Stokers' Corner

[WPandP]

Your 240 loads demand test is a nice complement to what I saw in my 0.1 loads demand, as used in my "Yard" structures. It surprised me how much one little fractional demand could "weigh" in the RRT3 economy - if it goes unmet, the price can get rather high, sometimes just as high as the demanding industry (at 2 or 3 full loads per year). Of course, at such low levels it was very easy to supply - and over supply - which keeps the price in a reasonable range. And the consumption rate is so slow that loads effectively do pile up at the Yard, which was always my intention.

I'm interested to see what kind of application(s) your rapid consumption will have, aside from thwarting the haulback cheat.

[KevinL]

I have a basic question about the "Demand" function. Do buildings that demand something also CONSUME (Remove from the map) that product ? The answer appears to be yes, but it is hard to tell by observing, as the demanded product will pile up beyond the annual demand quota.

Yes, demanded cargo is consumed by the demanding building at the rate indicated. If a building demands 2 goods per year, it will consume two goods, per year. If it gets delivered 6 goods during the year, the other 4 goods will sit there and stack up, to be consumed the next year and the year after that.

[belbincolne]

Not sure where to reply on "LA" so have put it in other section.

[Grandma Ruth]

Just going off at a bit of a tangent, if you want goods to stack up - i.e. to use the warehouse as a real warehouse storing goods - the way to do it is to have "1 supply = 1 demand".

The 1.06 patch cargoes and industries aren't quite worked out and some were abandoned which was a shame - I think the pharmaceutical factory, for example, could be better if it had more inputs, as it had originally. Chemicals and dye spring to mind, can't remember what else. Actually sugar would be a good one, and whatever we're using for glass, paper, plastic..... When you think about real life industries they all need people, who need food, and they all need packaging so the potential is there for really complex mixtures.

Sorry, got a bit

[Stoker]

The finished version of "LA & L.A." is now available for download in the maps section of the site here.
Good Luck and Happy Railroading!

[Hawk]

Not quite yet. It will be soon though. Give me a couple of hours. I'm starving and need to make some lunch.

[Hawk]

Now it's available!

[Stoker]

Thank ya kindly sir!

[Stoker]

I have put my "To Build a Nation" scenario project on the back burner for a while and am currently making a redux of the "East Coast" map that uses all of the 1.06 cargoes with straightforward railroading and tycooning goals. I am adding more cities to this relatively small map and am also moving the existing ones away from rivers and obstacles to make them more desirable to the AIs. I am experimenting with making some "buildable" warehouse factories that have reasonable profit figures such as a "Glassworks" to use the "Crystals" on the map producing Goods.

I am also trying out using the "place track to purchase things" method for buying upgrades and extra track etc. , where 1 space "territories" are created and things are triggered by either purchasing rights to these territories or things are enacted by placing track in them. I have a track purchasing method working pretty good wherein a territory on the bottom right of the map (In the Ocean) has 10 spaces , and by placing or bulldozing sections of track here sets the # of track units(5 units of track purchased monthly for each section of track in the territory) that will be "purchased" on a monthly basis.I like this track purchasing method better than the "yearly" method as you can change it whenever you like, and you dont have to deal with a "popup" choice message every year.

[Stoker]

OK, I went and did it. I caught the Mod bug. The more I work on making 1.06 maps the unfinished details in that Mod are bugging me, so I am going to assemble a "BandAid" that addresses the unskinned (warehouse skinned) new industries and also introduce a few new industry buildings to fill in some gaps in the usages of the new cargoes. My intention is to make this BandAid backwards compatible with existing 1.06 scenarios. I conducted a test where I reskinned the new MachineShop using the WeaponsFactory building, and then tried starting an old scenario that had a MachineShop prebuilt on the map and it worked! I suspect that if the new building skin was larger than the old "temporary" warehouse skin used on the new industries that there might be a problem but all of the buildings I propose to use are smaller than the warehouse so there should be no problems in that aspect. My file organization skills are good, but this Hexadecimal editing is new territory for me, so I expect to be asking for help on this subject, some of which has already been kindly offered. Please offer any suggestions about things that you think should be addressed in this BandAid or of how exactly these things should be implemented.

[WPandP]

The issue we have run into, with mod content that replaces an existing asset (like a new skin for a Tool & Die, for instance), is that within Saved Games, the old assets may still occur. The saved file includes some of those assets. However, anything newly spawned in the game will use the new assets just fine. This puzzled me for a while - I created a revamped Coal Mine, yet on some older custom scenarios I'd go in to play it and there would be the old Coal Mine right at the start. It was using the old graphics assets, but the BCA file was working right (as I had made it slightly more productive), and sure enough as soon as a new mine spawned, it was the right kind.

So, if you're trading out the default 1.06 warehouses for unique industries (yay!), don't be shocked if you go to play a 1.06 scenario and see old warehouses still. That just means those industries were placed in the scenario editor and saved with the scenario (as opposed to spawned at game start).

[Stoker]

I suppose I will have to add a "This might not work with saved games" disclaimer.

[WPandP]

Yeah. Though, it isn't that it isn't working; it works fine, it's just that saved content may not be updated. Most scenarios don't have pre-placed industries, they just spawn at launch, so that won't be a problem. But for someone who has played a few years in to a scenario, saved, then installed a bunch of mods, they shouldn't be surprised when they return to that scenario, to see all the old stuff.

This is true for almost all mods - my rolling stock behaves the same way; save a game with a train in it, and those cars won't be updated until the train gets to its next stations and loads up a new set of cars.

[Stoker]

I am using Hex Editor Neo. I havn't been able to figure out most of the features of it, but I am cavemanning my way through by just manually typing all changes. Is there an easier Hex Editor? I am also curious why not all Hex entries show as symbols in the text readout.Example "08" "07" and "27" all register as a period in the text readout. I am assuming that to change these values, you must do it in the Hex portion only.

[WPandP]

I use Tiny Hexer by mirkes.de - just Google that and you'll find plenty of download sites, though http://www.mirkes.de doesn't look like the right place to go - it is not being actively supported there. The main reason I like TH is that it have a Structure Viewer (I think that is what it is called) that converts the hex code into sensible floating-point numbers on the fly. So, using this tool, you can just type in the new decimal value you want it to be, without having to find some conversion tool first. I don't know what features Neo has going for it, so I can't say for certain that TH is better, but I really like it.

The characters that show on the right panel are just the ASCII text equivalents for those bytes, and I guess there are just several bytes which have no ASCII character equivalent. They all get rendered the same way. One thing that really tripped me up at first was that "00" and "20" looked the same - "00" tells RRT3 that it has reached the end of a text string, whereas "20" is the space-bar character, still a part of the text string. If I goofed between those two, then it would get the name wrong and fail to load assets. Another thing you'll notice is that the original programmers of RRT3 were rather sloppy with their text strings... they would just type the new name, up to the "00", then leave the rest of the junk beyond that point. So you end up with a bunch of nonsense in the text string portions, which doesn't affect how the game functions, but can be confusing to you as you mod.