Coru's game mods (and questions!)

[coruscate]

Looks sweet!

[nedfumpkin]

Thanks...

I just installed the casino and the vineyard, they look really, really good. A few things need fixing in the files.

Casino...you should swap out the bty file with a non-farm since it says that production is increased 20% if supplied with fertilizer, or you should add it as an input.

Casino....I would suggest changing the balance in the bca...I would put alcohol, and meat/food as a demand only, and then I would put in passengers=passengers unless of course you want to include alien abductions. :)

Otherwise, nice additions to the game.

[coruscate]

Thanks...

I just installed the casino and the vineyard, they look really, really good. A few things need fixing in the files.

Casino...you should swap out the bty file with a non-farm since it says that production is increased 20% if supplied with fertilizer, or you should add it as an input.

I'll see if I can do that for the vineyard too, I'm tired of that message. There's a spot where you can put the name of the load in, but it doesn't seem to affect the building at all so I don't know where to turn that off, except by copying another. I will give it a try.

Casino....I would suggest changing the balance in the bca...I would put alcohol, and meat/food as a demand only, and then I would put in passengers=passengers unless of course you want to include alien abductions. :)

I'm going to play with this a bit, plus I don't want it to try and eat its own passengers. I'm happy with the idea thus far, because if a rail did serve a casino eventually the casino would put people on that rail.

Otherwise, nice additions to the game.

Thank you.

[coruscate]

Clicking the link will give you the Lavender farm. Produces in a similar way to the Vineyard except the exact productions numbers vary a bit for passengers into goods. Both facilities seem to only produce a limited quantity of extra goods but if connected are profitable. I'll get the detail pricing later.

Still tweaking the Casino and trying to incorporate the Hospital (demands 1 goods, takes four passengers and generates out) and the tourist trap (demands 1 goods, takes two passengers and generates one or a half mail, I forget which, I need to go to bed )

By the way, demand and produce are industry things. Taking in and generating mail are non industry things that buildings can be set to do.

I figure in the end I may go straight demand on meat and alcohol as suggested for the casino, jack it's take in up same for the tourist shops, and balance it out by buildings that generate people such as air liners...

[nedfumpkin]

Totally cool buildings.....

I'm setting up the tourist trap as the toy factory since toys are out as a cargo for me. The building itself would be hard to make into anything else, and has Christmas trees and stuff. I am calling it "Attraction" so that it can represent a theme park or anything where tourists will go.

If you want to do the skin, by all means feel free. I am liking your skins better than some of mine. Although I have found that designing building signs in vector then copying them into bitmap displays better. Doesn't make sense, but I am doing that with the cargo icons and they seem to translate to DDS much cleaner.

[coruscate]

Excellent, I had planned on reskinning that as Legoland, California. About the only thing I could skin it as.

The Uranium mine can be skinned into a water park ^_^

[coruscate]

I have excellent news to report.

I loaded up a large map tonight to test if the game would register my new church and the old church, as well as the two different versions of the tourist trap based on the small and large retail.

It worked. The new and old church showed up and the game randomly shuffled between both variants of the Tourist trap without a problem.

What this means for those of us skinning is that we can and should have no problem if we skin something someone else already skinned, we can now get the game to generate another version of the building. It means that for any industry you can have as many buildings and paint jobs on those buildings as you can design that the game itself has no problem accepting under normal circumstances.

The Vineyard, Lavender Farm and Casino mods will be repacked as a "set" later on so that the game will generate multi-colored industries where you set them up, especially useful for the casino.

Oh since there is a railroad themed casino I will, since I wanted to experiment with it anyway, try and create a "trackside" version of it like was done with the GWizz port.

The airline mod will be released as a set featuring various airliner logos, and the "attraction" set can use multiple buildings as well as color schemes.

What I alwso want to find out is if this game can support multiple housing themes beyond what it already has. If it can, as a "see if I can" test, I can take one of the basic house scenes and give it a sick "picasso puked up last night's absolut" multi-colored Mexican city theme... you know, lime green houses with avacado highlights, homes painted a shade darker than the dirt and the occasional and deep navy blue with bright yellow awnings house. It'd be perfect for all the third world levels ^^

[coruscate]

http://healthyinsanity.com/railroad/preview100108.jpg

The new church and casino skin.

[coruscate]

And this preview contains the nearly complete skin for the "Attraction" and something new I learned about the alpha channel, there's a gray color in there that is the game uses to set the lights to during the evening portions of the game. You can see how I played with it here on all the buildings.

http://healthyinsanity.com/railroad/morepreviewszy.jpg

Oh, also, I think that company profitability may be tied to the BTY file... because my casinos only eat up 39 k a year but the attraction just BLEEDS money from the minute I build it to the tune of 100 or some obscene number.

[nedfumpkin]

I like the water park... I may be wrong, but I though that the grey parts were opacity changes to the image so that the light shines out from the inside of the building. I'm not sure how this works. But it looks cool what you did.

[WPandP]

Anything grey in the alpha channel will get rendered as lights in the game. This is what causes the "halo" effect on some reskins - if the creator doesn't take the time to clean up the edges of the alpha channel, when they go through and create the reduced-size versions of their skin (i.e. the B, C, D, and E versions), then they will end up with "anti-aliased" alpha channel edges which have grey between the black and white.

It seems like the level of grey also has an effect, in terms of how bright the lighting is. You can make it just a soft glow if you want to.

[coruscate]

Can a building produce, demand AND transform all at once?

Had problems trying to make that last night...

[nedfumpkin]

Yes, it can do all those things, and I am getting it to do that on most buildings I am creating. For example, the production of waste is a constant from industry. The industry transforms the cargo it is meant to, and in most cases there is a constant demand. Of course, all of this has an effect on the profitability of the industry, so that's where the tweaking comes in.

In a few situations, I am using the 16 entry house bca to create periods for different things. This is how I am making the co-operatives. In others, I have a 7 entry bca with different things going on.

The one thing that does happen is the cargo window gets really messed up if you have too many things going on at the same time. I still haven't figured out how to control the font size.

[coruscate]

Hey can you send me a few of those working BCA files? If you've already done the work I shouldn't be wasting my time trying to repeat your learning curve, I'd rather focus on skinning these buildings of mine and getting them functional. Once my core ones are done I can focus more on some of the ones you're coming up with. By the way if we don't smack into a limit I think I will do an alternate building skin for your hospital as well. One of the commercial buildings might look better than the Brewery...

[coruscate]

Now that I'm putting my skins together, does anyone want their name on a business?

Like so and so hospital, so and so airlines?

(Name) Airlines
(name) Hospital
(Name) (tourist trap goods) <-- feel free to let loose there.

[coruscate]

Alright, BCA wise this is what I have so far. I need to add the hospital and the shipyard to this and then it's all skins, skins and more skins until I'm done.

Question, can two demands be put on the same column, so far it seems like all {Demand Only} units need to be entirely separate.

[KevinL]

How does the lavender farm and the vineyard turn passengers into something else?

[nedfumpkin]

The way I'm setting up the vineyard is that it has seven input/output entries.

.2 glass = 1 alcohol

.1 glass + .5 livestock = 1 alcohol

.5 livestock = 1 livestock

.1 livestock = .5 wool

1 passengers + .2 glass = 1 alcohol

.5 fertilizer + .2 glass = 1 alcohol

demand only = .5 lumber

Then it produces and demands 1 load of passengers as passengers.(in the footer of the bca)

So this means that in total, the vineyard can supply 4 loads of alcohol if all its demands are met.

Glass is necessary for the bottles and carboys, lumber for the barrels. The passenger stuff for alcohol happens after the 1950s, as a tourist thing, but the passenger production in the footer is for migrant workers.

At least thats how I have it right now. The problem I am experiencing is there seems to be something in the bty file that prevents a full list of its supplies and demands, but the show up on the overview.

I'm going to aso make it buyable, but not buildable.

[WPandP]

Have you tested, over the long term, any of these "0.5 widgets = 1.0 widgets" kind of transformations? It seems like am infinite reaction, that will flood the game with that commodity after playing for several years. I know the industry is limited in terms of total number of cargo transformations each year, but is that enough to keep things balanced?

Really, this kind of reaction is a Nukular Cargo Formula - one neutrino splits one atom, which releases two neutrinos that go and split two more atoms, etc. So it is very fitting to be playing around with it conceptually. I just hope that really long scenarios still work, without the economy getting all out of whack. For instance, I could see that with such a formula, the industry will produce more than its own needs in terms of livestock, and thus the local oversupply will drive widget price way down. Then, even though widgets show up as a demand item for that industry, it will never draw fresh supplies towards itself. Maybe that is your intention... it is a net supplier of widgets. But, supposing that the price goes way down, and then all of the widgets get picked up and moved elsewhere. It no longer has any "seed" stock, and ceases production. It will have to go through a cycle until demand value gets high enough to draw a load back, to seed the reaction, and it will start creating an inventory while the price drops again. Thus, over the long term, I see boom-bust cycles, or rather, supply-demand cycles. Is this how it works?

[nedfumpkin]

I'm not really sure how it behaves over the long term, I am trying to figure that out now.

The decimals are working, and in the scenario I am testing there doesn't seem to be a problem with oversupply. After six years, I am still struggling to make a buck...but I'm playing with no bonds. (Condition is set that no banks until 5 loads of gold is hauled)

I am finding that there isn't a big issue with supplies getting moved to other places, especially when there is a small decimal since the consumption doesn't allow for full loads to be picked up on cargo that travels there on its own.

To prevent over supply, I've tried to make it so that industries compete for supplies, but also that the cargo is consumed in the game by different entities.

I think it is going to come down to the scenario writer and how they set up the map. More should be determined in the set up and less left to chance by spawning. This is especially true for industry, and attention should be placed on what goes where.

Ideally when it is all done the game shouldn't be overly easy, instead, it should require a lot of planning to be lucrative.