Moving highways

This Chapter deals with moving highways only. Highways without cars have different rules and are described in another chapter.

These moving highways can be easily used almost like static highways of fixed height as there is no extended operation of cars like that of trains over the endpoints. The difficulty is two fold: These macros affect scenery buffer and frame rate more than the rails and they are rather long, typically a multiple of 800m. Buffer considerations make the use of very long pieces mandatory for FS98 and reduces the number of possible macros to very few for FS95. This may make it difficult to place them, other than on very long bridges, into scenery with dense railways. My recommendation therefore is that you lay the highways first (planning where the bridges are expected to cross over rails), the moving railways second, the static railways third, and other 3D-objects last.

The cars that move are defined in a car list. The cars on the outer lanes run at 60 km/h, on the inner at 120 km/h. The traffic is repeated every 8 slots.

As usual the strategy for bridges has to be different for FS95/98 and FS2000.

The following moving highways are available:

M8HW0800 | Length 800m
M8HW1000 | Length 1000m
M8HW1600 | Length 1600m
M8HW2000 | Length 2000m
M8HW2400 | Length 2400m
M8HW3000 | Length 3000m
M8HW3200 | Length 3200m
M8HW4000 | Length 4000m
M8HW4800 | Length 4800m
M8HW5600 | Length 5600m
M8HW6400 | Length 800m
M8HW7200 | Length 7200m
M8HW8000 | Length 8000m
M8HWC10 | Curved 10 degrees, 3 x 800m
M8HWC20 | Curved 20 degrees, 3 x 800m
M8HWC40 | Curved 40 degrees, 5 x 800m
M8HB0800 | Small highway bridge 800m for FS95/98/2000 to cross a small river, road or rail.
M8HB2000 * | Set of 2000m highway bridges with 50% speed. Consists of flat, ramp, bridge, ramp, and flat parts.
M8HB3000 * | Set of 3000m highway bridges with 75% speed. Consists of flat, ramp, bridge, ramp, and flat parts.
M8HB4000 * | Set of 4000m highway bridges with 100% speed. Consists of flat, ramp, bridge, ramp, and flat parts.
M8HB4800 * | Set of 4800m highway bridges with 50% speed. Consists of flat, ramp, dual bridge, ramp, and flat parts.
M8HB6400 * | Set of 6400m highway bridges with 50% speed. Consists of flat, ramp, quad bridge, ramp, and flat parts.
M8HWx | 800m x 800m highway cross of one highway above another. For FS95/98 intermediate roads are drawn.
| FS2000 only:
M8HBi800 | 800m bridge for FS2000 only.
M8HBt800 | 800m bridge for FS2000 that has the northern end 5m above the southern.
M8HRe800 | 800m ramp climbing 2m.
M8HRq800 | 800m ramp climbing 3.5m.
M8HRt800 | 800m ramp climbing 5m.
M8HRh800 | 800m ramp climbing 7m.
M8HR0800 | 800m ramp climbing 14m.
M8HRx800 | 800m ramp climbing 28m.
M8HRy800 | 800m ramp climbing 42m.
M8HRz800 | 800m ramp climbing 56m.
M8HR1600 | 1600m ramp climbing 28m.
M8HR0458 | 458m ramp climbing 8m.

* Several versions of these bridges exist. The objects ending with 0 are straight, the ones ending with c are shaped like a C, the ones with S like an S, the ones with a Q like ?. This makes it a bit easier to place them.

Some more flexible, shorter macros exist (for FS2000 only) to make the design of highways in the elevated mesh and complex scenery simpler:

M2HW100(abcd) | Horizontal highway fragment 100m, speed 30/60
M2HW150(abcd) | Horizontal highway fragment 150m, speed 45/90
M2HW200(abcd) | Horizontal highway fragment 200m, speed 60/120
M2HW150(abcd) | Horizontal highway fragment 250m, speed 75/150
M2HW20c(abcd) | 2m rising towards north highway fragment 200m, speed 60/120
M2HW20d(abcd) | 2m descending towards north highway fragment 200m, speed 60/120
M2HB200(abcd) | Horizontal highway bridge 200m, speed 60/120

Four of these macros always have to be used before you can use a long macro again and you can only attach the southern end. You do not have to worry about the version (a,b,c,d) which is necessary to keep the traffic flow.

All moving highways are called with the same parameters:

Parameter | Value | Meaning
%1 |  | Geographical width
%2 |  | Geographical Length
%3 | 0 | Highway is placed on the surface of the FS terrain.
| Unequal 0 | Absolute Altitude of the highway above sea level in m
%4 | 0.250 | Scale. Should always be 0.250.
%5 | Orientation | Orientation of the highway on the terrain (0 = south-north direction)
%6 | 0-10 | Two digit number. First digit >= 1 switches on lamps and night illumination >=2 rotates lamps by 90 degrees for FS2000 only Second digit switches on a line of bushes or trees with height of second digits.
%7 |  | Car list 1 - 9
%8 |  | Car list of the lower highway on a cross Bridge rail for bridges
%9 | 0-105 | Embankment color 0: No embankment 1-FF: FS color 100-104: Texture 105: Seasonal texture
%10 |  | Range in m Highway is visible if within range. Typical value is 7000. The last digit is used to encode the highway texture.

These macros use the extended night illumination features of FS2000. Here you see an example with the bridge using %6=20 and the ramps with %6>10.

Hints:

You can modify the sequence of cars by editing the files ..\includes\carlistn.inc. The current implementation of cars is optimized for size, not for frame rate, to allow their use in FS98. This may change in a future version when usage in FS98 is no longer needed and multi-megabytes of free memory are available in system and video RAMs.