RT3 counts weird (sometimes)

[Just Crazy Jim]

I've noticed in several scenarios that depend on haulage counts that even when the details are set correctly, that RT3 occasionally seems to suffer a stroke in the counting part of the code. Some point after I have 50+ trains running, I noticed it to happen more often. Tonight, as I was testing my 1804 New England scenario, which has a requirement for loads hauled to Boston. Things were going as expected until I won the game at Bronze with only 158 loads of the required 500 hauled, 15 years before the trigger should have even fired, as it was set for 1829, not 1814. This was most unexpected.

I tried reloading a save and running the game to the trigger, and never managed to get it to repeat the error.

I tried to remember precisely what I was doing when the trigger went off all wrong and I believe I had the track tool active. I know that having the track tool active causes a sort of stutter at end of year, delaying display of the ledger. Everything I tried (including keeping the track tool active for a full year, laying and removing track) never managed to get the event to fire off wrong again.

But I am convinced there is something to the track tool (and possibly the stations/other buildings tool) that relates to the counting bug.

[Gumboots]

Never had it happen to me, but I wouldn't be surprised what this old game does when it gets in the mood. It seems to breed more bugs than a rotting whale carcass.

[Wolverine@MSU]

I've found that if I want to keep a Boom or Prosperity economy going when the game is getting toward going for a random downturn I switch to the tracklaying screen toward the end of February or August and keep it there until a week or so into March or September. Most of the time it will not change economic state as long as you're in the track laying mode. I've staved off downturns for years at a time with this trick.

[Gumboots]

Handy, if dastardly.

[Just Crazy Jim]

I've found that if I want to keep a Boom or Prosperity economy going when the game is getting toward going for a random downturn I switch to the tracklaying screen toward the end of February or August and keep it there until a week or so into March or September. Most of the time it will not change economic state as long as you're in the track laying mode. I've staved off downturns for years at a time with this trick.

Good to know. And it gives a bit more weight to my suspicion about the track and stations/buildings tools being active interfering with the normal background operations of the game. There is very likely a memory address issue.

[Wolverine@MSU]

Handy, if dastardly.

I rather think of it as "astute Tycooning". After all, didn't the railroad barons have some influence on the economy in their day?

[Cash on Wheels]

One tycoon shutdown the only railroad bridge to new york and forced his rival railroads to go into recerivership. Not enough time for me to look him up.

[Hawk]

One tycoon shutdown the only railroad bridge to new york and forced his rival railroads to go into recerivership. Not enough time for me to look him up.

That would be Cornelius Vanderbilt.

https://competesmarternotharder.wordpre ... er-bridge/

[RulerofRails]

I've found that if I want to keep a Boom or Prosperity economy going when the game is getting toward going for a random downturn I switch to the tracklaying screen toward the end of February or August and keep it there until a week or so into March or September. Most of the time it will not change economic state as long as you're in the track laying mode. I've staved off downturns for years at a time with this trick.

I thought for the sake of testing game bugs, let see if this happens if you run the game with the train replace/upgrade window open (re-start the game with the non-keypad "+" key) for 5 years. The economy still changed but the AI didn't build any track, instead buying my stock. Perhaps, these type of exploits could also be used to prevent the AI from building track, but that could happen at random times, so doesn't have the effectiveness of your method to stave off recession.

I know that train crashes/breakdowns generate no action if the game is run with the replace/upgrade window open. I sometimes leave the train replace/upgrade window up for a week or two if I can save enough to replace a train quickly, but my genuine fear is that events will not fire correctly if I leave the window up for too long. In track-laying mode, I would also have a fear that events don't fire right. Have you ever tested/observed if events fire correctly over the month ends of March and September when using your method?

[Just Crazy Jim]

RoR, as early as version 1.0 I noticed events failing to fire off when I have the track tool active. Not consistently, but with enough frequency that I am leery of using the track tool if I know an event is coming up. It also gave me to develop the habit of holding off building new track until after the ledger pop-up in January.

I have not done any extensive testing, but having a building hanging on the cursor but not dropped onto the terrain also has demonstrated a sort of interference with events firing off.

The game, being designed for systems with far less RAM than we have now, probably was coded within a set of coding norms appropriate to the time it was made, so this may not be a "bug" per se, but what was a design limit based on the then assumed norm for 32-bit gaming systems. So, my thinking is that there is a memory address conflict (shared, overlapping, something) in the several working parts of the code. Conversely, it is possible that there are potentially bugs we see now because 64-bit systems are putting game related data in memory addresses outside what the game was designed to read. I consider this a real possibility, because of the 2 GB usable RAM limit and 4 GB maximum readable file size limit on late generation 32-bit systems.

There were similar issues affecting 16-bit software after the adoption of 32-bit architecture. For instance, even though Windows 95 and Windows 98 are ostensibly 32-bit OSes, they had issues installing on systems with more than 512 MB of RAM because they used a 16-bit installer. Even post install, Windows 98 had a hard limit of 768 MB of usable RAM that could only be overcome if the system BIOS was of a particular design (So saith Microsoft, although I looked far and wide for such a system and I never managed to locate a BIOS that would allow it). IIRC, on release, RT3 was playable on Windows 98 systems, so some of the issues may relate to a 512 MB limit in the memory addresses used by the RT3 EXE. AFAIK, only a complete recompile with new values would change that.

[Hawk]

Any time I have the track laying window open when Jan. hits, the ledger window will still open once I close the track laying window. I never had a problem with it never opening after closing the track laying window.

[Just Crazy Jim]

Agreed, it doesn't affect the ledger displaying completely. I've had the ledger delay display until June and July because I had stepped away from the system with the track tool still active.

[RulerofRails]

For interests sake, in the quick test I did. After 5 years of running with the train replace/upgrade open, upon exiting to the normal game, plenty of newspapers showed up (economic, from events, even a connection bonus) but only one ledger. The ledger is obviously tied to the game year in some way so this makes sense.