Class 175 for the Welsh route

I'm putting a Class 175 'Coradia' in Arriva Trains Wales livery for the Cwm Twypsin route. It will be a 2-car set. Progress so far is all on the bodywork - nothing done yet "under the floor".
This exterior will be matched to the excellent 175 cab created by Steve T (available from BVE4Trains).

Doors, bogies and more front detailing added

Very nice gray! Coming on well!

Thanks, Ben - I had to use bits dragged off the four corners of the internet, and a great many made-up parts too. It will be OK in the end.
Got to early rail testing stage.

It is shaping up nicely, gray. What do you plan for animations?

The doors are animated, so are the lights in the centre of each car which light up when the doors open.
I've put seating inside but resisted any further interior detail. 

I only had these three pics as the main source for this train - just shows how a little can go a long way. I'm not claiming super-accuracy for the model, but I think it's a good representation of the type and it looks alright in the route.
Here's the pics I used:
Picture 1:


Picture2:


Picture3:

Does anyone want a test drive? I will send links to the WIP to the first six who reply. Testing must be on the Cwm T route firstly, though results on other routes are welcome too.

I can give it a go, I have a bit of time today evening and tomorrow.    

I'd love to, too!

Stick a pic in here and I'll take a look.

Here you go then.   I don't know what the lighter / darker frame is made by...

Probably transparency errors. I'll check them out early in the week. I've had enough for today, with over 30 hours spent on trainsim stuff in the last 3 days.  

Man, that's more than 3 working shifts... get that man some rest... 

I'd like to try

EB average deceleration - ca. 0.92m/s² - pretty reasonable
Full service brake average deceleration - ca. 0.71m/s² - pretty reasonable
Acceleration seems very nice as well. Didn't check against actual values, I'm sure you looked the values up yourself ;-) No need for checking that.

The brake release times on the other hand seem totally unrealistic to me - however they're like this in all british models, so they might as well be realistic, one'd need to ask a british train driver...

Viewpoint: Far off. As I mentioned in the other thread earlier today, I was planning on doing a sperate post on the topic, but since it already was mentioned on board and also since you're still working on this one, let's take the topic now already. Basically things are easily said: The vanishing point (which is easily found in railway simulation - that's the point all rails of your track and parallel tracks are seemingly pointing to) must be somewhere on the vertical central axis of the screen - no matter how off-centre one is seated!. It seems to be a common misconception among train addon devs, that you are always slightly turned toward the middle of the track, if you're seated off centre. Here it is - you are seated left of the middle of the track and the viewport is turned to the right. But that's wrong - you're looking forward. You usually aren't interested in things near you - you're interested in the far. And that is - dead ahead.

On this actual vehicle you seem to be seated pretty exactly over the left rail - so the viewport should be selected so that you see the left rail as a vertical, central bar on the screen.

The engine sounds are very quiet - is this intended? I don't know the real vehicle so I don't know how quiet they are in the cab.

A few points about the Class 175 cabview/train.

I modified from the Kenji Kimura MSTS cabview of a Class 180.

It's one of my earliest trains that was made for bve4 and still is basically a bve4 train in that the textures are .bmp and the size of the cabview is 1024x1024.

The edges on some of the textures can be easily removed, there's a feature you had to do for bve4 that you don't for open bve and the whole cabview and config of can be altered in minutes to .png

The sounds for the engine are deliberately low as they are if you are sitting in the cab driving it as it's a cabview only train at present!

Although if I had got around to finishing the 175 external I started some while ago, the sounds would now be rather louder to allow for the external view (as you can only have one set of sounds for both) and the cab would be 2048x2048 and a lot more Hi Res.

Also the brakes on 'modern' UK MU's do release/apply that fast, a lot of research go's in to a Bve4Trains production and all are beta tested by a trusted group of people that actually includes the odd driver.

I wish you good luck in making it rather better.

I am in the middle of three other WIP at the moment so a bit busy to sort it myself.

It would be the 2048 new version if I did anyway, which would most likely be a smaller file size as it would be in .png format.

But hell what do I know 

At this point let me remind everyone that this train is still a prototype, not yet being released.
The reason for its existence was my requirement for a train with good viewing capabilities for my Welsh route. I personally don't like  watching my stuff through a "toilet window" that exists on the dmus with corridor fronts. So there's the Sprinter thingy with a decent view, which I used when I built the route. The line through Abergavenny carries a lot of Class 175 traffic so it is an obvious choice. So that's why I wanted one.

Having  decided that, I found the BVE4 175 train (no externals) which Steve made back in 2009. I liked it, even though it's old now it is still a very serviceable item. Making an external kit seemed the way to go.
So, what you see is just my work on the externals. I did convert the cab textures to .pngs and any errors showing at present I will gladly accept liability. I don't doubt that Steve will eventually produce a better version at some point in the future. That would be a benefit for everyone.
And I don't want anyone to forget that UK enthusiasts owe a huge "thanks " to Steve for the incredible variety of well-detailed stock on his BVE4Trains website.

@Quork - Of all the Celtictrainsim train items, only the exteriors and the 2D cabs are produced by me. The "running gear" is always adapted from basically two UK standard items (loco & DMU) the source of which is in the "readme" with all original files. I don't know ****-all about changing brakes/acceleration or messing with sound files - I'm ¾deaf anyway!! Now, I obviously haven't driven a real 175, all the same, comparing it to a Video I have of a 175 from Newport to Crewe I thought Steve had done a brilliant job on that BVE4 model, even allowing he did it quite a long time ago.

Finally, and I've said this before - nobody listens. I'm NOT a train builder. My thing is routes and that sort of stuff. The only reason I began p***ing about with trains was because there were no Irish trains before I arrived on the scene. If I had not made them, no other bugger was going to do it for me. And while I was building Ballyfeckin it just looked bloody stupid seeing a Pendolino racing through the Irish countryside. Understand that one british dmu type does not signify an intent to get involved in the wider UK train scene. I prefer to let others do it. That said, it's a pity there aren't more people being involved in producing stuff for the sim - particularly routes - it seems to me that just a few hard working developers are carrying a lot of workload to try and keep it alive.

Stevegr wrote:The sounds for the engine are deliberately low as they are if you are sitting in the cab driving it as it's a cabview only train at present!

Ah, okay! Thank you. Seems like a nice vehicle to work on in real life... I'm not very fond of DMUs because they're usually rather on the too loud end.

Also the brakes on 'modern' UK MU's do release/apply that fast, a lot of research go's in to a Bve4Trains production and all are beta tested by a trusted group of people that actually includes the odd driver.

That's interesting. How compatible are they to normal railway brakes, e.g. if one needs to be dragged down from the route? Here on the continent the air brakes usually (not always) are of conventional type (mostly Knorr KE-valve) with thus release times like in normal carriage-based trains with ep-braking (electropneumatic brake steering - a purely assisting system; during brake pipe pressure change magnetic valves in the carriages are activated, which assist in emptying or filling the brake pipe; this does not affect the brake cylinder filling (3s-5s for R (rapid)/P (passenger) settings) and emptying (5s-10s (R/P)) time, it only makes all carriages brake sooner instead of waiting for the pressure drop to arrive back there (some 200/s only!)). The dynamic brakes (electric on EMU, motor/gear/hydrodynamic on DMU) on the other hand of course act faster.

I wish you good luck in making it rather better.

I'm not sure how you mean this and to whom you adress this; text communication lacks body communication... So to be on the safe side - please let me point out, that I am not trying to bash anyone or anything here! I surely never intended to claim I was better at anything. Testing and comments were requested and that's what I delivered - in a, I think, constructive manner. If it sounded elseway - sorry for that!

@Graymac - I'm well aware of that - though I think you're too modest. Your 2D cabs are really fun to drive, I like them! However I of course understand routes are the thing you love more.

I wish you good luck in making it rather better.

Me, I'm satisfied with how it is already. If anything 'better' in the "running gear" department is produced it won't be of my making, I'm not competent to do it. As I said above, I would not be at all surprised if a more advanced replacement was offered at some time from BVE4Trains.
Look at it this way, I build the Ford, Steve does the Mercedes.  

Update: for those who have links to try the prototype

File replaced - cab transparency issues addressed. Please download update to test.

Fellow developer Leezer (Chris Lees, BVE Cornwall) recommended a .png conversion utility called "Gauntlet" earlier this month. I've installed it, and I went back to the original .bmps which came with the 175 cab. I was delighted how easy and efficiently the bitmaps converted. It has cured the errors which (I admitted previously) crept in when converting the "hard" way with a Photo editor. I can recommend this great little program.  See: https://bveworldwide.forumotion.com/t823p15-welsh-branch-progress-update#11638

Using that utility myself, even if I primarily save all textures in Photoshop as 8-bit png. Even then I can save between 5-10% of the texture size. I will try the updated version.  

Well Quork, when it comes to brakes what I do is make the gauges act as correctly as I can in the cabview and the brakes act as I think, have seen or from feedback they should.

So what I put in the train file sometimes actually looks and might be wrong from a bve config point of view!

But if the train acts like I and others think it should that's fine by me.

PngGauntlet has been on my links page for many years, I've posted with a remark about it on here a couple of times and a few more on my blog on Bve4Trains!

All my work in the last 3 or 4 years has made use of it both to convert .bmp to .png and to reduce the size of new .png by around 30 to 40% in under 10 minutes.

Even NWM has been through it, so if you thought it was a huge route it's just a bit smaller than it might be!

I've also posted before now that 8-bit textures are not always smaller, although they do result in a rather worse looking texture.

It seems to be all down to number of colours in the texture if 8-bit is smaller.

But all this is something I've posted at some point before, so ignore me again as I don't code!

My god!

All the stuff I've made must be awful, I better shut down Bve4Trains and leave the scene forever 

Did I say the yellow on my Class 47 noses is wrong...... 

Stevegr wrote:But if the train acts like I and others think it should that's fine by me.

That's the benchmark. I didn't look into the train file at all, just looked how it behaves. I'll look into the file only to adjust the viewpoint for my own use.

Am I missing the joke or are you getting things I say terribly wrong? Your work is great, you're one of the reasons why there's such an amazing amount of british train addons to chose from - even more than from Japan! Nobody questioned your work! Certainly not me.