Locomotive fixes for 1.06

[Gumboots]

Yeah ok. Will have to use readme's in the directories then, because I'm not keen on new modders (or even old ones) having to figure out what is used for what. For that matter we can even have a readme inside each loco's PK4. The game wont mind.

[Hawk]

Easiest way is to try it and see if anyone grumbles about a particular map crashing. If nobody grumbles, I'd say that means no problem. If things can be rationalised, that'd be great.

One thing to remember is that most of the people that download files from this site aren't members in the forum, so you would never hear from them.

[Gumboots]

Been thinking about what to tackle next after the P10/BR39. I've decided that I am going to use the Furness Class 115 as the replacement for the "2-6-4 Suburban Tank". Yes, it's a 4-6-4 but it's the right timeframe for the existing slot (build date 1920-21) and it's comparatively clean and easy to model. I'll want something easy after the P10.

The FR Class 115 has another benefit, in that a lot of the basic modelling can be shared with the Stanier Black 5 (which happens to be next down the list of 1.06 locos). It would also make a good basis if someone wanted to make an LNER V3. The Black 5 it will share some stuff with would make a good basis for some of the British express locos like the LMS Royal Scot, GWR King or SR Lord Nelson if anyone felt like making those later. So, knocking off the FR Class 115 and LMS Black 5 seems like a logical next step.

Given that tank locomotives did have some use outside of Europe, I'm thinking the tank should probably be given World availability too (at the moment it's only Europe).

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ETA: Just thought of something else. There seems to be a bit of a desire for extra tank locomotives for UK/Euro scenarios. I don't want to get into making tooooooooooo many locos at this stage but....

....it did occur to me that perhaps adding a 4-4-2T would be a good idea. These were first introduced by the London, Tilbury & Southend Railway in 1880, and were in service until the early 1930's. The 4-4-2T configuration was very popular in the UK in the early 20th century, so having an early representative of the type that could carry through until the larger Furness 115 becomes available would make a certain amount of sense. It would fill a large gap in the current suburban/short haul loco lineup.

The Furness 115 was withdrawn from service by 1940, which just happens to be around when the LNER V3 came into service (1939 onwards). The V3 kept going until the end of steam in the UK. As I mentioned before, a Furness 115 model would be a very good basis for an LNER V3 anyway (and not half bad for an L,T & S Class 1 either) so this would be an obvious option for rounding out the tank locomotive roster.

If we do it this way, we can use the existing 262t .lco and .car files for the V3, so the name actually makes sense (coz it's a 2-6-2T innit), and add extra files, with names that also make sense, for the Class 1 and Class 115. This would give suburban tank locomotive coverage from 1880 right through until the 1960's, would keep the file naming sane, and in terms of modelling and skinning shouldn't be too horrendous.

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Regarding "balancing": personally I wouldn't be too worried about balancing the tank locos as part of a "smooth progression" with the other steamers. The way I figure it, people only want tank locos so they can have some specifically suburban locos for specifically suburban routes/scenarios. This makes the tank locos effectively a category of their own, unrelated to the other steamers. I would expect that scenario authors would allow and disallow locos that suited their storyline, and that people who were interested in such things would use tanks only where they thought tanks should be used.

If anyone decides to use one of the tank locos on a long haul route you can't stop them doing that, but I wouldn't worry about it. I'd just treat any tank locos as things that had to be balanced against each other, not as part of the entire roster.

[Gumboots]

The thing about using the Dining car and loco with good passenger rating is that it increases not just the Passenger haulage profit, it increases the Hotel profits, and this increases the Weighted Demand from other cities, which increases the haulage profits, which increases the Demand which increases hotel profits, which increases Passenger Production, and on and on and on. As I mentioned, this has a snowball effect that most players are not aware of because they have only tried a Hotel or two and saw rather mediocre results and abandoned the idea of bothering with them. The key to getting the Passenger snowball rolling is to get 3-4 Hotels and one or two R/T's in each city. Most people look at the profit from a single Hotel and think "Bah, it made ~$10k, this aint worth bothering with". , but that is incorrect, because if a Hotel generates even a single load of Passengers that gets hauled, the profit from that will be ~$30-$40k, meaning the actual return from that $100k investment is 30-50% per year- often more if properly optimizing the Passenger haulage.

Just got around to trying this on low_grade's Chile map, last time I played it.

As usual, I put a hotel in some of the largest cities. Some profit but not much. Proceeded to put one hotel and one restaurant in every city, regardless of size or current number of passengers. Not long after, big piles of passengers everywhere, and hotels and restaurants making decent returns. Didn't try to push it further with multiple hotels in each city, but the principle seems sound.

The next question is what do you do with said huge piles of passengers, given that shipping them all will require more trains which will slow down freight. The Chile map is freight-heavy and lucrative anyway, so probably not the best one for trying out mass passenger strategies. Still, if anyone ever needs to generate lots of passengers fast, this seems to be the way to do it. It could be very useful on a map where freight is scarce and you need some haulage.

Worth a try.

[Gumboots]

Found some info on caboose weights, which may be useful if we want to correct the excessively heavy caboose that comes with the game.

Looks like a 1903 caboose only weighed about 2 tons: http://research.nprha.org/NP%20Cabooses ... 00-399.jpg

A mid-1930's caboose seems to have been about 20 tons, which is the same weight as an RT3 express car of the same era, IIRC.

http://research.nprha.org/NP%20Cabooses ... 201537.jpg

I assume these weights would be similar for most countries, since the contents of a caboose wouldn't change much.

[Gumboots]

Hey, we haz new Blender export toys!

So, being currently in kid-in-a-candy-shop sort of mood, I've been looking at various possibilities. I went and imported a few default models into Blender, with UV mapping intact, to see how it all went. Then I thought about my old promise of fixing some of the gruesome bits on 1.06 locos. Some of them are still so far off what they should be that they're not worth trying to fix. It'd be just as easy, and a lot better, to just build new ones from scratch (DX Goods, Suburban Tank. Black 5, etc).

OTOH, the G4 and G10 aren't too bad, in that the RT3 models they were based on are of locos they were closely related to IRL: the S3 and the P8. This means fixing up the G4 and G10 isn't that big a deal, and doesn't require complete rebuilds. So, just for the heck of it I made a start on the G4. Have only spent a couple of casual hours playing around with it, but it's already a lot closer to a G4. I haven't made new connecting rods and coupling bars yet, but those will actually be some of the easiest parts to do.

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Edit: had a bit of a go at the G10 too.

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[Gumboots]

Hey I had a brainwave. The 1.06 Suburban Tank has always been rubbish and everyone hates it. So I wondered if there was a default PopTop loco that was decent, and that had enough space on the skin image to get a bunker behind the cab, just as a quick and easy fix that wouldn't evolve into another major project right now.

Turns out the P8 does pretty well for this job too. It already has the tender as part of the loco's skin image, which apart from making it an easy possibility for double heading (which also applies to the G10) means it can be mutated slightly into a pretty decent 2-6-4T. It's not a model of any specific German tank loco, but is in the general style used there and in other parts of Europe.

The amount of work required to get it going is fairly trivial, although skin and mesh still need a little bit of a tidy up, and I think it's a big improvement on what we have at the moment. If people agree and think it's worth having, I'll knock it into shape and pack it up for distribution.

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[Gumboots]

I can just tell you guys are brimming with enthusiasm for decrepit little German choofers. Nonetheless, these are fixes for 1.06 locomotive bugs, and they're quick and easy fixes that don't involve high poly results. Poly counts will be no greater than the originals.

So the Suburban Tank is just about finished. Part of the reason it's been so quick is because it's all done on the default P8 skin. No gfx work required. I should be able to finish it tonight my time. It has already been revamped for better proportions, has had side tanks added, and has been given a 24-sided cylinder just for the smokebox, since the P8's octagonal one was too in yer face without the smoke deflectors to hide it a bit. Extra verts for the smokebox, but saved some in other places. Now it just needs a little tidying up of the main frame side plates and front truck to sort some graphics there, then it can be exported to .3dp and given a slight tweaking of length points, track points, and truck attachments.

And, just because it's hardly any more work, and just because I can, I'll do it as a double-header as well.

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[Hawk]

Your projects are coming along nicely. Keep up the good work.

[Gumboots]

Aha! Amazing what you find when idly looking around on a Sunday morning.

1.06 has a DX Goods included, for the obvious reason that it was one of the most iconic locomotives of the period, had a long service life, and was built in huge numbers. Unfortunately, getting something that actually resembles a DX Goods into 1.06, instead of what's there now, was a bit tricky due to lack of available detail.

So this morning I was thinking about possibly modelling some of the very early Australian locomotives. It turns out that the first one ever still exists, which I didn't know (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Locomotive_No._1). Dimensions and good quality, modern, detail shots are readily available, and I can even go and see the real thing next time I'm in Sydney. This is all relevant because it was built in the same period, and by the same engineers, as the original DX Goods. It's almost identical in many ways, since it's really just a 0-4-2 variant of the DX, and will be useful for modelling both locomotives. Once this one is done, slight changes will give a very accurate DX Goods with very little extra effort.

This will all be handy for maps like the "Across the Blue Mountains" map, where the available 1.05 and 1.06 locomotives bear no resemblance to what was actually used at the time.

[Hawk]

You go man. Lookin' forward to all these new locos in the archives.

[Gumboots]

I've been checking out a few other things. The inclusion of the Vittorio Emanuelle II in 1.06 is, quite frankly, bloody annoying. There is next to no information available about it. There is, as far as I can tell, only one grainy little photo of it on the entire internet. There are several drawings that people have done, but all of these contradict each other, as well as contradicting the one available photo of the actual locomotive. This means that the only thing we can be sure of is that all the drawings are wrong, since the photo has to be right. The photo doesn't show all that much detail, but shows enough to make it clear that this locomotive would be quite complex to model.

Ok, so:

1/ there's virtually nothing that could be used to construct a reasonable model of the thing, and

2/ it's as ugly as an outhouse on wheels, and

3/ it was only ever used for one short line in one small area of Italy, and

4/ it'd be a mongrel to model anyway, if anyone were ever to attempt it, and

5/ it wasn't built in large numbers and did not have a particularly long service life, and

6/ it's not really representative of anything much, since it was so specialised.

Why is it in 1.06 at all? AFAICT, it's only there because it just happened to be the first 4-6-0 on the European continent. The only other thing it has to recommend it is grade climbing ability, but even then it's not really an advance over the old Connie. Comparing all the stats for both, I'd rather have a Connie 99% of the time.

Conclusion: the Vittorio Emanuelle II, which should be called the FS 650 anyway, is a waste of time. Why should I even bother trying to fix it? It'd make much more sense to choose something else.

And while I think of it, why are some people obsessed with "balancing" every single locomotive in the entire pack against every single other locomotive in the entire pack? This doesn't make any sense to me. I can see the point of having locomotives within a given region, or within a given scenario, balanced against each other for different roles but I see no reason why a specifically European locomotive should have to be balanced against a specifically US locomotive, or why a UK one should have to be balanced against a German one.

The only reason for it is if people think creating new ones is impossible, and that therefore a very small roster has to handle everything. I think it'd be much more fun to just go ahead and make different loco packs for different regions, then swap .lco and .car files to suit the map you're playing. So if you're playing US you could copy/paste in the US pack and have US locos running around, and if you're playing Euro you paste in the Euro pack. Or, given the ease with which RT3 directories can be copied, you could simply have several complete and separate installations to play UK/Euro/US/World/Whatever-you-like.

Doing it like this would be more fun during gameplay, and would vastly simplify the whole "balancing" thing.

[RulerofRails]

And while I think of it, why are some people obsessed with "balancing" every single locomotive in the entire pack against every single other locomotive in the entire pack?

What I see is that people like to give their favorite locos great specs. At the end of the day, whoever spends the time to make an engine has the right to put whatever specs they want on it. It may be true that this Vittorio Emanuelle II engine was someone's favorite engine and hence made it into 1.06 in the first place. (Personally, I never use this engine because it is a bit crude.)

I do like the idea of balancing the engines. I feel that purchase cost could do with more dramatic differences. The better engines should cost more. If I have an option I want it to be a decision instead of having the latest wonder engine that will perform all duties, cost little, and be cheap to run. Perhaps, Europe, North America, and World may be enough classifications to start with. I agree that there is no need to balance the stats of those from different regions together.

How can I say this? Because new locos don't show up in existing maps unless the map maker used a switch such as "Enable all European engines", there is little potential scope for balance conflicts in existing maps. If a player adds new engines to an existing map, they change the strategy of the scenario in some way. If the new locos cause the scenario to become unbalanced, that's their fault, not the map maker's (who has perfect control over the availability and performance of the engines in his scenario). Still, having standard specs that are unique but fairly comparable to the others does save these players who want to play with more engines on maps that weren't designed for such from figuring out and then applying the level adjustments they prefer, if they so happen to find that these engines are "unbalanced".

PS.
Gumboots, don't want to go off-topic. Just wondering briefly your thoughts: lately, while not having lots of time for RT3, I have been thinking over some ideas to try to adjust the economics of the game. Just using the adjustment possible from changing demand amounts and pricing. The idea is to up demand levels to consume stuff faster from the map. This especially applies to house demand levels. But at the same time to drop the price of most cargoes. Potentially this could drop industry profits, and prevent lots of the re-haul kind of trips that most trains drag that are oh-so unrealistic. Would be a mod of sorts. Your view?

[Gumboots]

Going a bit off topic is ok by me. My last post was largely just venting anyway. I was feeling a bit fed up with the bog awful things that had been left in 1.06 on the basis that somebody else would fix them later.

I agree some locos get over-specced due to the creator's enthusiasm for them. The Schools class I have in beta needs the free weight wound back a bit. They were good locos, and I want it to be good, but at the moment it's a bit too good for realism (hauls full 8 car freight consists at close to 80 mph, given a good run).

WP&P was saying via email that he thought the game really needed more difference in weight between freight and express. I tend to agree, since many express locos are utterly useless as soon as they get a sniff of a grade, whereas in real life they weren't like that at all. Some express locos (Schools class and VR S class, just to name two) were deliberately designed to be good on grades. The devs tried to balance the game by letting express locos be fast on dead flat terrain, but useless on grades, and I don't think that works so well. It just leads to people ignoring them as soon as terrain isn't dead flat (or at least it sure does with me). Making freights heavier so that you need a real grunter to get them up hills, but leaving express weights the same, would give scope for reasonable express performance on grades without allowing everything to be hauled by a Pacific or whatever. I think we should look at this sometime.

(Edit: Another possibility would be to reduce express weights as well, if simply increasing freight weights causes reliability problems with freight locos. If express weights are reduced, express locos could have their free weight and pulling power wound back slightly to compensate. This might be a good approach, since my long term testing recently indicates that faster locos carry a greater reliability penalty for the same nominal rating.)

About purchase price: not entirely sure here. I know the default loco stats often make no sense. There are really good ones, and really useless ones, and their purchase price and annual maintenance cost often bear no particular relation to anything discernible. That annual maintenance cost (with its hard-coded escalation year on year) is the real limit on how long they are worth keeping before you chuck 'em, and it's pointless having a reliable loco that rapidly becomes too expensive to run. You might as well grab a less reliable one and throw it away on the same schedule. The American 4-4-0 is a prime example here. They're cheap to buy, and the annual maintenance is a huge percentage of the purchase price, with the result that in practice the poor reliability isn't relevant. I just flog them hard with max consists and chuck them away before they start breaking down. Anyone who runs Americans for ten years or more is just throwing profit away.

So to make reliability ratings be meaningful you really need to set the annual maintenance much lower for more reliable locos, which makes them cheaper in the early years. I suppose the obvious thing is to up the purchase price to counteract this, so that they're more expensive to buy but pay you back with longer service. That then gets you into a conflict with gameplay versus realism, since often more reliable locos weren't actually any more expensive than worse ones. Something bog simple and cheap could require far less maintenance and cash to keep it running than a Gresley A4. Meh.

And I agree about the map/scenario balance thing. Everyone wants more engines to play with, and that means adding more to maps that didn't have them. It doesn't only mean that, but that will be one of the effects in practice. The thing is I don't necessarily want to add super engines to all maps. One example is Arop's Tasmania map. I have thought that it could do with locos that actually matched what was used in the period. Frankly, they were pretty rubbish. That's exactly why the TGR decided to get themselves some Garratts as soon as those were invented. They were in serious need of some hauling power that could run on their lines. The Blue Mountains map is another example. If I code up a Number 1 or an E17 to use on that map instead of the current roster, it won't be because they will be better locos than a Connie. It'll be so the map can be played with locos that suit the place and period, even if that makes things a bit harder.

About the industry economics: if you decrease the price but increase consumption, those two things will counteract each other. How is that going to reduce the incentive to build or buy industry? I can't see it reducing industry profit. I can see it reducing re-hauls to some extent, which might be good. Also, I'm not sure I want to reduce the incentive to use industry in all scenarios, since micro-management of consists isn't all that much fun either. Tilting the balance towards micro-management isn't going to be appealing to many people. That seems to me like that sort of thing that might be better handled on a per scenario basis via events. You can't change consumption rates AFAIK (except for custom warehouses I suppose) but you can change cargo prices.

[RulerofRails]

It's a good idea to make a bigger difference between freight vs. express. I would like some clear documentation about the actual weights in comparison as the values that the game displays are going to have to be adjusted manually to get a preview of how one engine functions as a freight vs. an express engine. If one uses territory specific events, I believe that the displayed specs may become inaccurate anyway, but it's nice to know for reference and decision making.

I think you will find that speed hurts reliability like it hurts fuel consumption. Levels that work for slow traffic will seem very poor at 100mph. This is why, on expert level, RT3's vanilla Pacific can cost more for fuel in one year than it costs to buy in the first place. It's much faster than previous engines, but with a similar fuel consumption rating.

I agree that in history past, nobody knew how long a locos lifespan would be. I doubt there is a sensible way to code this into scenarios though. Would almost need a build-an-engine type of deal, unless performance of current engines was randomized by events based partly on decisions that the player makes. Maybe it's good for a couple of scenarios as a novelty, but doubt that it would be welcome in every scenario. In practical terms, I would tend to make the cheaper maintenance engines more expensive to give what you described: an engine that pays back by longer service. Otherwise, there is too much gain to be had economically by buying the better engines.

You are right that decreasing prices while increasing consumption counteract each other. I think this gives a pretty good assurance that a balance can be found for a new price level. I think that the 10% ROI of established industries is hard-coded, which will always remain a very solid investment potential. Industries aren't what I am trying to change though. Everything should stay automatic (no micro-managing, we have TM for that), but with lower prices, cargo should stick at its destination for longer as price changes between competing demands should be slower. Probably the changes are mainly going to affect the highest level consumption cargoes like Meat, Cheese, Diesel, Goods, etc.. Contributing to the reason I am thinking about this is the fact that the game's cargo price change events are fundamentally bugged in their application. They are always applied too many times, sometimes it just takes longer to surface. The main consumption rates I am considering changing are those for houses (available in the bca files). Most of the current rates are 0.10 or less. There is scope to increase these a lot. But still in the ideas/testing phase.

[Gumboots]

It's a good idea to make a bigger difference between freight vs. express. I would like some clear documentation about the actual weights in comparison as the values that the game displays are going to have to be adjusted manually to get a preview of how one engine functions as a freight vs. an express engine. If one uses territory specific events, I believe that the displayed specs may become inaccurate anyway, but it's nice to know for reference and decision making.

Yup, I can see territory-specific events borking the displayed stats. Global events shouldn't, since I think the game works the stats out on the fly anyway. I can't see how it could do anything else, since it already has to deal with non-standard locos that couldn't have been hard-coded into the game engine. AFAICT it just takes top speed, free weight and pulling power from the .lco files, then calculates the speeds for various loads and grades. This would be assuming full car loads for all cars, and in the case of freight would presumably be taking an average of the freight types as its base weight. Would be easy to test for this anyway.

In practical terms, I would tend to make the cheaper maintenance engines more expensive to give what you described: an engine that pays back by longer service. Otherwise, there is too much gain to be had economically by buying the better engines.

I think you'd have to work out the cumulative costs for a range of existing locos over varying periods of time, then tweak the more reliable ones so that purchase price was high enough to not make them an obvious no-brainer, but low enough so that they would still give an economic advantage over enough time. Then you would still have the (incalculable) advantage of fewer random breakdowns, giving a potentially bigger advantage to the more reliable ones. This would still leave a niche for less reliable locos for short term haulage.

Edit: and of course there's the possibility of making less reliable ones a bit more reliable by over-servicing them, since breakdown rate is tightly linked to oil level, and I suspect is loosely linked to water level too. It's also linked to loads hauled over time and grades encountered (ie: how hard the loco has to work).

I think that the 10% ROI of established industries is hard-coded...

I don't. I think it's just a normal product of how the cargo prices and demands were set. It can vary due to circumstances.

... but with lower prices, cargo should stick at its destination for longer as price changes between competing demands should be slower. Probably the changes are mainly going to affect the highest level consumption cargoes like Meat, Cheese, Diesel, Goods, etc.. Contributing to the reason I am thinking about this is the fact that the game's cargo price change events are fundamentally bugged in their application. They are always applied too many times, sometimes it just takes longer to surface. The main consumption rates I am considering changing are those for houses (available in the bca files). Most of the current rates are 0.10 or less. There is scope to increase these a lot. But still in the ideas/testing phase.

Yeah this stuff would require a fair amount of testing to see what would really happen. RT3 has some really odd emergent behaviour when you start changing things.

AFAICT the price change events aren't really bugged as such. It's more that they don't operate the way you'd instinctively expect, because all percentages are calculated on the basis of the original price rather than the current price. You can get around that by changing the percentage for each iteration.

[Gumboots]

So I still haven't done any more to the G4 and G10 models. I'll probably finish off the G10 when I'm looking for something simple and easy as a change from obsessing over the @$#%# Schools class (I really do have to stop taking that one too seriously). I'll just approach the G10 same way I did the revamped 2-6-4T Suburban Tank.

The G4 will probably take longer, because honestly it just doesn't appeal to me much and I've never given it much use anyway. However there is a partially completed model available if anyone else is keen on it.

What I have done recently, in between fixing other things, is to rough out replacements for the 1.06 LNER V2 and Gresley A1 (which is supposedly a Peppercorn A1 in 1.05). As you can see from the shots they have a lot in common. These aren't priority projects for me at the moment. Realistically I won't have time to finish them this year. I'll just play with them when I need a change from other things.

[bombardiere]

Hello

It is interesting to see some action here after so many years. Good. I haven't read all the posts, but it seems like you have been able to solve the 3D conversion barrier. Really Great.

I will not begin to defend the work I made with the locomotives in 1.06. Sloppy work yes, but we were limited in what could be done. Basically I had skills only to make holes in skins and swapping the wheel between different engines. And even that required tedious work with hex editor. That is why I was lazy and left connection rods out of some engines.

If you are doing locomotive fixes, I suggest that you skip my pack altogether and start from the fresh.

The inclusion of the Vittorio Emanuelle II in 1.06 is, quite frankly, bloody annoying ... Why is it in 1.06 at all? AFAICT, it's only there because it just happened to be the first 4-6-0 on the European continent.

No particular reason. I just found it in a book and thought it was common enough, matched somewhat to RRTIII model and as 4-6-0 it was useful. Most of the engine choices were bit random.

[Gumboots]

Hey Bomber's back.

Well if you want to do some more loco modelling we have the tools for it now. The modelling itself is very easy these days. Now it's the skinning that takes all the time and effort.

[bombardiere]

Well I need to look into the script and what else has happened during these years. Back then we only had an import script for the Blender, but no way to export models back to RRTIII.

Your engine projects are interesting. A Garrett has always been in my wishlist.

The Blender has a very steep learning curve and back then I wasn't able to master it. Since then I have used little GMAX - 3DS program family.

I am kind of tempted, but I am not a student anymore and I have lot less free time. And I have forgotten everything I knew. RRTIII is a great game, but I have always felt that it missed its potential. Possibly Poptop run out of money. However, no replacement has arrived. Sid Meier's Railroad was sadly a toy. There is a new game Train Fever and it looks interesting, but I feel that is more of a transport tycoon rather than a railroadtycoon and doesn't not offer a scope for transcontinental railroad.

P.S. Now it is a kind of obvious, but back then I didn't even realise that 3d models has a LOD. I thought it was with skins only.

P.S.S. However, the maximum engine number is hard coded in the program. Milo was able to stretch it little, but as far as I know, it cannot be pushed anymore, unless someone is willing to crack the program.