Hawk & Badger Railroad Forum

The site may go a bit wonky for a day or so. Should sort itself out pretty quickly.

Testing...

I suppose at some point this forum will be wrapped up. Not sure when. I'll definitely renew the hosting this year (October again) and that will carry it through most of 2024. The annual cost is not a huge amount, but activity seems to have dropped to near zero for a sustained period.

At some point it may be more sensible to just have all the downloads on MediaFire (or whatever) and have that include knowledge base / FAQ pages for RT3, then transfer any actual forum activity to The Terminal.

Will see how it goes next year.

The game is still getting new players regularly you can tell from steam etc.. But I guess forums are a dying breed. Which is sad. I read awhile back that search engine results are getting neutered as well, a smaller, more business focused "web" if you will, so that surely doesn't help.

Personally I didn't play for awhile either. Main thing is that in my regular schedule I could play something for maybe 2 hours max. But there aren't really many maps designed for this. The modern takes on the genre, Railway Empire, Railroad Corporation, Railgrade, etc.. have lost a lot of things, including one of RT3's biggest strengths, dynamically-seeded active economy. 10 or 15 year maps are all that are needed to capture this. The start is critical, and the most interesting part of the game after all.

I have also fallen in the trap of bigger, longer, more complex is "better." To the point I have left SCBC final test in limbo for so long. SCBC is probably the opposite of what is ideal. An exercise in excess if you will. Something that takes probably two days to play, maybe if you get sick. But who gets sick anymore since the "plague?"

Yeah, time to play has been my thing lately. I've just been busy with other things and I don't think of RT3 often. But then again I'll probably do what everyone does, and pick it up again for a random binge sometime. Anyway the forum is fine for a while, but I may rethink the situation a couple of years from now.

Hmm, now I'm wondering if this forum is worth keeping for another year. Hosting is due on the 7th of October, and is it worth it given the near zero activity here these days?

We could just make accounts over at the Terminal and use their RT3 boards if we want to. All the downloads can stay on MediaFire for the foreseeable future. Do we need this site at all?

The information here may not that organized, but there is a trove of it. A lot of WIP maps especially for Trainmaster (they were abandoned but if you are keen most they are playable with only a couple adjustments) and other stuff that's usable but not completely polished.

When I'm on now it says 15 people are on as guests. Just because people aren't posting often doesn't mean that they aren't reading and making use of it. The game is a classic now and most things have been said about it already. I imagine people searching and reading various topics to learn, something they don't have to be signed up to do. Also the economy in this game is very dynamic and actually super difficult to master. Perhaps a lot don't comment because they have this feeling that the game is so deep that they were just scratching the surface. For me the information and strategy tips are one of the important parts of the forum. To me the forum can still be very useful even there isn't any recent activity.

Discord has gained in popularity. As a place for people to casually chat it's good. But it's hopeless in terms of structured organized informational content. Things just get forgotten so easily and the searching feature is quite rudimentary too. I don't know of a dedicated place for RT3, but for people that want to narrate their experience, what we would call the most active posters here, it's a service designed for them.

Steam has a discussion board for RT3. But 90% of it is casual level stuff. The searching is also super basic and there is virtually no organization. Every now and then you find people saying that if you want to find maps and get deeper in the game you should visit this site. For example some of the guides for the game mention this site.

The Terminal site has had issues multiple times in the past where uploaded files were lost. There's a map or two there that I wanted to download again, but it appears to be lost forever. :( It's also unfriendly to use IMO.

PS. What happened to your idea to do something with Blue Streak?

Meh. Ok, so we keep the forum for a bit anyway. I'll renew the hosting for another year.

TBH there is a lot of false information here, as well as the good stuff. And, as you say, the good stuff is not organised (or not much of it, and not very well). If we want this site to be a useful source of information then I suppose at some point it would make sense to write up some articles/posts/whatever that a/ get rid of the false information and b/ are written in a clear and easily comprehensible manner.

PS: Sidetracked by other things in life. You know how it is. Also, I have to admit that my motivation to play has decreased since my installations started becoming unstable. I seem to get CTD whenever scenario goals are completed, or even near to completed (which I assume is the game engine realising the goal will trigger soon).

Edit: Ok, we are good until October, 2024.

That's a shame about your installs. Fear of crashes can suck your motivation pretty easily. I had that before on another game. If there was something I can do to help I would. But, other than suggesting obvious things like trying a stock standard install with the minimum needed (maybe dgVoodoo) to get the game to run, I don't think there is much I can do.

I have thought that it might be worth picking up a GoG copy of the game, and doing a complete uninstall/cleanup/reinstall. As I understand it the GoG version is patched up pretty well for modern computers, with the only negative being disabling hardware T&L by default (which is easy to change).

Or, possibly just reinstalling from the original PopTop disc, and then patching up to the usual levels, might fix it. Admittedly my current installations have been screwed around with quite a lot. If other people have it running smoothly on W10, I'm sure I can get it running smoothly on my box.

As I wrote there, Gumboots' concept about articles free of false info is best served by a wiki-like structure of accumulated knowledge. The authors' team would have to be more controlled and qualified than a publicly open forum. I don't know if there are any software tools allowing an "approval-by-majority" procedure before stuff becomes universally accessible.
I guess that the most active members of such an editing team would have to be either pensioners or students; the rest of us have usually very limited spare time, and this may rather be spent on development than publication of things. Since early summer 2022 I belong to the elected Health & Safety Committee of urban rail workers and the workload alongside other tasks is unmanageable.
I wonder if this forum's content can continue to be available on line in some form in case the forum itself closes down as such. Regardless of the misinformation risk, such a platform is a valuable tool for potential developers.
I wouldn't rule out a financial contribution for myself once it becomes a problem, but the details might be better discussed through private messages.

Well, regardless of how the content is available online it still means someone has to provide hosting for it.

The forum has pretty low resource usage, so is probably as good as any other format for hosting costs. It's more a matter of organising some of the content. It would not be hard to set up a member group for editing "articles", which would just be threads in a board that was read-only access for anyone outside the editing group.

Alternatively, nut out the content and then make HTML pages on the site itself (ie: not inside the forum).

I registered only to ask you not to close the forum! There might not be a lot of visitors but it serves as a reminder of what the internet used to be. Plus, it contains a lot of useful informations.