The following text is a compilation of what was salvaged from the old Gathering Forum. It contains postings from several different people.
Thanks goes out to Wolverine for putting this all together.
Hawk
K's Rocky Road
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
i like this one, and it's something a bit new. with the advent of pjay's utilities, we can now move color data around from our maps to paint programs and back again. this opens up some very nice options. this new map is entirely based on one of those options.
what i did was take a digital aerial photograph, obtained from usaphotomaps (link obtained from RSH), and made an appropriate .bmp file of it. i cropped it and sized it to work with pjay's utilities and imported it into the editor.
using the visual data of the photograph, i then raised the terrain manually. so, the height data here isnt that accurate. i then proceeded to paint the new map in the editor, add trees where it seemed appropriate and one city and a few roads and other features.
the overall effect is that this is one of the most realistic maps i've made or seen yet. you can even see the various mountain trails (dirt bikes and atv's?) that run around the place. the detail is quite good.
the area of the map is somewhere in colorado. someone brighter than me can figure out exactly where, since it is from a photograph and i didnt alter any of the major terrain features. the lake shld be a pretty good clue.
now, i did take great license in setting the heights and some of the other features. the city is also ficticious in both name and location, as far as i know; also the barracks. everything else is fairly realistic.
there is no game goal on this one and only 3 preliminary set-up events. i debated over goals and just didnt like anything i came up with. i'd have liked to have make it player salary of a certain amount, but that's not an option. so, if you've an idea for a goal on this one, feel free to comment or make one yourself.
you cannot buy existing industry on this one, but you can buy and place your own.
you may not start more than just the one company.
the ai will not start a railroad on this one and if you play with them in the scenario, they will only be good for buying and selling stock.
the map is relatively easy. thought i'd give you guys a break this time :)
you start with 3 million in personal cash. add in the 4 million you can get from outside investors and you've got a pretty good opening amount of money to play with, enough for some rail and a business or two.
the whole idea is post-war and restoring a peace time economy. in lieu of more cities, you have a large block of warehouses that act as a pretty good demand sink, so again, this map is actually pretty easy. half the reason for this map was to show off what can now be done with user-made tools.
and, in line with that, for those that dont visit the map and editing forum, i also released another map a little while ago. this one was again to show off what can now be done, and a few things that could be done before, but werent. the name of that map is K's_metro_subway. it's also up on my site. that map is a sort of potpourri of new possibilities, including a golf course, a 3d football stadium, a new 3d building made from the actual terrain and overlaid with an aerial photograph, nd elevated rail system, a subway system, new terrain paintings, including roads and a number of other things. it is NOT a finished scenario and wasnt meant to be. it's a 'sampler' of some of things that can be done. it will play. you can run it and have fun with it, but it's not a finsihed scenario, so dont expect one. there are also tunnels under tunnels, bridges under bridges, tunnels under bridges and so on. so, it's quite an array of editing tricks for those that are interested.
my thanks to pjay for some great tools, rsh for trying to educate me about digitlal elevation files and finding one's way around the globe and all the other map folks that continuously feed new ideas into the community and keep this game being created. and special thanks to poptop for one of the best editors i've ever seen in any game!
and may the farce be with ya all ;)
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
You gotta take a break and play these maps sometime Krae
Download from usual site http://www.mizus.com/kraellin/RT3/
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I downloaded the map but can't play it (or any other map, for that matter). It seems I'm plagued with the "Crash to desktop" syndrome lately. It started a couple days ago, for no apparent reason.
I guess I'll try un-installing and re-install. Hope it works.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
It plays well
Generous startup cash and all that "stuff" out there waiting to be brought home. Thinking of using this format for the rebirth of K's_United_States?
I think I learned something about industry placement from this map.
Thank you Kraellin
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
hehe, i prolly dont even know how to play any more ;)
and thanks for putting my link in there. i knew there was something i forgot :)
if by 'this format' you mean the aerial photos, i think that might be a bit ambitious to try and collect the entire aerial map set for the u.s. and turn it into one giant map. my isp would cut me off with all those downloads, but the thought did cross my mind...and was quickly rejected, unless, of course, i were to find some online resource that had already done this in a composite. that would be rather cool. and i did take a look at my updated version of the u.s. map last night, one that i havent finished or posted yet, and i think it's going to have to wait till the 1.04 patch before i work on it again. there's just something odd going on with certain events that i havent sorted out yet. we'll see.
are other things crashing your machine also, or just RT3? and when i get one of those, the question to ask is, what changed? just prior to this showing up did you install some new software, new hardware, hard-crash your system, get some new spyware, a virus, a worm, open an email attachment, or what? is there something new in your startup list, did your kids decide to install a peanut butter sandwich in the cd rom drive? there's usually something. hope you get it sorted.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Everything else is working fine, even MSTS.
For more info, I have 2 hard drives, not installed together, I swap them around. One has WinME, and the other has 98SE. I have installed a few new things on the ME drive, but not the SE drive. They both drop to desktop.
Ran Ad-Aware and Spybot-also Norton Anti Virus. Found nothing.
I'm beginning to think it might be hard ware related, although I
have not changed anything before it started.
I'm going to try a re-install this evening.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Very nice...
I'm started on this scenario (at medium difficulty), but I guess I could have done it a lot better. I've only built 2 industries (diary processor and steel mill), but I've built a pretty big network yet.
I was tempted to build a meat packing plant too, but then I realised there wouldn't be any demand for meat (.03 loads demanded / house / year, so I guess +/- 1 load demanded each year for the complete map).
I think the elevations could be steeper. I could very easily lay all track pretty much straight without grades above 3% (except for terrain deformation due to new buildings ofcourse).
I used electric track with GG1's. I don't know if that's a good choice but it's an old RT2 habbit I guess.
I have 3 trains at 300 k /year
Diary farm at 150 k / year
Steel mill is not providing me with a solid income yet (it just started its second year of succesfull production)
I did not connect to the northern barracks yet, maybe that's a major mistake
It's amazing to zoom out completely and then zoom in completely. It's (on my pc) very smooth and you have such a great amount of detail on all levels. Starting with a satelite-photo and then zooming in to the very detailed ground textures. I would recommend everybody to enable the more detailed ground textures. They really make a big difference in the close up appearance of all RT3 maps.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
slightly off topic:
you might check the NASA site for pix. They have some amazing imagery available. I like the following because you can keyword search for areas of interest
http://rapidfire.sci.gsfc.nasa.gov/gallery/
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
the link didnt work for me. might just be down?
yeah, i thought about raising the terrain more, but decided to give you guys a break ;) feel free to raise it more if you like and let me know how it goes. after running a few tests, though, and seeing how badly a large station placed on one of the large hills deformed everything, i decided not to go any higher. i might make the next one combining aerial and elevation; that could be slick.
i put the barracks in there with a possible game goal in mind, but then changed my mind. they were there to simulate troops coming home and needing to be shuffled around on their way home. there's really no more significance to them, in my mind, than that. it is nice, however, when a barracks also comes up in the city. it makes for some easy money.
and yes, ground detail and higher resolutions and detail everywhere makes this a very nice viewing map. the detail from the aerial photograph shows through mostly, and adds in a lot of detail that wouldnt otherwise be there. so, yes, it's worth setting your details up at least once, just for the view. this editor is a 'smart' editor and allows for a very nice system of overlaying color and texture, and that's why thees aerials work so well; you retain the aerial detail but can add in your own color and texture without wiping out that detail. very slick.
sounds a lot like a corrupted file or registry, but if you have rt3 installed on both drives and they arent loaded both at the same time, then that's quite suspicious of something else, like a bios setting or something. and if both drives with their respective versions of rt3 both went corrupt about the same time, but other things on both drives are loading and running, boy, i dont know. the registry for each is on the respective drive and so is the master boot record, so i wouldnt think both would just suddenly become corrupt at exactly the same time, unless there was a virus that had been transferred from one drive to the other via a file copy. have you moved any files from one drive to another lately, particularly map files from rt3 and have you removed them to see if that's what's doing it?
i suppose if you had a power supply going bad or bios was going nuts, that might account for it, but it shld show up in other programs also, particularly any other large games you might be playing. swapping drives like that out on a regular basis can sometimes screw the bios up too. it gets a confused at time. you might try resetting the bios to its default settings and do a double reboot on the same drive. also, if the cmos battery is getting weak, it might not be reading each drive correctly as it gets swapped in and out and thus settings from one drive linger into the settings of the other and really confusing the registry thereafter.
why not just put both drives in at the same time and do a boot swapper at startup to pick the o/s you want for that session? the bios would love you for it ;)
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Thanks for the ideas Kra. I'll look into the bios and see if I see anything "unusual".
I did a virus scan, but I might try that again. I have swapped some files from one drive to the other, via a 100MB zip drive.
Last time I set the bios to default, I ran into some problems. I might just make some notes from the bios so I can set things accordingly, and try it again.
What is a boot swapper? I'm not to sure this 250 watt power supply can handle both drives. One is 80GB and the other is 120GB.
I'll look at some of the ideas you mentioned.
I gotta do something. I'm anxiuos to see your map, and do some more work on Gibraltar.
Again-Thanks.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Hmm... link works when I pick it.
try googling MODIS that should give you links
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
i tried the link again last night and it worked fine. apparently, i was just timing out, for whatever reason, earlier.
very nice site. thanks :)
a boot swapper is a small program done from dos during startup. it basically comes up as a menu in a dos screen, before windows loads, and asks you which operating system you wish to boot up with. whichever you pick, it will then go to and startup that o/s from wherever you've told it to find that o/s. you can also do the same thing from a 3 1/2 floppy with a startup disk inserted in your 3 1/2 floppy drive.
i recently put windows xp on my dad's system. he has win98 already and we just added xp as a 2nd o/s. when startup occurs, he can pick from a dos menu either of these two o/s's and that's the system that will boot up. there may be certain restrictions on which two o/s's can do this easily. xp and win98 have no problems with it as long as xp is the 2nd one installed. in fact, xp will even detect the other o/s during a custom install of xp and allow you to set this up during the install of xp. other o/s's working together may be a bit more finicky. but there are programs out there that might allow you to do this with the two o/s's you currently have.
a 250 watt supply is a bit low these days, but shld be able to handle at least a basic hardware system, mobo, 2 hdds, 2 cd/dvd drives, 3 1/2 floppy, vid card (as long as it isnt a newer one that requires its own power leads to the card like the newer ati's), and a sound card and modem. and all this is if you arent overclocking anything. but to be sure, you'd have to check the power ratings of all those devices. the current trend, however, is larger and larger power supplies. most systems are prolly using at least a 300 wat supply, if not larger these days. some are even using 400 watt. dont know that they actually require that much, but it certainly isnt hurting anything to have one that big.
it still seems odd to me that only rt3 is crashing and under both o/s's. is it crashing in the same spot in each system? do you have any log files enabled that might give a clue? also, it could just be that your rt3 disk has gone bad. maybe a scratch or some peanut butter on it, or that the cd rom drive is no longer reading it correctly. if you've got another cd rom or dvd rom drive in your system, you might try putting the disk in there and see if it works. any of those things would account for both systems crashing on the same program.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Whelp, when do they hand out the "Dummy of the Year" awards, 'cause I think I deserve it.
I also need to get out this weekend and buy a new cd-rom drive. I never thought to try the "Play" cd in my burner. Ran RRT3 for 'bout a half an hour and all seemed well.
Thanks for all the advice and help Kra, even though it looks like I didn't deserve it.
BTW! Beautiful map. I haven't tried playing it yet-was to busy snooping around.
In the mean time, I'm going to fire up "Google" and see what I can find on the boot stuff.
Again, thank you kind sir.
Edit 1: Hold that "Dummy of the Year" award, and save the money for a new drive. Still crashing. Back to the drawing board.
Kra-just for the sake of discussion, I don't think peanut butter is the problem. Might be "Disk Scratch Fever". I just don't understand that. I keep it in a safe place, right here on my desk-Uhm-somewhere. Hey, I just found the case-been wonderin' where it went.
Hey Phil-Got any extra "Play" disks' laying around?
I'm still going to dig into some of the other ideas you came up with. "Course, I haven't tried the re-install trick yet.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Hi K. Downloaded it and it plays perfectly. Lovely map although its a bit more difficult for me to see the hills than usual (I'm colourblind). On expert I played it for several years. Electric. Several industries added. Money rolling in until a depresssion. Only problem is that I got bored with no specific target to aim for so I was just trying to get rich myself.
Must have a look at your metro trial. If I can get round to creating a map I was going to see if I could do anything with the London Underground.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
wrote: If I can get round to creating a map I was going to see if I could do anything with the London Underground.
I remember someone else had a plan for this, like creating a city to represent each suburb.
Don't know how it would scale & if you can't build over tunnels that makes it harder.
Interesting project!
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
thanks :)
sounding a lot like a copy protection issue. when is the thing 'dropping to desktop'? during the boot of the program or some time later? are you running from the auto-run menu, a desktop icon, start menu, or windows explorer by double clicking the .exe?
that you could get it running once with the other rom drive, even just the once, makes me think the disk has gotten a bit warped, scratched, coated with something foreign, uncoated (the original surface coating of the disk), or something else has slightly messed with the integrity of the disk.
you could try just cleaning the disk, (and no, they arent dishwasher safe :), or looking for tiny scratches and getting one of those disk scratch removers, or cleaning your rom drive read/write heads, but since this seems to be only happening with the rt3 disk, i suspect it's the disk and not the drives.
have you tried other disks for other games and do they work ok in the drives? you might also want to look for a way to copy the disk or do the virtual drive method to preserve what's left of your disk. you might also try the thread that talks about all this, the one about copy protection and a no cd in tray fix.
yes, the lack of a goal here does take some of the spice out of things. the map was really done and released to show off the use of using an actual aerial map as the game map, so the game play may be a bit 'dry'. feel free to suggest something.
the metro subway map is a 'sampler' also. i employed some new tricks in that one, and it's in fact, somewhat of a collection of tricks thrown together in a new style map. it's worth a play just to see some of these new things. there is a game there, a scenario, but it's also also-ended. in fact, i released this one in the maps and editing forum, as i thought it would more appeal to map makers and prospective map makers. there are also a number of things not done to scale in that one. things were just thrown in any old way i could just to pack all these ideas into one map. there's a real scenario in there somewhere, however, and i may come back to that one later :)
and if you do decide to do something with the london underground, i'd be interested in seeing it. the game really doesnt do subways well. tunnels cant turn underground, so you have to just run straight stretches to an open spot and make your turns with normal track, then make another stretch underground and so on. terminals also cant be underground, so you have to leave an open spot for those as well. thus, you can simulate an underground somewhat, but not exactly. maybe we'll see subways added for real in an expansion pack.
so, even with the limitations in the game, the subway map is worth a look.
edit: i went back and raised the mountains another 50%. you may be right. it is a bit more dramatic.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Thanks K - I'm downloading Subway now (15 mins to go!). My thoughts on LU were that there would be no underground or tunnels but there would have to be lots of bridges both over rivers and other lines which would add to costs plus intersections in both directions with the Circle Line being the 1st target - but I still haven't got round to even giving it a try - too busy playing other peoples scenarios!
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I finally got things working. Believe it, or not, I think the whole problem was Win 98/ME won't play well with 768MB ram. I removed the 256 chip and all works fine, on both drives.
BTW! I did have the correct entries in the "System.ini" file, and everything else worked fine, including MSTS. I don't know why RRT3 didn't like the extra memory.
Go figure.
Anyway, I played Rocky Roads for about 6 hours Sunday (with no problems). Had track stretching the whole map. I don't remember what year the map started, but I played until around 1990. If I remember right, I ended up with a 256 mil CBV and no outstanding debts.
I love the detail of the terrain on this map. Excellant work Kra.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Well K I'll stick it here cos I'm in this post but I've checked through Metro - what a map - must have taken hours (Days/weeks/months) it's a totally brilliant concept but (as you implied) it is rather difficult to actually play on. Makes Rocky Road positively easy!
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
how odd. defective ram? paging problem? i know win98 has a bit of a problem with paging over a certain limit, but that it was actually causing the program a serious problem seems odd to me. oh well, glad ya got it going :)
256 mil cbv, eh? hmmm, guess i shld have made this thing tougher ;)
but you got the point of the map, i think, the detail work from the aerial photo. and yes, i like this too.
and thanks :)
it did take hours. it was one of those things that you work on, then work some more, then get another flash and add more and so on, ad infinitum. i still go back and add things now and then. and yes, by comparison, rocky road is a walk in the park, whether that park was made from an aerial shot or done from scratch :)
i'm quite tempted to do another now, one which is actually laid out a bit more sanely and planned on paper and complete and where the scales of things match up better. just do a network of 'subways' and 'elevateds' in a proper city and make it a city management map, rather than a build your own type system. then again, it might be fun to make a 'mad hatters' type map with everything going hither and yon and let the player try and straighten it up ;)
i'd be quite interested if you've got any ideas to make the 'subways' better somehow. the turns and stations for them take up a lot of room and make for some clunky depressions. it really needs a more elegant solution, but not sure i could do it without poptop's coding help. still, if you've got any suggestions, i'd love to hear them.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I don't think it is defective ram. I tried it in my other computer and seems to work fine. Oh well! This one does just fine with 512, so I'll leave well enough alone, for now.
I forgot to mention, I played in Easy mode.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
wrote:
If I can get round to creating a map I was going to see if I could do anything with the London Underground.
you could have it that you put the london underground in a big gorge rather than in tunnels and forget about putting london on top or you could do a load of interlinked tunnels. 1st method better railroad representation 2nd includes london.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
on easy? oh my. that map is already pretty easy ;)
i've been re-working it a bit on pj's suggestion of raising the mountains higher. it looks better that way. so then i had to re-do the zones for resources and i may add another event or two as well.
but every time i load that map up i'm impressed with the look of the thing. those aerial maps just make ****** good terrain, if i do say so myself. now, if i can just get pjay to make a better interface on the bmp2gmp and gmp2bmp and combine the two into one utility with a browse for file selection.... ;)
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
kreilin you have hit the problem on the nose. i once got the wrong type for my computer so it is either defective or wrong type. either way it can be easily rectified with new ram and anyway you dont need that much. 256 is real max. needed even for xp.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
well, it's prolly not defective if he got that same stick to work in another machine, but it could be a wrong type situation. modern motherboards are doing some odd things with ram slots these days, giving as many as 4 slots, but two slots will take one type of ram and two others will take another type and there's some other considerations in there as well, but i forget all that's being done; maybe some of it is ram speed also. at any rate, it's not that surprising to find out that removing one stick actually fixed things. i have a dutch friend that ran into the same problem with one of his machines when he added a third stick.
then again, hawk's other programs were working, so maybe it's just the game that didnt like it and some odd config thing with the game.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Actually guys, both sticks are PC133 DDR. The only difference is one is 512 and the other is 256.
It seems strange to me too, since it only affected RRT. What really seems strange is MSTS ran fine with both sticks installed, and RRT ran fine, for a while, then it just decided it didn't like the extra stick. Even after RRT decided it didn't like the second stick, MSTS still seemed happy.
I made Gibraltar with both sticks installed.
Go figure!!!!!!!!!
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Quote: I don't know why RRT3 didn't like the extra memory.
Some of the tricks I've used over the years have shown me that IF the two or three memory chips are different, either brands or sizes or marginally in speed, even if RATED the same, chaniging the order sometimes solves the problem. Even though two stirips are rated the same speed, that does not mean they are always identical and the .5% difference could cause all kinds of problems in only one game, if it is sensitive. Where the main ram is used by the video chip as well, again switching them around can make a diffference, particularly if the sizes are different, since the video may in some cases be bridging from one strip to the next and taking a strong dislike to that bridge over troubled speed bumps. Switching them around puts that same video in the middle of the other strip then.
So there are a bunch of possibilities even if you think all is equal in speed.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Thanks for the tip RS. Unfortunatly, that didn't work either.
Oh well! Everything works just fine with 512. I think I'll leave well enough alone.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Great map! Thanks! I enjoyed being able to just run a profitable railroad and build up some businesses without having to meet some objective.
For a twist I put the map in the editor and changed the start date to 1845. That was fun UNTIL I tried crossing the river to get to all the cheap iron ore, coal and oil. No suspension bridges available until 1895. ACK!
In every play of the game I set up and "industrial park" north of Goosebury, about half way up the map. My trains made good money filling the supply chain between the park, Goosebury and the warehouses. Even made a bit of change running express rail.
It will be nice to see more maps like this one based on the aerial photographs. Very realistic! Good job!
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
i do have another in the works, but i've been neglecting it lately. oh, and it does have an objective, but you can always strip that out to your liking
the aerial maps were obtained from the microsoft terra server, if you're interested in trying some yourself.