Cargo weight revamping

[Gumboots]

Here, someone test this for me on their box. It's the complete set, A to H eras inclusive. The problem era is E, from 1925 to 1949.

Installation is the standard deal: back up anything you think should be backed up, then copy the files to the relevant folders.

Edit: Zip removed. Debugged version is a few posts down the page.

[RulerofRails]

My memory on the smoking P8 is quite vague. I'll look at it, and give the new files a run.

[RulerofRails]

Unfortunately, I get smoke too.

Yeah, the P8 sort of hazes a bit at rest, which isn't really that bad. These things are belching, wow!

I tried a little messing with the .car files and I don't think it's a bug with that specific spot in the list or ID because if I call other models for example the D 3dp file, that works correctly. Did you try to see if these cars do the same thing as singles?

[Gumboots]

The P8 tender will belch the same way at times, but not always. It's intermittent. The "hazing at rest" is just the game's normal locomotive steam files. When the tender belching smoke kicks in it's really noticeable.

Anyway I just made a complete new test installation, with everything set back to default. E era covered hoppers still belch, so at least we know for sure it's something to do with that particular car. I'll repack them a couple of different ways and see if it makes any difference.

[Gumboots]

Found a fix. I repacked everything so the E era was renamed to a W era. IOW, xHopCoverE everywhere was just changed to xHopCoverW. For some weird reason (and I have no idea why) this fixes the car so it doesn't smoke. What the heck. It works. I'll take it.

Screenshot and debugged zip are attached.

(Oh and just for the record, I tried repacking them as single cars too but that didn't help)

Edit: Forgot one edit in that zip. New zip uploaded.

[RulerofRails]

Tried the updated zip (RC2). Worked after changing the .car file references for the W-era from "E" to "W". No smoke.

[Gumboots]

Edit: Forgot one edit in that zip. New zip uploaded.

Fixed. Grab RC3.

[Gumboots]

Found another dumb limitation in the game. Cargo models can only be applied to a body, not to trucks. On trucks the cargo model simply won't be called, even if the file exists. The screenshot shows what happens. Although correctly skinned cargo models for coal and iron are in the PK4, all that's visible is the underlying base skin of crushed rock.

This is a bit of a nuisance, since it means that to get the right look for double and triple open hoppers there will need to be a specific car type for each cargo, with the cargo skinning built in. Fortunately this is not difficult, since all it means is some copying and mass renaming of files, along with a bit of skin tweaking, and some minor hex file edits.

Anyway at least they all appear to be working.

[Gumboots]

Ok, open hoppers are done too, at least for 1.05. There are three separate classes for bauxite, coal and iron so they all get the right cargo skins. When I get around to doing 1.06 stuff, might as well have specific ones for ore and rock too, but for the moment I'm only doing 1.05 cargoes.

Have all been tested. All work. H era looks like the screenshot. Files are in the zip. Installation is the usual procedure.

Edit: Zip removed due to later version being made.

[Gumboots]

Alllllllllllllllllllllllllll righty then tankers. Seven of them.

Yes I know I said next week, but they were so easy to finish and I was on a roll. They look like this:

Installation is the usual deal. Weights for each era are:

A (pre-1875) - 7.6 tons
B (1875-1899) - 10.6 tons
C (1900-1924) - 14.5 tons
D (1925-1949) - 21.5 tons
E (1950-1974) - 29.8 tons
F (1975-1999) - 39.8 tons
G (2000-9999) - 50.0 tons

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Edit: Old zip removed. New and better pack available on this link.

[Gumboots]

Looking good! Single tankers sounds good. I think it would be nice to sort of mimic what trains are using in bulk (a generalization), making those the doubles. The ones you have done so far seem to reflect this IMO. I would suggest making double boxcars before a certain point (1950ish).

Had another thought about this. Since I'm doubling up (or possibly tripling) the tiny A era shopping trolleys anyway, and capping off the series with double well cars for the H era, there's a multi-boxcar theme going already. So that got me thinking about what else would be good.

I whipped up a model for a PRR X58 (50 foot low cube) since they were a common US car of the 60's to 80's, and as they're not high cube would still look reasonable in a non-US context. Hooked up two of them as a double unit and laid out a consist alongside the well cars. The result is they're a bit too big IMO. Although the theoretical difference in carrying capacity is about right for the actual weight change, visually the double X58's tend to look a bit bigger just because of the way the volumes are arranged.

So then I had a brainwave. There's no real reason why both cars in a double unit have to be the same. I reckon I can do them by combining an X58 with a PS-1 (40 foot low cube) on the one skin image. It will work, and it knocks back the size of the G era units so they fit nicely with the well cars, and also gives them a shorter and more manageable wheelbase. Fits with the era pretty well too, since PS-1's were built until the early 60's and some did last into the 80's.

So then of course I started thinking about the 1925-1939 F era, which is when I discovered the B&O M53 wagontop. These were nifty critters, made out of CorTen steel and as strong as battleships. Some of them lasted 50 years in service, which is good going for a glorified tin can. I'm rather taken with these, so am thinking the F era should team up an M53 with an AAR 1937, just for fun.

Edit: Sorta like this...

[RulerofRails]

I like this idea.

They look good too. Open doors is an interesting concept. Are they meant to be empties?

[Gumboots]

The open doors is just me being lazy. For a quick whip-up I just used whatever shots I had handy that were close to a straight profile shot. Some of these have open doors, since they were shot in a yard rather than out on the tracks. For actual use in the game I think closed doors would be the way to go. In practice cars would never (or very rarely) have been run over any distance with the doors open.

I've since thought about it some more, and more or less decided just to go with straight AAR '37 cars for the F era. I like the wagontops, but having them every second boxcar just doesn't feel right to me. The X58/PS-1 combo feels and looks right, but the M53/AAR'37 combo doesn't. Here's a shot with all PS-1's for the F era, compared to the AAR'37/M53 combination. I also threw in the E era USRA 40 footers.

However Goods, Rubber and Weapons were going to have their own individual cars anyway because cargo icons won't work with them, and I was going to do Ammunition similarly to Weapons just for the heck of it, so some of those could go in double wagontops just for fun. They kinda look like tanks, so maybe just use them for the military freights.

[RulerofRails]

Sounds Good!

[Gumboots]

Hey I've looked up a few more things, which means trouble. The early RT3 covered hoppers are totally fictional. I always thought they looked stupid, and it's because somebody just made them up. Covered hoppers weren't in use before the 1930's. All cargoes that we're used to thinking of as covered hopper cargoes were carried in boxcars before then.

Freight Car Friday – USRA Standard Freight Cars

Note the lack of any flat, tank, stock, reefer, or covered hoppers from the list. Covered hoppers had not really come into vogue yet. Most of the commodities we now associate with them were hauled in boxcars in 1918.

70 Ton 2-Bay Covered Hopper

History: In the 1930's ACF introduced a new covered hopper which would allow bulk shipments of dry materials. Previously these were packaged and resulted in hand loading and unloading. These commodities included cement, dry chemicals, flour, grain, sand, sugar and many others. The first cars where shipped in October 1936 and had a capacity of 1958 cubic feet.

So really that's what we ought to have: boxcars before 1925 (just because of era change years) and ACF hoppers between 1925 and 1950. Which aint gonna happen right now, but should be on the to-do list for future improvements. TBH the RT3 hoppers are all wrong anyway, so really need a full revamp at some point.
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Anywayz, boxcars. I think the way to go is what's shown in the shot.

The 7 triple A era cars really are a bit much in terms of visuals with A era locomotives, but the way I figure it A era locos won't be hauling a full 7 cars + cabooose anyway. They usually do well with 4 or 5 car consists, which means triples will look good with them. Using triples also simplifies things in some ways. With the central unit being the body file a cargo icon be applied, and hovering the cursor over the body during gameplay brings up the cargo name. That's handy when the icon is too far away to be clearly visible, and is a bit of a fault with the double units.

The doubles have such a small body unit that it can be hard to target with the cursor, and hovering over the trucks doesn't bring up the cargo name. What I'm thinking is that really double units should have a transparent body patch to increase the targetable area for the cursor.

It may be possible to get away with one patch on the centreline, or it may need one either side to work properly. Will test it and find out.
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Oh and the M53 wagontops look good as military boxcars, even though in reality they would usually have been used for general haulage.

[Gumboots]

Just found a minor bug in the tanker pack. The right side graphics for the rear truck on the D era tanker are borked. Dunno how it happened, but somehow the verts got screwed up on the UV mapping. Easy to fix (already done in Blender) so I'll repack them soonish. Will have a thorough check for other bugs first.

[Gumboots]

Have been playing around with a few things, and reading up a bit more. I'd really like to have a proper freight hauler right from the start, in 1830. That way the more gutless Planet can be used for express until the Adler comes along. The LMR were obviously thinking along the same lines not long after they got Planet, because in 1831 they bought a 0-4-0, which they called Samson. This had about 80% more grunt than Planet, and I've found a good drawing for it.

So the Samson idea is looking good. Mesh is pretty much done, and skinning won't be difficult. While messing around with it I had a brainwave about A era freight cars. Like most PopTop stuff, the dinky little A era freights never looked right. Tripling the hoppers gives good consist length, but the poly count is getting a bit on the high side when you have a lot of them.

The brainwave came when I was adjusting the mesh on Samson's tender. I remembered that high grade coal in lumps is about the same average density as water, and of course tenders are designed to carry coal and water, and are designed to the right axle loading for the rails and for tender-sized wheels. So, if you were an 1830's car builder looking to make a general purpose hopper, the obvious no-brainer option would be to make it about the same size and volume as a tender of the period.

Ok, grab the mesh for the A era hoppers (my ones, which have already been messed with) and mess around with that some more. Turns out if you scale them up by 20% for length and height, they end up around the same size as an 1830's tender. Put them together in a consist and they fit perfectly with a locomotive and caboose of the time. Even better, they look the part as doubles, which means poly count can be cut by 1/3 compared to using dinky little triples. This is pure win. Which makes me wonder why I never thought of it before.

And then I found some pictures of the LMR that were drawn by people on the spot in the 1830's. Sure enough, the average freight car was about the size of a tender. There you go.
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So there will be an update to the hopper packs to sort out the A era, and there will be a new freight hauler for the early 1830's.
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[Gumboots]

So five years later...

...I have actually done a bit more. Amazing, huh?

Got enthused about the game again, and since I was playing express took a look at the putative new express pack thingy again. I've figured out a better solution than what I had before. The B, C and D cars for pax, mail, dining and the A, B, C and D car for troops all use the same basic skins. The troops ones are just done in a different colour, and the mail cars have different doors and windows, and the dining car has extra racing stripes compared to the pax car. The troops car uses a slightly different model to the others (clerestory details only) but the others all use exactly the same model for any given era.

I've figured out (d'oh) how to make the cars get bigger without just stretching the skin and without borking things. The idea is to do the longer ones with two-piece sides, so the windows and lettering stay the right size and the number of windows can increase on the bigger cars. The UV's overlap on the skin, so it effectively makes the skin longer. This looks a lot better than what I had before.

So having figured that out I just ran some tests, to make sure the skins I had planned look ok under RT3's infamous evil game lighting. Made a few different sets to try out, and have got them pretty sorted now. These were all just tested on the default C era models, not the new custom models (which are still in Blender). Obviously the troops cars will stay the same colour. Out of the pax/mail/dining cars I like the dark brown, light brown and royal blue ones the best. The grey ones aren't bad either, but the green ones will probably get dropped.
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[bombardiere]

Thank you for continuing this project and bringing new life to RT3.

The previews look great. I kind of like green coaches. Unless you think those look too much Troop coaches. To my eye, the grey ones are least attractive. I am sure that some one can find of an example of grey passenger coach* ;), but I feel that that passenger companies used bright colours.

(* Okey, I immediately thought one. SECR. South Eastern and Chatham Railway. Their coach were kind of mid grey. )

I am still playing 1.05 close to vanilla, so I have yet tested all this wonderful new wagons. However, one thing. I think that I partially know the answer and I am sure that you guys have been thinking this.

Multiple wagon. Do I understand correctly that when there is a two or three wagons grouped together, the game cargo does not change and it still count as one car load delivered?

It would be nice that it could be changed so that when there is two wagons together, I would get money for two car loada. But my guess is that it is hardcoded in .exe and cannot be changed. This extra revenue would make longer trains even more attractive and justify using a slow freight engine.

My pet peeve with slow freight engines is that because they are slow, it takes a long time to complete the run (d'uh) and their overall revenue is low in comparison to faster engines which can make more runs in the same time.

I could use scenario set up and increase cargo prices, but that could wreak industry / game balance. So I would rather see more cargo load delivered than increased price.

[Gumboots]

Yes, I was worried about them looking too much like troop cars. TBH I really like the old Northern Pacific express livery, but IMO it looks a bit too troopy. Although once everything is set up it would be easy to reskin cars to suit personal preference, if anyone wanted to do that.

And yes, numbers of loads is locked into the .exe and can't be changed. The double cars are just eye candy. Increasing cargo prices tends to make the game economy misbehave. If you want to increase rail profits, you can always reduce loco maintenance costs and/or purchase price. You could also reduce track maintenance costs, which would further boost rail profits. Even a reduction in sand, water and oil consumption will help, due to the greater range meaning fewer service stops. There's more than one tool available to adjust profitability of rail.