Rail Yard Structures

[WPandP]

As for the cars with Vista/1.05, I don't really know what might be going on, but as far as I know you might be the first person I've heard of who has been running 1.05 on Vista. The Yard structures are supposed to show up in the list right amongst the restaurant, hotel, etc.; I'm wondering whether there might be something about Vista that disagrees with mod content in general.

Do you have any other mods installed and working? In particular, do you have any extra engines (as these use the same ".CAR" file type to load all their resources)?

[Wooly]

Alright WP&P, I found out a few new twists.

First to answer your question, no I don't have any other mods installed. I just have your yard mods and a few of your car mods, iron, coal, reefer.

Second, I found out that your added structures are available to me in the editor, but not in a game. In any scenario, I can open the map and manually place a yard mod, and even the cereal building. Once the game starts the structures are not available to build from the menu, but they are still on the map, and they work, well, sort of. They do process loads. I am not sure about how well the yards attract their specific cargoes though. I will have to make a better map for testing tonight. I think I had cross demand fouling up my test. If they were working, their attraction was about that of a house, since they had similar loads of cargo at each.

I can not think of a reason the game should allow them to be built, but not allow them to be shown and chosen from a scenario. I think I will add them to a brand new map, and see if a new scenario, made after mod installation, affects that.

[WPandP]

I know that new industry-type buildings must be made available within the editor, in order to show up in a given scenario. This would be the case with the Cereal Company.

The Yards, though, were developed as "station services" like the Post Office, so that they would always be available, in any scenario.

As far as how much they attract loads, you're right, they are built to have very weak demand, like a house. If a demanding industry is near enough, its "demand footprint" will override the Yard, and you won't see much effect. They really are meant for long-distance hauls. They're also very sensitive to oversupply, so you can't just stockpile a bunch of cargo in your yards. An empty yard is an efficient yard!

[coruscate]

Thank you for the hard work, these are all excellent mods and have fleshed out my map quite nicely.

[WPandP]

I've gotten back around to finishing out the set of yard structures. Next up is the Grain Elevator. The available 3DP files for the body left me with few options, so I went for the most noticeable feature - the multiple silos. This building acts like the others, as a partial-demand for Grain, Rice, Corn, and Sugar. Place it in the center of a big agrarian area, and it will collect loads towards it, making pickup of these loads far easier.

Click the link to download a ZIP file, and follow the instructions inside to install it.

[coruscate]

Hey I just wanted to check since I'm getting a handle of all these BCA files and what not, in terms of actual supply, demand, etc, the yard structures simply eat a small amount of cars, they don't just take in a spit them back out like a station, right?

[WPandP]

Hey I just wanted to check since I'm getting a handle of all these BCA files and what not, in terms of actual supply, demand, etc, the yard structures simply eat a small amount of cars, they don't just take in a spit them back out like a station, right?

Correct - they are all set to "Demand Only" like houses, and have fractional demand rates like 0.1 load per year. This is just enough to make them function as load attractors, creating "hot spots" on the cargo value map.

[coruscate]

I'll be testing your new ones in my San Diego mod map. One last question, didn't you have these set up to be treated as "restaurants?" How does that affect revenue for these?

[WPandP]

As far as I know, they just lose a small amount of money consistently; you don't make profit off of a Yard. It isn't huge, but they do run red. I don't think passenger deliveries (which affect a real Restaurant's profit) have any effect, but I haven't tested this to know for sure. I just used the building category to which Restaurant, Post Office, Hotel, and Tavern all belong, it's not like the game thinks of it as a Restaurant.

[coruscate]

Okay, you did do the new coal mine right? I like the new production, it evens out a lot of maps where coal production is... lackluster. The regularity of the roof pattern gives it a "checkerboard" appearance that stands out really fast when I'm halfway zoomed in. Doubt there's anything that can be done for that.

Haven't worked too much with the other new structures just yet.

[WPandP]

It's called a Moire pattern, and it is the result of the mismatch of scale between the undulations of the corrugated roof in the skin and the graphic resolution at which you are running the game. If you have a powerful enough graphics card, and can turn on the anti-aliasing as well as run at high resolution, then this effect can be minimized. The makers of the game chose to handle it in two ways, though: first, they create step-down versions of each skin file, where the A version is largest (say 1024x1024), B is half that (512x512), and so on down to a 64x64 or even 32x32 version of the skin, which really is just an unrecognizable blob at that point. The game only uses the A skin when you are close enough to appreciate it; as you zoom out, it trades in the B and then C versions, etc. Effectively, what you are doing is pre-rendering the anti-aliasing when you create the B, C, D, etc. skins.

However, there is still a range in which the surface patterning can produce Moire patterns, and this leads to the second method they employed. This was to exaggerate the features and patterns. Thus, the apparent distance between adjacent corrugations in their skins would probably be about twice as much as I did in my skin. Shingles would be much bigger than they would be in real life, as would bricks or individual boards on a loading dock. I run my game on a fast system with good graphics, so I tend towards making skins with finer details, to try to be a bit more realistic. But I still run into the Moire effect you describe; I live with it as a trade off for the greater realism.

Thanks for your comments on the coal mine. I like it this way too, though they tend to be too profitable now, and always a good investment to purchase. Perhaps some minor edits could correct for this. But I like that I can now locate them on the map much more readily! Another building that is hard to find is the Oil Well... perhaps, now that we know how to edit .3DP files, someone will attempt to give this a larger footprint; the simplest method would be to set the well on a broad platform, which could be skinned to look like disturbed earth, but would at least clear out the trees around and serve to highlight the structure itself.

[coruscate]

Or perhaps take a building and cluster oil wells around it on a foot print like a farm? Probably too imaginative too be feasonable but if it was feasible, it'd probably be the most likeable option. Ned would know more than I, he did some "weird" things like that.

[herocrafter]

I know its been over a year since the last post here but does anyone recall if the marshalling yard was built?

[nedfumpkin]

what's the marshalling yard? There's a whole bunch of buildings made

[Blackhawk]

I don't know if they were built or not but the list was in the first post of what WPandP intended to create, his website says they are still "coming soon."

My intention is to create the following:
Stock Yard - for Livestock
Hopper Yard - for Bauxite, Coal, Iron
Icing Platform - for Alcohol, Cheese, Meat, Milk, Produce
Grain Elevator - for Corn, Grain, Rice, Sugar
Marshalling Yard - for Logs, Lumber, Pulpwood, Oil, Diesel
Classification Yard - for most other loads

[nedfumpkin]

I'm pretty sure that all that stuff is covered. WP&P and I finished a complete set.

[AT41B]

Would it be worth the effort to add rock or gravel to the "Hopper Yard" or is that something not very easy to do? I personally don't know how that is done.

[Gumboots]

You mean as a cargo, or in the skin, or both?

[AT41B]

Just in the cargo that it is scheduled to Accumulate and store for pickup. As it is, the only cargo is Coal, Ore, and Bauxite.

[Gumboots]

The cargoes are controlled by the .bca file. PJay's notes say you can have 5 cargoes.

BCA file specs
===================
HEADER (55)
PRODUCTION ENTRIES (x*188)
FOOTER (169)


HEADER (55)
--------------
000 : 4 : int : bcaStart : F203 = 1010
004 : 30 : char : filename
034 : 4 : int : base price
038 : 2 : short : start year
040 : 2 : bytes : q0 = CCCC = {-52 -52}
042 : 4 : float : cargo loads transformation / year (demand only or supply only don't count here)
046 : 4 : bytes : q1 = CCCC CCCC = {-52 -52 -52 -52}
050 : 1 : byte : building group
051 : 4 : int : number of supply/demand/production entries (eg: 0 for ports/warehouses, 16 for houses, 4 for tool&die)
055

PRODUCTION (188)
---------------
000 : 4 : int : 1 (demand only) or 0 (rest)
004 : 4 : float : output qty. (if output only, this is loads/year ; if input=>output, this is relative output)
008 : 24 :string : output cargo name or "{demand only}"
032 : 2 : int : start date
034 : 2 : int : stop date
036 : 4 : int : q0 = 0
040 : 4 : int : q1 = 0
044 : 4 : int : number of input cargo's needed (0-5)
048 : 24 :string : input cargo 1 name
072 : 4 : float : input cargo 1 qty. (rel or loads/year)
076 : 24 :string : input cargo 2 name
100 : 4 : float : input cargo 2 qty. (rel or loads/year)
104 : 24 :string : input cargo 3 name
128 : 4 : float : input cargo 3 qty. (rel or loads/year)
132 : 24 :string : input cargo 4 name
156 : 4 : float : input cargo 4 qty. (rel or loads/year)
160 : 24 :string : input cargo 5 name
184 : 4 : float : input cargo 5 qty. (rel or loads/year)
188




FOOTER (169)
--------------
000 (-169) : 4 : int : buildable (? is a fertilizer factory not-buildable ??)
004 (-165) : 4 : int : buyable (? why hotel, post, saloon, restaurant, ... ??)
008 (-161) : 4 : int : upgrade price?
012 (-157) : 4 : float : q2 (0 or 0.5 or 1)
016 (-153) : 4 : int : upgradable ?
020 (-149) : 61 :string : building name
081 (-088) : 1 : byte : on-the-rails type
082 (-087) : 4 : int : q3 (1830)
086 (-083) : 4 : int : q3 (1850)
090 (-079) : 4 : int : q3 (1900)
094 (-075) : 4 : int : q3 (1950)
098 (-071) : 4 : int : q3 (2000)
102 (-067) : 4 : float : passengers : (commercial 0.5, house 1, hotel museum 2, church cinema deptstore 3, stadium 5)
106 (-063) : 4 : float : passengers : (commercial 0.5, house 1, hotel museum 2, church cinema deptstore 3, stadium 5)
110 (-059) : 4 : float : mail : (commercial 2, house 1)
114 (-055) : 4 : float : mail : (commercial 2, house 1)
118 (-051) : 4 : float : troops : (barracks 1)
122 (-047) : 4 : float : troops : (barracks 1)
126 (-043) : 1 : byte : is... ? restaurant(0) hotel(1) saloon(2) post(3) customs(4)
127 (-042) : 1 : byte : isPort?
128 (-041) : 1 : byte : isWarehouse?
129 (-040) : 40 : : zeros
169 (-000)



on-the-rails-type
-------------------
00 = small station
01 = med station
02 = lrg station
03 = service tower
04 = maint fac



building groups
----------------
00 House
01 "along-the-rail buildings" : Stations, Service Tower, Maintenance Facility
02 "normal industry"
03 "city buildings" : church, stadium, ...
04 "station facilities" : post, restaurant, hotel, ...
05 Dummy



62 : building name (first byte=00)
20 : 5* 000A 0000 (newlines??)
68 : trailing zeros