Making 1.06.1: any interest?

[Hawk]

Thanks, Hawk. I was wondering where that was.

I talked with milo a while back and since he was pretty busy with the real world and didn't have time for RT3, I (with his Okee Dokee) decided to hide that forum, since work had pretty much stopped on Rail Mogul and Ned was working on TM.
Now I thought maybe some of the ideas and experiences in that topic may be of some help, but decided to make it read only, so if there's something in those forums that you folks want to discuss, just link to it and continue discussion here, or in another thread.

[Stoker]

Roger that, Hawk. In case you were wondering about the cargo changes, I left your favorite industry intact. "Toys" will however be reskinned as "Luxury Goods", and the Toy Factory will produce "Luxury Goods" instead of the too specific "Toys". Other new industries such as a "Jewelry Factory" (Ingots>Luxory goods) will be introduced to take advantage of some of the lesser used cargoes in 1.06. Broadening the use of existing cargoes and making them available earlier in the scenario is one of the things I am aiming at to provide a more comprehensive and versatile cargo chain.

[Hawk]

In case you were wondering about the cargo changes, I left your favorite industry intact.

My favorite industry? Which one is that?

[Stoker]

You had mentioned in the past an affinity for the Toy Factory.

[Hawk]

You had mentioned in the past an affinity for the Toy Factory.

Uhm - I don't think that was me. I rarely utilize them myself. Me thinks ya' got me confused with someone else.

[Stoker]

You had mentioned in the past an affinity for the Toy Factory.

Uhm - I don't think that was me. I rarely utilize them myself. Me thinks ya' got me confused with someone else.

Perhaps. I recall a discussion where I suggested something about wanting to re-building the Toy Factory and someone (could have sworn it was you) mentioned it being their favorite building. I did a search and nothing popped up, except for Coruscates discussion about reusing the Toy factory for a disneyland type of building. This is odd, since I am certain that I posted about wanting to re-building the Toy Factory at some point on the forum.

[Hawk]

If it was me I don't remember, but that's not unusual.
But as I said, I rarely do anything with toys. Lumber mills, steel factory's, and textile mills is what I generally go for.

[Stoker]

I hear ya on the memory. It has been years since I did anything relating to modding RT3, so there is quite a layer of dust and cobwebs to brush aside to try and remember how I had done certain things. I am considering setting the feather duster aside and breaking out the leaf blower soon.....

[RulerofRails]

Hey, on the topic of the toy factory. I hardly ever used to build them until around the time I joined the forum. When I owned an upgraded lumber mill I used to place two upgraded Furniture Factories next to it. Playing some of arop's industry focused maps made me realize that it is better to build an upgraded Toy Factory and a normal Furniture Factory. I love that there are always new things to learn and strategies to try! Looking forward to seeing what changes you are planning!

[Stoker]

I have been reading around to gather up what had been already discovered in the past as far as limits on game resources and came up with this:

This thread is for discussing how future add-ons to the game should work.

The Problem:
RT3 has a limited number of 'slots' for each of several types of resource. These numbers cannot be increased easily. We're already hitting the upper limits of the game for a couple of these:

• Locomotives (68 used of 104) - 1.06 increases limit to 129
• Buildings (89 used of 110) - 22 of these are copied ports/warehouses
• Cargos (41 used of 52) - 1.06 uses 51 of 52
• AIs (41 used of 41) - These are alterable but not loadable
• Logos (48 used of 147?)
• Portraits (41 used of 140?)
• Locomotive Skins (unknown)
• Building Subtypes (unknown)
• Cargo Skins (unknown)
• Music files (unknown)

Another wrinkle is that the internal resource name translation table, which permits a house to show up as 'House' in English and 'Haus' in German, is full. 1.06 introduces an alternate translation mechanism that requires naming new resources rather obscurely: the Concrete cargo, for example, has the internal name ~4451Concrete. The tilde indicates a new-style name, while 4451 corresponds to a line in RT3.lng, which for English is 4451 "Concrete" and for German is 4451 "Beton". Current planned message file ranges:

Code: Select all

4355-4424  Locomotive names
4425-4449  Building names
4450-4460  Cargo names
4461-4549  Cargo skin names

According to Milo, there is a limit of 110 Buildings, and 1.06 had added by it's completion 10 more in addition to the 89 original. I had thought that there was no limit on buildings, but this is not the case, so it appears that a maximum of 11 more new ones can be added for the purposes of this patch. To go beyond that will require re-using some of the existing slots, making that the realm of a true mod, which will be considered at a later date. Milo had added to the .lng file areas dedicated to calling up the in-game names of buildings using descriptors from 4425 to 4449 for these 21 additional buildings, of which these are the ones that were included in 1.06:

4425-4449 reserved for Buildings
4426 "Concrete Plant"
4427 "Construction Firm"
4428 "Dye Plantation"
4429 "Electronics Plant"
4431 "Furnace"
4433 "Hospital"
4435 "Machine Shop"
4437 "Ore Mine"
4438 "Pharmaceutical Plant"
4439 "Quarry"

I am a bit confused,as he has set aside more than 21 name descriptors for new buildings. I could have sworn that I had constructed more than 11 new buildings for King Coal, but that was a long time ago and my memory on that account is fairly fuzzy. It might be that this is the limit for .3dp models and not the actual number of industries. It is also entirely possible that I had eliminated some of the existing 1.06 buildings to be used for new ones, but alas KC is lost forever and I don't have any way of finding out exactly what I had done. If it is indeed limited to 11 new buildings, this should be adequate to patch up the loose ends in the 1.06 production chain and still leave all existing buildings in place so as to be completely backwards compatible with existing scenarios. If anyone has anything to add or correct about this information, please feel free to chime in.

[Gumboots]

I've just been doing a bit of drivetrain testing with a view to standardising coding of drivewheels, bogies etc for any future work. We shouldn't have gauge wars on RT3. It's enough hassle already.

What I've found is that if the bottom of the drivewheel is set to zero height it will actually render as slightly below the track gfx. This gives the wheels a slightly chopped off appearance. If the wheel is coded to put the bottom of the outer rim at +0.1 units, it all looks good (this is CD CC CC 3D in the hex).

For the inner flange, having it set to -0.1units at the bottom looks right (this is CD CC CC BD in the hex). Obviously this also means setting it 0.2 units outside the outer rim at front, top and back. This gives a flange which looks realistic in width compared to everything else.

Using just 0.1 and 0.2 as the difference makes things easier for decimally-minded humans who want to chuck corrections into a base converter.

For width, setting the inner flange at either + or - 2.8125 units, depending on if it's on the right or left side (00 00 34 40 or 00 00 34 C0 in the hex) puts it just on the inside of the rail graphic, which is where it should be. This works out at 56 1/4" if using the 10" = 1 RT3 unit scale I worked out before, which is about right.

The outer flange has to go at 00 00 50 40 or 00 00 50 C0 to look right. This is 32 1/2", so 65" total. Looks like due to the pixel count in the track gfx it's approximating a top flange about 4 1/2" wide instead of about 3". That's wider than it really ought to be for standard rail profiles, but close enough for RT3.

Also figured I might as well do the wheels with four layers. This is what some of the default locos have (American 4-4-0 for example) and it tends to give a better effect at close range.

The wheels files usually only have one instance but I'm thinking they could easily have a few more if necessary. This would cut down on rendering power when zoomed out, and for simple things like wheels is easy to code manually. So it'd have four layers close up, and then drop down to one layer for the equivalent of the C or D skin.

The default wheels that have multiple layers don't bother doing this (they just stay multiple all the time) so I'll try them like that first. If we think we need to cut polys later on, adding the extra instances wont be much work.

[milo]

I have been reading around to gather up what had been already discovered in the past as far as limits on game resources and came up with this:
...

I am a bit confused,as he has set aside more than 21 name descriptors for new buildings. I could have sworn that I had constructed more than 11 new buildings for King Coal, but that was a long time ago and my memory on that account is fairly fuzzy. It might be that this is the limit for .3dp models and not the actual number of industries. It is also entirely possible that I had eliminated some of the existing 1.06 buildings to be used for new ones, but alas KC is lost forever and I don't have any way of finding out exactly what I had done. If it is indeed limited to 11 new buildings, this should be adequate to patch up the loose ends in the 1.06 production chain and still leave all existing buildings in place so as to be completely backwards compatible with existing scenarios. If anyone has anything to add or correct about this information, please feel free to chime in.

The problem's that the original RT3 programmers defined most of their resources using fixed-size arrays. I managed to boost the number of available locomotives because I found a way to move the stuff stored just after them, but expanding the number of buildings was just too hard. I had some vague ideas about writing a utility to permit swapping out groups of buildings, but never got around to it - the idea was that a scenario could, say, decide it wanted twenty coal-related buildings instead of the buildings associated with the electronics production chain. That way you could have far more than 110 buildings; you just couldn't use more than 110 in the same scenario.

[milo]

And no kidding on the dust! Hard to believe it's been seven years since 1.06 went out. Great to see a new generation of modders take on the grand old game.

I do still have development notes and the scripts for building the 1.06 package if anyone wants them. Unfortunately can't promise time, though.

[Gumboots]

Anything you have would be good, if we can figure out how to use it.

Glad to see you like what we're doing. The work you and the others did was a really great start. We're just tarting the old beast up a bit more.

[milo]

Here's the install script, anyway. I've attached some of the dev notes too, but as they're mostly rambling about disassembled code, I'm not sure how much they'll help.

[Gumboots]

I smell duct tape.
Referenced at 41029F and 41EC17, both times passed to 5A57CF, but swapping
places with the other operand. More evidence that 5A57CF is strcmp.
5c8df0 is the second in the list, referenced from 41027F and 421118... tell
me they aren't strcmping everything. Oh, god, this is awful, they're doing it
twice.

I don't understand how the .exe is put together, but the general feeling there echoes some of my experiences in the loco .3dp files.

[Blackhawk]

The .exe is likely put together using NSIS. http://nsis.sourceforge.net/Main_Page There is a documentation page there that may be useful in understanding how to create an .exe file.

[Gumboots]

At the moment I don't want to know. My 2c is we should aim to do this thing without getting into a debugging cycle with stuff none of us really understand. Locos I can do. Stoker can do cargoes, etc. Everyone else can test. Let's stick to what we're good at.

[Blackhawk]

I agree at this point I think it's best to use the loose files and make the updates/changes/additions as needed. Then down once a finalized product is created an .exe or .msi could be worried about if desired. After all it's not that hard to tell someone to empty this directory and copy these files in.

[Stoker]

At the moment I don't want to know. My 2c is we should aim to do this thing without getting into a debugging cycle with stuff none of us really understand. Locos I can do. Stoker can do cargoes, etc. Everyone else can test. Let's stick to what we're good at.

Agreed. I think we should limit this to the loco/graphics fixes you have in mind and can do and the cargo/building fixes I can do. As far as making an installer, I am in favor of not doing that. Ever since Vista, installers on old games like this rarely work right . In addition to that, many people (myself included) are rightfully wary of running any .exe from a dubious source, like some game mod team. When what we have done is completed the necessary files and folders can be made into a single .PK4 that can be dropped into the UEC folder. This will be the simplest and most fail proof way of installing this patch.

@ Milo: Wow, did not expect you to be around. I was merely a lurker back when 1.06 was being developed. Later, I worked on my own mod of the game which was never released and was later lost in an HDD crash. Thank you for providing us with your notes on 1.06 development. The programming of the game engine is beyond the scope of what we intend to do, of course, but seeing what and why certain limits are on the game is very helpful. I now see that the number of buildings you quoted in that thread about the resource limits was including some of the buildings that had been produced for 1.06 at that point, with the final quantity making the in game total 94 as of the 1.06 release. This would leave 16 slots for new buildings open, instead of the 11 I had first arrived at after reading that thread. That is good to know, as I have a lot of ideas for buildings, and as long as existing models are being reskinned they are relatively simple to create. Testing takes a lot more time than creation for these. As far as cargoes go, I count 51 in the 1.06 release and 52 being the stated limit. I may also go ahead and make another cargo to use that last slot for this patch. I fully understand that you do not have the time to donate to a new RT3 project, but I sincerely hope that you will check in on our progress (any tips or suggestions are welcome!) and try out the final product when we complete it.

P.S: One question I have concerning the buildings limit. In the .lng you reserved 25 lines for Building names (4425-4449, using a tilde prefix). 10 were used by 1.06 buildings, leaving 15 unused numbers in that series. If I am correct about there being 16 building slots open(94/110), how would I number the last one? I see that the next lines that were reserved for cargoes did not use line #4450. Would I use that # for the 16th new building? Or would using a number beyond those currently reserved work and/or be better? I do not know how these #s are called by the game engine. Am I missing something here (likely) and perhaps only 15 more buildings can be introduced on top of the existing 94?