Hawk & Badger Railroad Forum

Just curious if anyone actually views the images that show the scenario briefing before downloading a map, and if so, does it have any influence on whether or not you download that map?

Yes, I do. They are very informative on some of the scenarios.
Some are as expected, but some tells of things you never think about.

I think these are very useful when looking for a new scenario among those that you haven't played yet. The goals and briefing in most cases give a decent idea as to quality and gist of the map. After being around awhile I learned about the styles of the different map makers. In terms of the way the economy is designed (building density, regions, seeding, and one that makes a big difference IMO: Are there many nearby cities with similar recipes?), the name of the author (if you played one of their maps before) will give you the best idea of the style of economic design, otherwise I rely on said briefing.

Yup, I usually check out the images.

Great! Thanks folks. I appreciate the replies.

I was thinking about eliminating them to save about a gig worth of storage space, but now I won't. Saves me a bit of work too.

If you get keen to save on storage, I bet you could save half a gig simply by using better compression on the images. I just tried a quick test with the thumbnail for the Colorado map (first one in the North America listing). It's currently 68 kb or thereabouts. Compressing it down to half that in Photoshop* yielded an image that I honestly couldn't tell from the existing one.

I just loaded the existing one, then checked it with the "save for web" jpg option set to 20 for quality.

I probably could, but it's a little late for that. There's a little over 3900 images just for the scenarios, and only 1790 of them are jpg's (map description). The rest (scenario briefings) are png's (needed for the transparency).
I'm not really up to going through all of them and adjusting them.

All those images only add up to about 1 GB so that's not too bad.

Even easier to get compression with PNG. Cold War Colorado2.png is 456 kb on your server. Saved as png-8 with no other attempt at optimisation it's 144 kb. Run that through PNGGauntlet and it comes down to 135 kb. Looking at them side by side, I can't tell the difference.

But yeah, 4000 images is a bit much to deal with. It'd only be worth doing if you could run a batch processing script on the entire directory.

I could do a batch conversion by folder with Irfanview, although I'm sure it doesn't have the options some image editors have. I might play around with that and see what I get.


I also have Paint Shop Pro X and Photoshop CS2. I could look into them and see what they offer.