Are good-looking rivers important?

[Canadian Viking]

I am currently spending hours on the rivers of my next game. They are laid in their proper locations, and now I am smoothing their slopes before finally making each one the proper width. I know that Mobius stated the rivers in his Great Northern game took him about 60 hours. I expect I spent nearly that much time on the rivers in Building to Buffalo, and will probably spend 40-50 hours on rivers in my new game. This got me thinking: does the appearance of the rivers really matter much to most RRT3 railroaders? What is your opinion?

[Hawk]

I picked not to picky but I do like it when they flow the right way, actually flow downhill, and merge nicely.

[WPandP]

I enjoy the topographic challenge of surveying routes, it is one of my favorite aspects to the game. Laying rails alongside river corridors is so central to real railroading, I think it is critical that the game's rivers be configured to permit the player to do the same thing. Of course, the way the game exlcudes track from the riverbanks gets right in the way of this! But it only takes a little bit of terracing to create a buildable "shelf" parallel to the river, to accomodate the rails that will come.

I've used online mapping tools to create overlays that I then set onto my sculpted heightmap in the game, using bmp2gmp.exe, and then it is just a matter of tracing. Occasionally, you can see that the basin of the valley doesn't align right with the map overlay, probably due to how the engine does its smoothing, so some manual adjustment may be required. But my experience is that this method goes fairly quick and is very satisfying, with squiggles in all the right places.

[JayEff]

I think rivers are pretty important, worth the fuss. But consider how many rivers you need. I avoid putting in the ones that are not navigable. Cargo travels up and down rivers faster than overland, so the rivers on the map should be navigable.

[ChrisW]

Good point, JayEff. I hadn't thought of that before.

[Canadian Viking]

JayEff does make a good point. The difficulty is that there are differing levels of navigation. Should rivers be included only if they are navigable by a steamboat? What about flat-bottomed canal boats, barges, or a large freight canoe? Many rivers in Michigan, Wisconsin and Minnesota were used to float logs downstream to sawmills, but those rivers were not all navigable by steamboats. I'm grappling with that issue right now on my next map. Are the Black, Flambeau and Wolf Rivers of Wisconsin significant enough to warrant being on the map? Rivers are needed to float the logs out of the northwoods to the sawmills that were built further south.

I liked the feature in the original Railroad Tycoon of Landings at certain points along a river. A Landing would accept coal and logs (or was it grain?) from your railroad; presumeably they would be shipped downriver from that point.

I do generally stop my rivers short of their true source because most of them are not actually useful for transport near their headwaters.

[wsherrick]

The rivers are very important to me. I worked for uncounted hours on making the Miss and Missouri rivers in Age Of Steam-Blue Streak. The other rivers had to have erosion patterns along the banks so I put them in. I fixed it so one could build track right along the river banks. To me an attractive map is a large part of enjoying a scenario. So far I haven't received any feedback about if people playing Blue Streak like what I did with the rivers, but; even so I was pleased with the result. :D

[JayEff]

JayEff does make a good point. The difficulty is that there are differing levels of navigation. Should rivers be included only if they are navigable by a steamboat? What about flat-bottomed canal boats, barges, or a large freight canoe?

I would sayit depends on the context of the scenario. I would always try to include rivers that were economically significant at the time. But also, I think that if the scale is small, you might have to reduce rivers a bit.

Something I will do on non-navigable river valleys that I don't want to be used as a railway corridor - is lay a river, then lay land on top of it. That erases the flowing river part but leaves the purple part that requires you to build a bridge over it. So if someone wants to build up the valley, they can, by building one very long bridge. An example of this can be seen on the Athabasca 1905 map. The Kiskatinaw River west of Dawson Creek is done this way.

[aasta]

I've used online mapping tools to create overlays that I then set onto my sculpted heightmap in the game, using bmp2gmp.exe, and then it is just a matter of tracing. Occasionally, you can see that the basin of the valley doesn't align right with the map overlay, probably due to how the engine does its smoothing, so some manual adjustment may be required. But my experience is that this method goes fairly quick and is very satisfying, with squiggles in all the right places.

I made quite a few maps for rt2 in the past, and have tried with rt3, but am usually very dissatisfied with my work, so I discard them. One thing in particular that bothers me is that when I've painted a portion of the land, if I zoom in on it it has a checkerboard appearance. It's very foolish looking.
I use a Mac, do you know of any programs that I might look for online that would help make a very good looking map? I have the time to devote to it.
Thanks.

[Hawk]

You might have the grid turned on is why you get the checkerboard appearance.
Just hit the 'G' key to turn the grid on or off.

[aasta]

Thanks Hawk.
I'm not sure that that is what it is, but I'll try that. It certainly sounds logical that that's what it is.
aasta