What is SIm-Path

Sim-Path is a stand-alone program that simulates the movement of land-vehicles, ships and crane loads in an on-screen computer aided design environment. This software enables engineers, architects, airport and harbour authorities to check car parks, road and intersection layouts, truck and container loading areas, airport aprons and harbour-sides using a full suite of user-defined vehicles.

Sim-Path interacts with other CAD systems using standard DXF files.

See below for screen-shot and more about Sim-Path!

Friday, December 3, 2010

Sim-Path 2011

Greetings Sim-Path users!

The new version of Sim-Path can be found in the toolbar to the right -->>

Just click to download the zip file, then click on the SETUP.EXE to do the install.

First time you run Sim-Path you will be prompted for a user name, and you are able to change the user name anytime in the Project Settings>Preferences menu.

On the toolbar you will see two new buttons:  Measure and "K".  Press the K key to see a Quick Key reference.  Sim-Path now takes CAD-like single-key commands of "L" for line and the like.  If these are balky its (probably) because the form has 'lost focus'; just draw a line or similar using the buttons to get the form listening again.

You can install this on the same PC as you have any previous edition on without conflict - good to keep one foot on the ground.

It uses the same .SPV files for vehicle definitions as you are already using.  The installation file includes the original .SPV files as well as some more recent ones.

This product is free to all users and you may install it on as many PCs, and recommend it to as many friends as you like.

Please let me know how it goes for you, and any bugs I may have created on the way.

Thanks for your continued support!

 Kind regards


 Nigel

 (To comment click the little 'comments' word below and submit your comment or question.)

 Last updated 20180126.
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15 comments:

  1. Unknown16 June, 2013 15:44

    Hi there and congrats on this piece of gold you have built. Has anyone mentioned any kind of problem regarding the application rejecting the decimal part of measurements? For example, 0.815 m turns to 815 after saving units file. Using windows7 might be the problem? Many hanks anyway!!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Nigwil01 May, 2014 20:01

      SP expects the decimal separator to be the full stop ".". It ignores the comma "," separator, and that would give the result you report..

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  2. Anonymous19 August, 2013 04:02

    Help not working, so have no idea how to use it.

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    Replies
    1. Nigwil01 May, 2014 19:31

      Using Sim-Path

      A typical work pattern with Sim-Path is as follows..

      Start Sim-Path -

      Draw - Zoom - Select Vehicle - Drive -Save - Edit - Save- etc..

      • Draw a representation of your problem areas with the drawing tools, or else import an existing ASCII DXF file containing details of the area of interest. Keep such DXF files reasonably small, and containing only the detail relevant to the traffic engineering problem. You can select layers of the DXF to show as required using the Layer form that is displayed whenever a new DXF is loaded.

      At present Sim-Path handles DXF files up to Autocad Release 14 ASCII DXF (dxf). It only reads LINE, POLYLINE, CIRCLE, ARC and simple TEXT entities, so keep the DXF as simple as possible and explode it until all entities are at their basic entity types. Sim-Path does not display SPLINES

      Sim-Path prefers simple layer names like “ROADS” and has an aversion to layer names like”As_text_23mm Sheet 4:* V A” etc. If entities don’t appear then check that they are exploded to the entity types Sim-Path recognises and that the layer names are plain.

      Sim-Path maintains the same coordinate base as your drawing, so paths and drawing entities created in Sim-Path can be imported to your project drawing as DXF blocks. You can define the layer names and pens of entities created by Sim-Path.

      • Pan and zoom to display the locality you want to test with a design vehicle.

      • Select the units to make up the vehicle you want to use to create the swept path.

      Hit Crtl-V or the right mouse button, open a Sim-Path vehicle file and select a vehicle.

      You can use single unit vehicles (such as a car or two axle truck) or multi-unit vehicles such as an Articulated Truck [=Tractor unit + large trailer unit], Truck and Full Trailer [=Tractor + tow-bar and its axle + trailer body] or B-Train [=Tractor unit + trailer #1 + trailer #2]. You can have up to five units in a vehicle.

      • Using the Drive Control, locate the vehicle at the start position you want. (This can be anywhere on the screen) Watch the status bar at the bottom of the screen for instructions.

      • Start driving the vehicle using the Steering Box. Manoeuvre the vehicle - turning and travelling forwards or reverse as required.

      • When you have arrived at a solution (or a good definition of the problem) then stop the vehicle and save the path and any drawing work.

      • Start a new path for alternative options.

      • You can also edit or create and validate new units to form new test vehicles to use in your work.

      • You can insert additional DXFs (for example swept paths you have just created) into the view - thus building several paths to determine where concrete, landscaping and road markings can go.

      • To alter the way the vehicle is shown as you drive, go to Project Settings>Preferences and in the View Options frame select the display you want. If on re-paint you don’t want to see the path then just click the Clear Path button on the drive control. This removes the old path, and lets you continue from where you are.

      • To toggle between Wheeled and Vector drive modes, select the Vehicle menu, and check or uncheck the Steering Mode menu item. Vector Mode only moves the first unit and ignores any other units in the vehicle.

      • Vector Mode involves moving the vehicle, suspended crane load or vessel as if it is being pulled by a rope attached at the Thrust Point. The Thrust Point is at the centre of the circle on the vehicle axis in the Drive Control Steering Box. The default position of the Thrust Point is at the rear of the vessel (at the Rear Tow Point defined in the unit description) - simulating propeller thrust with rudder-like directional control or the action on the vessel of a tug on a tow line. To change the location of the thrust point, hold down the Shift key while clicking the new thrust point location on the axis of the vessel outline.

      Hope that helps.

      Nigel

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  3. Anonymous29 August, 2013 02:40

    Hi, Are you still developing this software at all? Can I be so bold as to recommend a feature for addition? It would be great to be able to scale a background image by clicking on two points on the image and typing a distance between them. Cheers, Chris

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Nigwil01 May, 2014 19:16

      You mean
      Menue>View>Zoom Bitmap to match a Dimension in the View...

      Enter your known dimension in the form, select the two known points.

      SP re-scales the view accordingly. Note that you can safely Pan and retain scale, but if you zoom in our out you will need to do the >Zoom Bitmap to match a Dimension in the View... again.

      You cannot move the bitmap image, so often its worth using the drawing tools to draw lines etc around the key parts of the view, then you can zoom etc as with an imported DXF. You can export the linework to a dxf too.

      Hope that helps.

      Nigel

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  4. Anonymous01 May, 2014 14:31

    Hi, what Simpath to dxf units ratio do you set to make it work at 1:1?

    ReplyDelete
  5. Nigwil01 May, 2014 18:06

    Greetings Anon!

    The SP unit is based around the units you use for defining the vehicle dimensions. If you're using metres (which the SP vehicle files distributed with SP use) then a typical car will be defined with Point1 x as something like 0.9 (being the distance from the vehicle's centreline to the front right corner), etc.

    If your vehicles are in metres and your drawing (and hence your dxf) is is in metres, then the Import DXF Settings should be set to 1.0

    If your drawing is in mm then the ratio should be set to 0.001.
    If your drawing is in feet, then try 0.3048
    If your drawing is in inches, then try .0254

    When SP exports DXF it uses these settings to adjust the scale of the output DXF so that the swept path displays correctly when you import the dxf to your drawing.

    Hope that helps!

    Regards

    Nigel

    ReplyDelete
  6. Anonymous21 May, 2014 20:07

    Hi Nigel, Kelly Bosgra Here. the save dxf path returns an error of SPATH1.SPI file not found. Can you please advise?

    ReplyDelete
  7. Jeremy23 September, 2015 12:44

    Has anyone got the dxf function to work on 64bit Windows 7? I get the spath1.spi file missing error.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Nigel Williams23 September, 2015 16:06

      Hi Jeremy! Send me an email to simpathnz AT gmail.com and I will send you the missing file.

      Delete
  8. Clifford08 March, 2018 01:05

    Hi Nigel, its Clifford Chai here. :)
    Can you please advice me on how to download your Simpath program?
    My PC got corrupted 2 months ago and i have lost the program.
    Cheers

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Sean M25 March, 2018 13:44

      Hi Clifford, the program is still available by clicking the sim-path2011.zip file at the top right hand side of this page. This will direct you to a dropbox page where you can click the 'download direct' option. Extract the program on your PC and run the setup.exe file.

      Delete
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