User interface

I hope you will like the user interface of FSRail after getting used to it. I deliberately did not try to copy the typical design of Airport or similar programs. My user interface is orientated along the steps performed when building a model railway.

1. You select where to place a rail. Typically this is at the end of another rail. I call these open ends endpoints. Since attaching to an endpoint is the most common operation a click with the left mouse button is reserved for this step. Just click to an endpoint on the map to attach a rail. Shift+click to see all properties of the endpoint, modify them, or do any operation possible with endpoints. Clicks more than 10 pixels away from the endpoint will start a dialog to lay down a separate rail at the mouse position.
2. From a catalog you select which rail to attach. Usually 2 to 3 mouse clicks will select one out of 1500 different rails.
3. You select which end of the rail to attach and can rotate it slightly around the endpoint if desired.
4. You then fix the shape of the details of the rail, check the complete call, and confirm it by pressing OK.

Typically you would compile and look at the result now. If the result is good you'd continue the same steps for the next rail. If it is not right you can remove it to start again. You can also modify it by clicking to the center of the object with the right mouse button or do more modifications with a Shift+right click of the mouse. Right click and Shift+right click also works on non-Rail objects in FSRail.

Some testers asked for the possibility of putting a bitmap behind the railway map. I thought about this but it does not work with the current computer technology. Typical distances of two rails in a station are 8 m so a resolution of 1pixel/2m is the absolute minimum that makes sense (FSRail places rails to a position of better than 25 cm). This is 250KB per square km and since a typical FSRail scenery is 50x50 km the minimum bitmap would be 625 MB. Indeed even in compressed format every useful map of a 100x100 km area fills up a CD. FSRail would get extremely slow and memory hungry long before any background map would be useful. Nevertheless I added a tool for bitmaps and markers that you will learn about later.

Another philosophical question was how to access files. I decided, for safety reasons, that only FSRail.exe is allowed to read from and write to its own directory. FSRail can overwrite files in its own directory but nowhere else. And it never touches C:\windows. My personal contribution to clean software. Without directory browsing input file browsing is a waste of effort.

Some Information about navigating on the screen. Scale = 1 means that the total railway, as defined in the header, plus a border of 20 seconds fits on your full screen. When the header is changed because an attached rail leaves the header's range the relative scale changes and you will see small jumps. As long as you are running FSRail in a Window smaller than your screen you can use the scroll bar or arrow keys to display a portion of the full screen. With a zoom factor greater than 1 this is always only a fraction of the complete railway. You can shift this fraction around with the menus or by pressing the appropriate keys like < for shift visible part left, u for up, and plus or minus (+/-) to change the zoom factor.

FSRail carefully disables Menus when they make no sense in the current context. If the context is left unexpectedly it may mean that most menus are still disabled. If this happens I recommend that you save your work, exit the program, and start it again. You can also enforce all menus to become accessible again by pressing the ESC Button - but then the security checks inside the program may no longer keep everything safe.

FSRail can not only place rails but also other elementary objects like polygons and roads of airport macros. These capabilities are limited and for bigger work I'd recommend using the specialized programs like AIRPORT, SCCreate, or ASD. These features in FSRail are intended for small operations like fitting roads to barriers, harbor docks to rails, and cranes to the rails in cargo stations.