RRT3 Going Nukular

[WPandP]

The problem with removing furniture is that you can't do much with lumber then, since I took out the toys as well. While coffee does round out the tropical plantation, it's only good there, or as a port import. I hardly see it in many scenarios anyways. At the same time, removing coffee also opens up slots in the housing demands that could be put to other uses, same for meat.

I don't see that replacing Furniture with Merchandise does anything to degrade the importance of Lumber. You still have a Furniture Factory which demands the lumber to make its products. Also, we can borrow from the 1.06 patch again and carry over the Construction Yard (though let's give it a nice unique building) to demand Lumber as-is.

[nedfumpkin]

I haven't tried reskinning the toy factory since I don't see the need to do it. It has no other use now that toys are gone, so I was figuring on using it as it is. Until I am finished with the BCA files, I can't look at anything else right now...and my head is just full of hex and cargo prices....

Quick note on what I posted above regarding the auto plant.....rather than have decimal outputs, I tweaked the inputs so that all periods produce 2 loads of cars. (6 per year) The machinery demand is only three periods so there is a bit of overlap, and this cuts into the overhead since it begins as 1/2 load, then increases to full load, then ends with 2 loads. Wastes remains constant output.


After sleeping on it I have decided that I will remove coffee and replace it with gold. I was only keeping it for its value in R/L....and for something tropical...but what could be more tropical than Inca gold exported to Europe? :)

I don't see a need to have this as two cargos since gold is refined where it is extracted for the most part. This way I can make it so that there is a gold mine proper, as well as something smaller to represent panning (sand pit), and then also a small amount would be produced by the iron mine.

This means we are going to need at least a bank, and probably another industry to handle gold. It can then be inserted as a demand where coffee was, and used as an input into other things.

I'm having a really hard time trying to see it as a process cargo, and I think it can fit into the overall scheme best by just coming out of the ground.

[nedfumpkin]

Something else I am thinking of is making changes to the rubber/tire chain. I am considering that the Tropical Plantation would produce, among other things, latex instead of rubber. This would then be processed into rubber products, and tires would be included. But this would also represent the whole range of rubber products, fan belts, rubber gloves at the hospital, etc. The tire factory would become the vulcanization plant that would go from primitive rubber to complex rubber over time, and finally ending up producing Mr. Spocks. :)

[proudcanadian]

Just curious, it's kind of off topic, but will we be able to replace the placeholders for buildings like the hospital, concrete plant, etc. from the 1.06 patch with these mods? It'd be cool to finally see a hospital instead of a warehouse. Everything looks amazing btw, and keep up the good work

[nedfumpkin]

Technically yes. You could take the Hospital skin right now and make a minor modification to the bty file so that it loads the hospital instead of the warehouse. When all is done, I'll try to make a mod for the 1.06 people to swap out the warehouses for unique buildings.

[WPandP]

The only reason 1.06 was released with Warehouses standing in for everything was for lack of people like us to create the custom buildings. All that needs to be done is to create a new building with the same filenames - the BTY and BCA files for the Hospital and other 1.06 buildings don't need to be changed (unless we wish to do so). This is a piece of work that was always anticipated to occur after the patch was released; the warehouses are proxies, and we just need to create new skins and 3DP files to replace them.

[nedfumpkin]

The copy of the 1.06 buildings that I have has the bty file for the hospital pointing to the warehouse for a model. To use the hospital I created, the model has to be changed to the brewery, not a bid deal to accomplish at a later date if it is necessary.

Progress report....

Still working on bca files...learned something today....if you swap out the bty file for a farm to an industry bty, then you lose the crops surrounding it. The 3dp files for a farm are just the building, which leads to me to think that I may be able to play mix and match with the crops and buildings.

The "ten" output cargo file I made for the auto plant didn't want to work so I had to go with the "seven" input file that I have working. So now autos are reduced to three periods, and machinery is constant at one load per year demanded.

There are four basic farming communities. They are essentially the same with minor variations on output to reflect geographic variations. They are:

European Farmstead Co-operative - which has a mostly milk, produce, hemp, grain, and a bit of other things.

Asian Farmstead Co-operative - same as above, but rice is in place of milk, and milk is in place of corn, a few other tinkerings.

Tropical Plantation - same as above, but has rubber produced, and corn, no hemp.

Western Ranch Co-operative - emphasis on grain and livestock, less produce and milk, etc,

Then there are specialty farms....

Cotton Plantation - just produces cotton

Bio-Mass Plantation - produces hemp an corn

Amish Community - A much smaller version of the European co-op, no cars demanded nor diesel, but produces textiles, furniture and everything at a low rate. Designed to be a challenge industry for scenario writers.

Commune - Similar to the Amish Community but shuns eating anything that casts a shadow. :)

None of the farms can be built or bought with the exception of the bio-mass plantation. Both hemp and corn are used to make diesel, but corn is used to make sugar at the refinery, and hemp is used to make textiles, so this is an industry that is based on agriculture rather than a farm per se.

Ideally the farms will be set by the scenario writer rather than spawned indiscriminately. A major farm represents an agricultural community so they should be set near a small village. In theory, if the farm is serviced then the growth of the village should be directly affected.

I've not been able to get the Customs House to work, so I am making it into the Railroad Office. Trying to make it a station building that demands paper, but also swaps a bit of gold at a profit.

The biggest problem I am running into is that the industry window doesn't display cargo supply and demand all that nicely. The font size and properties seem to be hard coded into the game, so this is the biggest downfall so far. This means that the large farms are able to display all of their demands and supplies, so people will have to refer to the docs, or be happy looking at the cargo map overlay.

I've got about 7 or 8 bca files to finish up, and then I'll be caught up on industry and will see how many more can be fit into the game.

[WPandP]

I have gotten back into skinning, at long last! I've been hands-off for a long while. Anyways, I'm working on this remodeling of the Coal Mine (I made a new building called CoalTipple for testing purposes); this will free up the original mine's hoisthouse for other purposes... Gold Mine makes most sense to me, if Gold is to be included. I haven't made any changes to the BCA and BTY files, other than to make them refer to CoalTipple.

I noticed that I was wrong, and coal mines produce 3 per year, not 2 as I thought. Still, I think it would be good to make them base 4, with bonus up to 6 if provided with machinery.

[nedfumpkin]

I like that coal mine better than the default.

I've set it up so that a coal mine by itself will produce one load per year. If you use explosives, then you can get 5 per year, with machinery, you get 7 per year. It also produces .3 loads of sand. I might tweak it down a bit though.

Gold is fitting into things very nicely. I've made it a small demand at houses, and it is also a demand at the military base. For the Military base, I set it up so that in the 1800s it behaves like a fort, then in the 1900s it modernizes and changes its demands.

The Railway Office is working, and that will handle gold for a small profit. It swaps .3 gold for .5 gold, and consumes a bit of paper.

I am thinking about making a bank and a mercantile exchange, with one of them being a municipal building, and the other being an industry that can be bought. Most likely the bank would be a municipal building with a 1:1 gold exchange, and a paper demand. The mercantile exchange would be set up differently, but I'm not sure how yet.

I'll be able to put the gold exchange into the casino as well. I have made it come from a gold mine, then a small bit is a by-product of iron mining, and it is produced in small amounts at a sand pit. Ideally, the scenario writer should place these near rivers.

I am almost done all the bca files..then I'll get to work on skinning....Off the top of my head, this is what is needed for building skins.....

Landfill - municipal building so it should be small...demands waste early, waste and sand late

Scrapyard - converts waste to bauxite or iron, autos to steel. should be small with a fence at least.

Bank - probably can be made out of the museum skin.

Explosives Factory - the skin I made is going to be changed to the tannery since it will work better.

Electronics Factory

Missile Plant

Armoury - currently using barracks, but could use a better building...is a municipal building so it should be small.

Farms - I want to try mixing 3dp files...for example...a kyoto house in the Asian Co-op. This will also free up some farm buildings for other uses.

Bio-Diesel Plant.... Oil Refinery with a paint job or whatever anyone else can come up with.

Apothecary - should be small since it is a municipal building.

Pharmaceutical Plant.

Cannery - Poptop only included some of the files for this...not the important ones.

Food Processor - is the dairy processor, but can be changed to suite anyones tastes.

Machine Shop - I've still got it as a tool and die, but want to change to something else. I used this skin with modifications for the glass factory.

Sand Pit - anything that will work.

Gold Mine.

And whatever else we come up with. I believe coruscate is making the skin for the shipyard.

I still have to try to fit the lavender farm in, as well as the hopper yard and ice platform.

[nedfumpkin]

Then, off the top of my head, these are the rail cars that need to be done....

Shielded Boxcar for transporting isotopes. 1950s forward (1 car maybe 2)

Reinforced boxcar for transporting explosives. 1947 forward (4 cars)

Covered Hopper for transporting uranium - current flatcar is to be redeployed for depletalloy

Sand hopper, or this could probably be any other hopper. should probably be covered or else we'll get and in our eyes if we lock the camera view onto a fast train transporting it in an open hopper.

Armoured Car for transporting gold. (4 cars)

Then I want to reskin the GP7 because I don't like the pink and purple colour scheme, and I want to try to fix the GP7 double profile image.

And anything else I am forgetting right now.

[coruscate]

Use the grain silo minus grain field for your grain halfway "building" thingamajig. Oh wait, that was WPANDP ^^;;

I like the casino and gold idea, it's perfect.

[WPandP]

I still am mulling that one over, I'd like the GrainElevator "yard" structure to look like a block of towering silos. My current idea is to use the Stadium, and rely on shading in the skin to make it look like round silos even though they'll just be painted on a flat wall.

Okay, I went ahead and Packed up my revised Coal Mine, if any of you want to give it a try. I changed it back from being a unique "Coal Tipple" building; I was just using that name for testing purposes. However, all the assets it uses are still named "CoalTipple", so that it doesn't overwrite any of the default Coal Mine assets, aside from the BCA and BTY file which must be replaced in the "BuildingTypes" folder.

NedF - I suspect you'll have more changes to make to the production formulae, to go with your overhaul; all I did was ramp up production from 3 to 4 per year.

Playtesters: I ramped up production from 3 to 4 per year. Please help me test to see whether this is, in itself, unbalancing; my hope is that it just makes coal transport a bigger component of your railroad networks. But it might also affect the profitability of mines, or show other effects.

[coruscate]

So it's a regular coal mine with bigger production?

[WPandP]

It's a better-looking coal mine with bigger production.

[coruscate]

LOL, okay, I will try it soon but you'll have to try my church "mod."

8p

By the way...

http://amazingtextures.com

Look no further, it's even got a B0MB-@$$ building texture section, it'll really help with the casino and corporate office mod packs.

[coruscate]

Had a theory on your observations about the farm BTY files and the plants.

OUR BEST CASE SCENARIO is that something in the BTY simply looks for plant 3dp / dds files of the same name as the bca, OTHERWISE the plants would get triggered anyway, right? So if we manage to find those files and examine their little bits we should be able to customize plants.

Which would be awesome, because I want a lavender farm with lavender colored plants.

[nedfumpkin]

WP&P: I've downloaded the coal mine pack and I will insert it in place of the current skin. It looks really good.

I was just reading through the 1.06 readme, and it states that the maximum is 53 cargo types....we have 51 right now so we could still include two more cargo types if we want. Although I'm not sure what. I hesitate re-inserting coffee, or anything else that was removed since I think we've struck a good overall balance, but I am open to suggestions. (note...I want to double check the 53 number before committing since I wasn't able to get more than 51 to work earlier...I dunno).

It also says that the maximum number of buildings, not including ports and warehouses is 88. Currently there are 55 industries showing up in the game. I have 86 bca files total, with ports and warehouses. So that might leave only 4 more building slots to be filled. I'm not sure how this number is calculated. The original install has 67. (all figures exclude the dummy.bca)

So if we are left with 4 building slots, the one of those has to go to the bank, and the remaining three are contested for by: the lavender farm, the new church, the grain elevators, the 1800s saloon (see below) and anything else we can dream up that I am forgetting right now. I could lose the hippy commune if necessary since I've sort of been keeping it as an expendable reserve slot. Its purpose was to sort of be a small insular community that lives in perpetual poverty. It could be a hippy commune, a South American mission, an ashram, kibbutz, or anything else that would fit. It would be especially compatible with the vineyard as a close neighbour.

Corurcate: I've looked through all the files and can't find anything for the farm crops themselves, but if you find anything I am definitely interested in being able to change these. Also, if you find where the tracks come from, then it would be nice to try to make them look a bit better too. Haven't found those yet.

I like the previous skin on the Casino better... I noticed that you made it start up in 1830....I was thinking of making it a later date in the 1900s, and instead changing the saloon as station building to be a mini-casino in the 1800s, or making a separate saloon for that time period. What are your thoughts?

I also forgot to mention that the Sugar Refinery is in need of a skin.

[nedfumpkin]

One of the downsides of all this is that it doesn't appear than any previously made maps will be able to be used for conversion to the new set-up. I tried stripping out all the cargo and re-saving an old map, but that didn't seem to make it work (I might've missed something). I'll keep working on this or else maps will have to be made from scratch.

Edit: Good News! It appears that the inability to load previous maps was the result of late night tweaking, and not anything else. Previous maps load in the Editor without any problems, nor requirement for prior modification. You do have to reconfigure the industry settings and stuff though.

This means that previous 1.05 compatible scenarios can be updated to this version, or can be used as base maps for new scenarios. This is good for me because I can't use the height map and I suck at map making.


As things are coming together and this thing continues to work on my machine, which incidently is a PII-350, voodoo 5, with 256k ram, then it will pretty much run on any machine that can run RRT3, it is now becoming possible to explain in more detail the shape of things as they are working out.

The first thing that this is trying to do is improve the base locomotives and rolling stock to versions that are better than the defaults, and also add new rolling stock to the game for new cargo.

There are 4 cargo removed, and 14 added. Supply chains have become more complex, and general demand is being expanded across the consumption aspect of the game. The new industries are designed to change with the times, and become more complex in their workings.

Agriculture comes from communities, rather than individual farms. Ideally they should not be automatically spawned by strategically placed either in map making or by event. They should be placed in conjunction with small cities, or remotely. This is to remove the habit of getting clusters of farms as the main agricultural base. The smaller farms can be used for variety and auto spawn. More than likely the farms will over produce, so it will be for the start-up events to set their production according to what the scenario call for.

The cargo system is designed so that rather than getting a single commodity at a single place, you end up with a little bit of a few different things that have to go different places. It's a much more complex system, and there are a lot of dual demands that if production is limited could offer challenges.

With this system, the larger more detailed maps like San Diego and Anthracite can be made to have a tremendously challenging set up if the writer chooses. From my perspective, and this is what prompted me to do this, I want to create a scenario on the Anthracite map where very little is left to chance, and almost everything is based on game play. Rather than having industry spawn randomly, I want to have it set up that industry locations are the result of choices made (knowing and unknowing) in the game.

I am now also thinking about splitting the military base into two so that the earlier one could be a Frontier Fort and the later one a base. This would make it fun since then Clint Eastwood and Lee Van Cleef could have roles with the dynamite and bridges, and it could be a real cuh-buoy Western thing. :)

[coruscate]

I like the previous skin on the Casino better... I noticed that you made it start up in 1830....

No that's just the editor date. The casino still starts in 1931. That's the date it all became legal.

I was thinking of making it a later date in the 1900s, and instead changing the saloon as station building to be a mini-casino in the 1800s, or making a separate saloon for that time period. What are your thoughts?

It's reasonable, let's see what the max number of buildings and stuff come out to.

I also forgot to mention that the Sugar Refinery is in need of a skin.

Ok.

As for the maps same thing here, the game seems to save certain settings when a game loads up into it, and those randomized settings in the event area thingamajigger seem to be part of it.

By the way, it may ease your thinking to think in "modules." Nothing wrong with having a building that you use for some scenarios and you just uinstall when you're not. That way you don't have to lose your cargos or buildings, I mean we're already deep off into customizing the game, it's not like we're packaging up something for sale to the public where there must be a "final" after all.

[coruscate]

Now here's a question, is the building limit by BCA, BTY or either counts?

Keep in mind it may be active buildings, i.e. the thing won't crash if all buildings aren't in play or something like that...