Building placement terrain defect

[tobias02]

Hello there!

I'm Tomas and I love Railroad Tycoon 3 as much as you do. But I hate this:
Imagine a smooth hill-climbing railroad while a building erects nearby and causes a steep cliff spike. Aaaargh, right?

Well, how about modding the game so that building placement won't modify the terrain but build a concrete "basement" under itself?

Thanks for your opinions! Meanwhile, happy railroading!
Tomas

[RulerofRails]

Hi Tomas,

Unfortunately modding RT3 isn't very easy. Virtually everything that is currently possible is the result of some clever individuals (needs lots of stubbornness and determination) reverse engineering a certain file structure. Doing things to the exe is another matter. Milo, a programmer, managed to add some features to create 1.06, but this took him a lot of time. He doesn't have time anymore.

I also wish the deformation was less extreme. Bad news is that this is controlled within the exe. Even if you were a competent programmer (I'm not) dissecting something like this in the exe would at best be described a "pain" and probably use lots of time.

The sort of things that I would suggest are work-arounds. Not a proper solution, but with some of the desired effects (maybe some undesirable ones as well). One idea is that you could use the editor to paint some extra "reserved cells" on the slopes to give more room for your railway to pass through.

If you want to try this, first load the map in the editor. Now chose the 3rd option in the special editor toolbar (along RHS of screen): a brush symbol. Then among the paint options you will find a option shaped like this: ⃠. This has the option to "lock" (reserve) cells (currently locked cells shown in purple). With the tool you can paint in extra reserved cells in the problem areas. Please note that any city has a mandatory "cross" pattern of reserve cells. These can never be truly removed, even if you paint over them with the un-lock tool, they will be re-drawn by the game when you save the map. It's not much, but maybe it could help relieve the issue in some situations.

[Gumboots]

The other old trick is to simply pause the game and Ctrl+E into the editor whenever you find a building has borked your track. Then use the terrain smoothing tools to make it reasonable again, before exiting back to the game and resuming it. It usually only takes a minute.

This is a common practice when playing RT3. Changing any terrain anywhere to make it easier is a kind of cheating, but smoothing random lumps thrown into a game by the .exe is considered to be fair.

[tobias02]

Hey guys!

Thanks a lot! I didn't know you could enter editor in-game. It's Shift+E actually (Steam), but it saves my life. :)
Regarding mods, I thought you have access to source code. Otherwise we're talking obvious impossibility here.

Happy New year!
Tomas

[Gumboots]

Yes, Shift+E. My mistake. I've used it often enough, so I should know.

We don't have access to source code.