New Cargo info, and a request!

Discussion of Pop Top's last release of RRT.
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pure al
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Don't worry about it. I myself haven't spent enough time playing the game to have any sense of cargo values, I've just gone straight into modding everything. Any help is welcome, we now have a thread dedicated to cargo values.
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WPandP
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Okay, so I know I am late arriving at this party, but I do have some thoughts, and some questions.

Firstly, I like the 1.06 cargo list... though I have yet to download and play with it. But I think the actual cargo chains may need to be refined, which would happen as the buildings are created. Now that I have created at least one functioning building (a Railway Express Agency office, though still developing its cargo recipe) I know that I can volunteer to do some of this work. In particular, I'm attracted to doing a Smelter, which I might prefer to call a Stamp Mill, based on the Uranium Mine with a lot of stuff Alpha'ed out.

The Concrete Plant, though, should NOT demand steel. While construction concrete does indeed use copious amounts of rebar, the fact is that it is never shipped by rail with the steel included. Instead, what is shipped by rail is the Portland Cement which is then mixed on-site and poured into forms in which the steel has been placed. So, I would say that Concrete Plant should just be Rock-->Concrete, or to be even more accurate it ought to be Rock-->Cement (change the name of the cargo).

As for how to make a Quarry, I am wondering whether a Farm would be a good starting point for reskinning - the farmhouse can be the small office, and the crops could instead be rock piles. Might look too regular though, and it wouldn't be realistic to have rail lines just slice right through an operating quarry. Another thought I had was to use the Barracks, and use its towers as "cranes", then Alpha out a bunch of things, and set the rest to look like piles of stone.

As for my own REA building, I want to introduce a cargo called "parcels" but I won't need to if we can get "valuables" or some of the other cargo skins to work. I sort of think there should be a generic time-sensitive freight, perhaps called "merchandise", which would mimic the role of Goods but give us something to use in conversion (i.e. goods-->merchandise), and be a catch-all that is at the top of the cargo chains. This would be demanded by department stores and possibly other metropolitan structures, and we could create buildings that convert any/every other cargo into "merchandise". I bring this up because it seems like a lot of the new cargos (electronics, medicine, even old toys) could just as easily be abstracted into this category. Thus, a pharmaceutical plant would convert chemicals-->merchandise, while an electronics plant converts crystal+ingots-->merchandise. In railroading terms, the same types of freight cars operating on the ssame types of scchedules would be used in both cases, so why differentiate?

But, of course, 1.06 has already been released with these, so maybe those last comments can be ignored.
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milo wrote:When looking at new production chains, focus on the ten 'actual' cargos for now. We'll worry about skins later if I can get them working. I'm also not planning on including new buildings in 1.06; we'll go the Pack strategy for those. The new cargos will be accessible through Ports/Warehouses until then.

You can probably do anything you want to Department Stores, because they weren't in older scenarios unless the scenario-maker explicitly placed them.

The decay field ranges from .1 for cargos that don't decay to .55 for Milk. Few of the cargos have a decay value greater than .15. Livestock and Produce are .45; Waste is .35, Meat and Cheese are .3; Automobiles, Corn, Clothing, Grain, Toys, and Uranium are .2.

The mystery byte at offset 20h is a 'visual appearance' modifier to the car. 1-8 apply to Flatbed cars, while 9-11 are Open_Hopper cars. This is how the Weapons flatbed shows up, for example. The default for cargos without a 'visual appearance' modifier is just to paint the resource icon on the outside of the railcar.

Current car types:
Box
Flatbed
Auto_Carrier
Covered_Hopper
Open_Hopper
Reefer
Tanker
Stock_Car
Mail
Passenger

Don't worry if you don't have time; I can put them together when I get back. Mostly we need to sort out what should be in 'em over the next week or so, and what modifications we want to make to existing buildings.
Was just looking through old patch discussions and found this. Some of those default rot times don't seem to make sense. Uranium, for instance, is not going to decay appreciably over any time that a railway trip will take. If it does, you probably have a critical mass, in which case cargo price is the least of your worries. :mrgreen:

Livestock and produce needing fairly fast shipping makes sense, especially in the 19th century. Waste is just paper and steel, etc (judging by the outputs) so shouldn't need a fast rot time. Automobiles should be slow rot, with corn being much faster. Fresh corn goes off pretty fast.
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