CPU train spamming

[Cash on Wheels]

Southern pacific, a coast to coast map can also have this problem while playing on 1.06.

Did a test on expert, not much diffrence 118 loads.

I have 4 versions installed 1.05 1.06 trainmaster & my own. So no extra content is interfering.

[RulerofRails]

Interesting test. One thing I would point is that you have different pricing in your 1.05 vs 1.06 tests. This means that your testing environment is not constant.

One of the changes in 1.06 caused the behavior described here. Among other things, in 1.06 there is no way to control the density of houses in regions other than cities. Possibly this can be reverted by tweaking the settings for the house.bca file?

I am almost sure that extra houses and other seeding differences are the reason for the difference in your pricing. And may even goes a good way towards solving the "return to sender" issue you describe.

[Cash on Wheels]

The real problem is a lack of station price stabilization in 1.06. In this 1.05 SS look economic cell price colors for alcohol in the town 1.05s. Notice how the price of alcohol is lower @ the cell where the station is? That feature is disabled in 1.06.

Even if you switch the city density around. 1.05S (73%) vs 1.05c(42%) there are no freight return loads to 1.05s. The houses in the supplying warehouses city(1.05s) get dibs on what comes out of the warehouse first. The the leftovers get shipped to 1.05c. where it stays until the load gets consumed or rots.

BTW If you change the department stores BCA footer settings you can have a many as you like. . Those sliders for the municipal buildings in the editor have no effect that I notice.

[Cash on Wheels]

(most of this post was removed by cash on wheels 9/15/16)


On expert in 1.06 I shipped 130 loads back instead of 155. Little differnce.

[RulerofRails]

I setup a test with the same parameters you described and got the same results. In 1.05 there was no back-hauling, in 1.06 it happened a lot. Good find.

If the changes in 1.06 that affect the train routing cause this, seems that those calculations are more powerful than we would expect. Similar to my finding that price outbreaks for the increase price events only occur when trains are run. More info.

I went a little further and tested having a Meat Packing Plant (warehouse supplied 4 Livestock) in one city with no warehouse demand in the other. I did eventually get a back-haul in 1.05 with this but it was after 3 years or so. So we can't say that back-hauling doesn't happen, just that it's far less common.

I will also state that a station at the edge of the map and at the end of the line is in a unique position in terms of the demand map. I'm pretty sure you will see more back-and-forth in 1.05 where the areas in question are in the middle of the map and on a larger network. Also, the warehouse demand acts a bit differently to the blanket effect of the miniature house demands that are easy to overwhelm, encouraging re-hauling.

---

In that modified test when I ran the Meat Packing Plant, I also removed all the other supply functions in the warehouse and deleted the demand warehouse completely. Because I did the modifications to a saved game (originally made it at game start in 1.05 so that I could get identical seeds in both 1.05 and 1.06) I already had some Autos, Pulpwood, Coal and Corn on the map. This is how the price map for Autos looks at the end of 5 years.

Price of the red square is $286. Other cells are right around $345. These price islands have been mentioned before, and thanks to your investigations we can say that they are mainly a 1.05 thing.

These price islands sometimes take 2 years before they will suddenly "break" and jump back to the price of the surrounding cells. Frequency of service could have an impact on their strength and duration.

In starting off some scenarios such as the fictional "Impossible" I relied on these breaks to get hard-fought capital for expansion. That scenario has many topographic features that help slow cargoes progression overland so that it can be re-captured by your station. On flat ground, most of the cargo will drift away before the island disappears, so they aren't exploitable and you lose control of the cargo. These price islands can be annoying when trying to send resources to an industry (it's 1.05, so no ship-at-a-loss).

I feel it's a "cheat" because of the profit involved, but the player can build a Small Station on an adjacent cell. Then haul there for a high one-time profit. That tends to break the island.

[Gumboots]

Some interesting stuff being turned up here. I'm starting to think that the best game would be one that applies some, but not all, 1.06 changes to 1.05.

[Cash on Wheels]

Finally found out how to turn on the price islands in v1.06! It took me 3 hours to find something that I looked at 3min into the .exe search!

Offset dec: 183100 / hex: 2CB3C needs to put back to 74 from EB.

I will give it a field test tomorrow. If you custom consist automoblies, the train just goes back and forth for $0K in between the two cities on my test map.

Messing with the .exe MAY turn your 1.06 into version 0.00 for some reason @ the main menu.(not the reason)

[RulerofRails]

If all custom consist loads are moving for $0k, that would create different gameplay problems. Hopefully I understood this wrong.

[Cash on Wheels]

Those Islands pop up after you custom consist something from green to red. So, you can still have negitive loads. If you force something from its natural source (i.e. bauxite from a baux mine) to an aluninum mill it should have little effect. However if you decide to take bauxite from an established aluminum mill, where the price of bauxite is high. Then force move it to your new alum mill were the price for bauxite is still low. That move will disrupt bauxite movment all over the map.

[Gumboots]

By "islands" you're talking about the depressed prices at station, right? They appear in 1.05, and in 1.05 you can't ship at a loss, so in the case of 1.05 they have to be caused by something else.

[Cash on Wheels]

Yes, the islands do not exist in 1.06 unless you change the 1.06 .exe file. This islands stop the cpu's that like too many extra trains inbetween two cities. This also stops YOUR trains from moving aluminum back & forth between two tool & dies. However more field testing is required.

[RulerofRails]

Did this change to an exe.

Offset dec: 183100 / hex: 2CB3C needs to put back to 74 from EB.

Ran a test and can confirm that this cuts back-hauling as you stated.

Best news: When hauling-at-a-loss, your company is still charged for a haul that loses money.
Also, my version # is still displaying properly as 1.06.

Any things to watch for when I get a chance to test this some more?

[Gumboots]

Nice find. It'd be great to have 1.06 debugged a bit more.

[Cash on Wheels]

In Madagascar I took coal ($74) from my hub city (Antananrivo) which has a steel mill & power plant. Then moved it to a city were coal was $0. That created a price island for coal in every town that had a direct train connection to Antananrivo.
So it shut down coal movement system-wide for a while. That train has a value of -$74 per load. The return trip from $0 city with that very same coal was only valued @ $3 per load, instead of the $70ish that you would normaly recieve from the regular 1.06.
Now when I forced moved Coal from the coal mine where the price was ~$5 to the $0 city it had little effect.

Moral of the story, if you use this change for 1.06 pick your spots when using haul @ loss.

[Cash on Wheels]

Nice find. It'd be great to have 1.06 debugged a bit more.

What else is wrong? I look & see if I can do some more simple changes. Not to many though! I bet there are a few landmines in that .exe!

[Gumboots]

Ok, if you're up for a bit of looking around...

...there are a couple of things I'm curious about. These aren't 1.06 bugs as such, just general stuff about the game's limitations.

Do you have any idea where the passengers cargo gets the passenger appeal rating applied to price? This happens after the train loads, so it's not in the .car or other files for passengers. It's in the .exe somewhere.

Another thing is that game skins for any asset are limited to 1024x1024. Any skin image larger than that won't be applied (it falls back to the B skin, or whatever is the first image under 1024). If the limiting code could be found, it may be possible to increase the limit on skin images, which could be handy sometimes.

Come to think of it, this may be possible with game map images too. The inputted .bmp for any map is always 1024x1024 even if the map size is much smaller. So, the game is already set up to scale larger images down to fit the map size. This leads me to wonder if it can be made to accept larger images on large maps.

Also, when saving maps in the map editor there is some graphics degradation with each save. My theory is that it's using a lossy algorithm to save the maps, which is odd because the input for map graphics is .bmp (this .bmp format data is also in the finished .gmp) and screenshots, etc are saved as .tga, neither of which are lossy formats. I did find a lot of code related to .jpg in the .exe, but have no idea how it works or what it does.

If you can find out anything regarding any or all of those questions, that would be cool.

[Cash on Wheels]

Not sure what you mean by the passenger price or map. But I will give you this.

IIRC one of the patches; 1.03, .04, or .05 reduced the passenger appeal ratings by half. So run a file compare between those verisons.


1024=0004 in hexland. Worthless to look that up. However It is at the very beginning of the .exe & also found 4 strings of 1023(03ff) packed close together, I will look at those tommorow. The engine.cfg should contaion your max resolution values within the first 20 bytes. Dunno what the rest does.

[RulerofRails]

Something that I would like to see fixed are the events for train acceleration and fuel cost. Probably worth checking at some stage if it's simply a bug in the event section of that map's gmp file instead of the exe. These events change the displayed rating ("Above Average" for example) in both 1.05 and 1.06, but in reality the trains behave the same.

[Gumboots]

Not sure what you mean by the passenger price...

The revenue change due to the passenger appeal rating is applied after the cars load. I would like to know where and how that happens in the .exe. Reason is that it basically borks the automated cargo loading algorithm, because instead of being loaded on the basis of how much they will actually earn you the passengers may not be loaded because some other cargo has a nominally higher price.

Example: Pax delivery price of $20/load. Goods price of $22/load. Goods will be loaded instead of pax. If pax appeal rating is Ultra Cool, delivery price of pax would actually be $24/load, but the game will still load goods instead because it ignores the appeal rating when loading.

This is a bug.

...or map.

When making a game map you can import a .bmp image for the overall map background graphics. This is cool, but it's limited to 1024x1024. Better graphics would be possible if that limit could be increased.

Also, when creating and testing a map you have to do lots of saves and edits. This would be ok, except that RT3 uses a lossy algorithm for saving, so the map graphics degrade with each save. Which is another bummer. I was wondering if the .jpg-related code had anything to do with this, since .jpg is a lossy algorithm and AFAIK it's not used anywhere else in the game.

But I will give you this.

IIRC one of the patches; 1.03, .04, or .05 reduced the passenger appeal ratings by half. So run a file compare between those verisons.

Already knew about that. It reduced the steps between ratings from 15% to 10%. So instead of Ugly > Ultra Cool being 85% > 130% it's now 90% > 120%.

1024=0004 in hexland. Worthless to look that up. However It is at the very beginning of the .exe & also found 4 strings of 1023(03ff) packed close together, I will look at those tommorow. The engine.cfg should contaion your max resolution values within the first 20 bytes. Dunno what the rest does.

Yeah but I'm not talking about the screen resolution. I'm talking about allowed image sizes for game assets. Being able to use bigger ones would be cool.

[Cash on Wheels]

I'm using a turn of the decade laptop w/a turn of the century graphics card! (1368x768).


Your images 1024x 512x 256x are traceable from the language file. But I have a feeling that will be tough to trace it from all locations. The game loves 1024 for some reason

Passenger prices. Milo said there are hundreds of calls during train loading. Not easy also.

That got me thinking of the 'poor' GP7s. The times I see one IRL I have a hard time imaging at one point those were new! And used on mainline service! It just seems like they rolled out of factory, into a few smog filled tunnels, then directly to branchlines w/10 mph speed restictions.