We are pleased to announce the release of a significantly improved program version containing many new features, and all due to a new member of the development team – Stephen Smith. Firstly Stephen has contributed very significantly to the user interface as detailed below. Secondly he has contributed behind the scenes in improving the readability of the program code and bringing it more into line with good programming practice. Thirdly he rekindled Albert’s enthusiasm for the project so he too has been busy making some functional improvements and correcting errors. After all that it hardly needs saying that Stephen is a very welcome addition to the ROS team!
User interface improvements:
Icons have been added to many of the menu items and buttons.
Speed and distance conversion facilities now work both ways.
‘Hotkeys’ have been added for frequently used functions.
A website link has been added to the help menu.
Presentation has been improved in terms of clarity and ease of use.
Functional improvements:
The railway can be repositioned by dragging with the right-hand mouse button in both zoom-in and zoom-out modes.
The screen can be resized and still retain full functionality. Xeon recently mentioned this limitation when not in full screen mode and Albert promised to add scrollbars at the next release, but full function resizing is much better than the inconvenience of scrollbars. Interestingly he had thought that scrollbars were available but after Xeon contacted him found that v2.0.0 didn’t have them. Further investigation revealed that they were available in v1.3.2 and earlier, but disappeared for some unknown reason in v2.0.0!
Routes can be cancelled when they are occupied by trains with a ‘route locking’ warning as given for trains approaching signals. Albert had earlier thought that route cancellation when occupied should be disallowed as SPADs are more likely in these circumstances, but it meant that long automatic signal routes couldn’t be removed when there was heavy traffic and the route was never free of trains. One user, Brian Clancy, commented on this back in 2016, pointing out that it is allowed in real railway operation when circumstances require it, which it has to be to avoid a no-way-out situation. This change therefore brings operation more into line with real railway operation.
More information has been added for trains that have yet to enter at continuations, including repeat number, entry speed and timetable, to allow better planning for when the train arrives together with earlier route setting.
The help manual and on-screen help have been updated to reflect the latest changes.
Errors corrected:
The timetable screen caption now reads correctly when creating or editing timetables. Formerly the earlier loaded timetable name remained in the caption in error.
Signal behaviour on locked automatic signal routes exiting at a continuation when a train has exited has been corrected. Before, signals continued to clear in sequence in spite of the route being locked. All now remain at red.
There was a potential error when pre-setting automatic signal routes, in that a pre-set route could be set across a diagonal that was fouled by an adjacent track that cut across it. Now such situations can’t arise when pre-setting routes, though they can still be created by the user during operation if required.
BUT – it’s not all good news:
The bad news is that for operating systems later than Windows 7 the earlier compatibility issues are likely still to be present, requiring 256 colour mode and possibly also disabling display scaling on high DPI (dots per inch) settings. These and a new one that has surfaced in some circumstances are described in the ‘Known Compatibility Issues’ box on the Downloads page. These changes only have to be done once but they are a nuisance, so we are trying to track down their source and hopefully avoid them in a later release.
Finally:
As ever please be on the lookout for and report any unexpected behaviour, especially if changing the compatibility mode doesn’t cure it, and please send in any error files that are produced if the program crashes so that we can correct any problems that might arise – many thanks.
We hope you approve of the changes and enjoy the enhanced program.
Best regards,
The ROS team