Railroader - Thomas Whistles mod demonstration

Honestly, I'm surprised no-one else had done this yet so I'm jumping in and posting this before someone else does.
This mod does exactly what you'd expect, it adds whistles from various characters throughout the Thomas & Friends series from the early synth whistle samples right up to the stock sounds of the CGI era.
Mod download: www.nexusmods.com/railroader/...

[@kaseyleitchnextgen3281]

I love that the font changes depending on what era each character’s whistle came from. But whoever did the mod didn’t do enough whistles, as there’s loads of others they could have done, such as those of Stephen, the international engines, Connor, Caitlin, Skarloey from Home At Last, Sam, Samson, Logan, Toby from Toby’s New Whistle and Percy from Percy’s New Whistle. They didn’t do any of the horns either.

[@tidmouthmilk12]

Thanks for your feedback! It's my mod and it's very much a WIP so don't worry! Some of the whistles I skipped because I was bored of the all the HiT era whistles that are just Thomas or Gordon pitch shifted. There's also a bunch that didn't really sound very good in-game so I left them out whilst I do some tweaking. As for horns I need to do some research into how to do those but as soon as I've figured that out they'll be added as well.

[@kleetus92]

I never watched Thomas the Tank, I was too old by that point, but knowing now as an adult that George Carlin did some of the narration makes it absolutely hilarious to me. That said, most of these are UK type whistles which is like nails on a chalkboard to me, but a few of those sound like actual real whistles particularly in the CGI era and the second to last one. Nicely done.

[@tidmouthmilk12]

Yeah, the sounds that are actual whistle samples sound way better. All the whistles and horns prior to series three were just sampled instrument sounds from a Jupiter synthesizer so that's possibly why they sound weird here. I am planning on possibly modifying them a little to make them a little less grating sounding in-game whilst still being faithful to the originals in a future update.

[@coenisgreat]

Can definitely use some work, but I'm very appreciative of what you've done here. I think the main thing to potentially fix would be the audible skipping when you hold the whistles down for too long, where the audio track distinctly ends and starts again. A couple of them sound off though, But at least some of that can be the result of both how short they are in the show and one's best attempt to recreate them. Also I'm heavily biased towards the original seasons so the later series, especially the CGI characters, are mostly unfamiliar to me >w

[@tidmouthmilk12]

Thanks for the feedback! I've had a lot of issues with the audio skipping right from the start. It's a limitation of the mp3 format annoyingly. What I've got released is definitely better than my initial testing though, so that's something. 😅 And yes, some of the shorter whistles were definitely a lot harder to try and extend and make work. I think Skarloey's s4 whistle might just be out of the question just because of how short the toots are. I had similar problems with Emily's/Freddie's whistle too, though I might be able to work around that one by using the whistle sample of the 7F from Train Simulator Classic (Railworks)

[@EvilOneGames]

Very nice! Good Job!!

[@BobtheGigglemaestro]

Initially I was like "Hey, why'd they skip over Toby?" and a few seconds later I realized why. The variety would probably be incredible for people who've watched the show so much that they're able to tell which of their trains are close by from recognizing each character's whistle. Shame there isn't a huge Thomas model pack for the characters themselves.

[@tidmouthmilk12]

Yeah I'm kinda surprised the Thomas community hasn't jumped on that yet, knowing how ravenous they can be. Still, it's an early access game with a peak of around 1k players so it's early days yet. And, I could technically include Toby if I put in his whistle from Bull's Eyes.

[@BobtheGigglemaestro]

@@tidmouthmilk12 Actually on the game’s official Discord server someone has already made a Thomas engine, and is currently working on Annie and Clarabel along with an fourth unrevealed character. I haven’t used it yet because modded engines seem like a pain to set up at the moment

[@BlueMusicalEngineStudios]

That's awesome! it almost sounds like their whistles are 3 chime whistles

[@tidmouthmilk12]

Yeah Railroader adds a bit of filtering over the sounds in-game. I think that's some of the ones I tried didn't really work too well.