Hawk & Badger Railroad Forum

I've been looking at the models in SMR. With the DX Goods, there are probably 200 triangles tied up in details that you'd never be able to see. About another 800 triangles wasted on fluff that could be done better with a texture. The same is true of just about every loco in SMR. On top of that, they...

Well, another unproductive day. Other than managing to produce a fairly authentic lo mein in the kitchen, I have not made any progress, especially with modelling new locos. I did make a couple of buildings that I may eventually post if I can ever make textures for them that don't look like they belo...

TBH, I look the look of the D50 and D53 better than the "old west" version in RT3. But I guess that is because the "wild west" thing isn't part of my cultural background. My people dealt with lions and hyenas and malaria and angry natives that usually won, so there's not a great ...

Aha! Pre-ordering track a year in advance. I'd thought of that one myself, back when I was kicking around ideas for a revamp of the Italy map. Good to see someone implementing it as I think it has potential. !*th_up*! Anyway, stock is the way to go here. Since there's no value in holding stock your...

Very nicely done. I always wondered why the Connie was featured so early in RT3, when IRL it was largely ignored until about 1880. Once the companies finally noticed it, they couldn't get enough of them. In one form or another, they were being made into the 1930s. Admittedly not many were made by Ba...

As I posted in my Evil Genius at Work thread, I was reading about phantom Islands . This map is the result. I've twittered on it for 3 days and I'm fairly comfortable saying it is not an easy one to win. I managed to win on medium difficulty several times, but not consistently. I reckon that comes d...

What you're doing is a good test, but it will be a bit different if you ran the gradient from corner to corner than if you do it horizontally or vertically. As a general rule, more complex patterns tend to get chewed up less and you have to wiggle the noise percentage a bit to get it right for some ...

And I am sure I have mentioned this in another post, but when you are finished with the texture for each size (made all of them) just before you do the TGA to DDS conversion, it's best to use the add noise filter (I use 1.6%) to bamboozle the DXT conversion and keep it from gobbing things up too muc...

For no reason in particular, I was reading about Phantom Islands this afternoon. One in particular was on maps and mentioned in treaties for over 300 years: Saint Matthew Island . It seems that the English, Dutch (Sint Mattheüs Eylant), French (Île Saint-Mathieu), Portuguese (Ilha de São Mateus), Sp...

I only have 1200 screen height, but when modding default skins I often find myself working at 200 or 400% zoom anyway. So being able to work at that scale without it being all blurry would be total luxury even if I can't see the entire skin. When I want to see the whole lot I can just zoom out. !*t...

All of this may be considered off-topic, so I'm marking it as such. TBH, I have always preferred the Vader livery on the bulk of European/continental steam. It's a purely personal preference, no doubt brought about by my early experiences seeing late steamers vetted in grit, soot, rust, and grease t...

Thanks for the new info. Off on a new tangent. I've been trying to think of some fanciful way to marry an early European aesthetic to the idea of the Challenger 4-6-6-4 or Big Boy 4-8-8-4. Yes, I know, madness - either a steampunk, hyper-glandular madness with too many 7-foot drivers (why stop at 7?...

The history of European steam is not my strong point. Where would you place a Webb compound 0-8-0 in there? Before or after the Connie? Better or worse? I wonder, because Baldwin was still manufacturing Connies as late as the 1920s, whereas Webb 0-8-0s didn't start until 1901 and seem to have had a ...

I think I may have left out a rather important part of what I was trying to express. I hit all around it, but missed writing it. I meant "for purposes of fitting many models (e.g. a quad-header loco, or a large clot of buildings on a single footprint - example: Hooverville, coal camp, etc) onto...

Looking over the Camelback 3DP, I'm sort of confused. It's made to a higher level of detail than most PopTop locomotives, with 3D cylinders for hand-railing instead of transparent 2D textures, then flipping the other direction, it has an 8-sided cylinder for the boiler. And it has one of the weakest...

Milkshape 3D has a simple UV mapping tool for doing the same thing. I have used it for many years :D It's entirely possible that the game could handle an oddball sized texture IF there is an 8 MB bitmap* limit set for a single texture. *Here I am using "bitmap" in its original computer cod...

Noted. That explains some of the confusion I was having about the livery. I was like: "that's awfully upscale livery for a general purpose railroad company." But that just tells you that special livery and names for PAX locos is all but a long ago and forgotten thing in the USA. In any eve...

A double-header NR class? Sure, why not? (0!!0) I'm guessing for length (72 ft 2 in according to Wikipedia) they'd be about the same as the USA 103 (which looks suspiciously like the GE Dash 8 Series, which is 70 ft 8 in), same C-C arrangement at least. But for sheer gruntitude, I have to point out ...

So, in other words, you can replace Shays with anything you like for RT3 purposes. (0!!0) Very true. I should be celebrating... but now it weighs on me to make the decision >_< I had thought a Heisler might be fun to do sometime. And/or one of the bugger 3 truck 90 ton Shays. Unfortunately there's ...

I have been trying to find what replaced Shays once they stopped being manufactured. It turns out that for the most part, Shays weren't replaced. They typically died in service, frequently having gone through a series of owners before going to the big roundhouse in the sky. It honestly never occurre...