NARS moving train sounds

[old_train_guy]

Hi all,

I've played a game with an older NARS GRF version where trains made sounds moving (not the default train start moving sounds). Now that I've installed NARS v2.52 they are gone. Is there a way to turn them on or is there another GRF that does moving train sounds?

TIA

[Emperor Jake]

NARS 2.5 removed a lot of features that were in NARS 2.03, including futuristic trains, regearing, multiple liveries, push-pull reversing, and the running sounds. You could downgrade to the older version but you'll miss newer features like autorefit, full industry set compatibility, and user-friendly parameters.

UKRS2 is another trainset that has running sounds. I can't think of any others

[jfs]

Running sounds are hard to really do properly, the way NewGRF works, unfortunately, which might be why the feature was removed in NARS.

In NewGRF, trains can only trigger sound effects based on game tick intervals. The problem then is that game ticks might not always take the same amount of real time, but the sounds triggered must be fixed-length clips. So if your game is running slow, because you might have so many vehicles your computer can't keep up, or your game is running fast because you put it in fast-forward, then you might get either pauses between the running sounds, or running sounds overlapping each other.
You can somewhat mitigate those problems by making the running sound clips longer, and trigger less frequently, but then you get the problem that they can't respond as well to changes in the vehicle state, e.g. if it suddenly needs to stop at a signal, or just reaches its destination station and stops there, then the sound might keep playing.

So maybe the feature was removed from the GRF for those reasons.

[peter1138]

Apparently running sounds behaved differently in TTDPatch, which is what those GRFs versions were made for. But nobody has been able to document exactly what differences there are, only that it doesn't sound right.

The 27/30ms tick difference could have been a factor in it, but I don't think it was just that.