the A stock and D stock trains.

For the future, the middle car for the 483 will also with modifications necessary be able to act as the middle for the 38, 56, 59 and 62 stocks that will be made at some point, not sure when.

Due to a developer currently being very busy with projects, we will be starting work on the D78 Stock completely from scratch, after work on the Class 483, and the 1938 Stock.

https://www.facebook.com/BVETube/posts/518840678526695
This is not an update, but is a public announcement that I think I need to make. Please help him if you can.