Railroad Tycoon 3 - Trainmaster Alpha 1

[Itsa Timmy]

I had a bit of free time tonight so I took the plunge and downloaded TM. Things are looking very nice, Ned.

A few general concerns though, Does anyone else have to "resign" back to the campaign screen when in the editor?
Also the General Validation seems to lock up the game until I alt tab out and back in.

I haven't had time to mess around with much but maybe I'll be able to this weekend.

Keep up the good work, Ned!

[Wolverine@MSU]

A few general concerns though, Does anyone else have to "resign" back to the campaign screen when in the editor?

Yes, that happened to me when I made a new map from the Spain.TGA heightmap. I only set a new default start date and recolored the map to make buildings more noticable. I also set all "industries" to 100% to seed the map with all available assets. When I went back to edit it, I got the Campaign Menu. Some other maps I made did not do this, and I remade the Spain map and it works OK, at least for now.

[nedfumpkin]

I get that menu in RT3 1.05, but in TM I get a menu that returns me to the main menu.

I'm working on the menus for the game, and will be releasing them later on. I want to make it so that resign is never an option, and instead, returning to the main menu is, I'd also like to see if it is possible is I can make it so that a restart scenario option is available.

[Gandar]

I was at the optomestrist today and had drops put in my eyes, so things are kinda fuzzy for me tonight. I go to get examined by neuro-opthalmologist in June.

Ned if your new machine is a laptop then take it with you, from my experience with opthamologists you will be waiting for about an hour after your appointment time. With luck it will be better in Hamilton.

[nedfumpkin]

There's only about 6 neuro-opthalmologists in Canada, and I'm going to the top guy. It's all being paid for by my work. There is another neuro-opthalmologist in Hamilton on a felloewship, however, I'm going to wait until the Toronto guy examines me so that if I need to go to the Hamilton guy, then I can get OHIP to pay for everything.

[nedfumpkin]

Just a quick note to say that I've deciphered the file with all the text messages in it, and with the next patch, Dining Cars will be called First Class Carriages. I'll also be making some other changes....lots

[MrScott1964]

This was probebly covered before somewhere else, but how does the hopper yard work?

[nedfumpkin]

The hopper yard is a railyard structure that you build as a depot for coal, bauxite, fetilizer, iron, uranium, pulpwood and sand. It has a very small demand, just enough so that the player can send the cargo there where it can be picked up by another train.

These can either be placed at stations in cities, or off in the country with a small station to act as a railyard,

[MrScott1964]

It acts like a building and just gets placed beside the track?

[nedfumpkin]

It's something player does to assist their company. It gets built like a hotel or restaurant. It can be placed anywhere, but will need a station to be effective.

[WPandP]

The "Yard" structures were initially a conjecture about a way to get RRT3 to behave more like real railroads. They basically have a small demand, like individual houses do, for various cargoes, and this is enough to create an economic map "hot spot", towards which the cargo will flow. Thus, you can get a cargo stream that is obstinately avoiding your station to angle over towards it (over time). With their weak demand, they'll "trap" those loads there. Thus, a Hopper Yard collects coal and other things that ride in hoppers.

I wanted the Yards to be spurs off of the main track, but due to game engine limitations I couldn't find a way to force that. So you can build it anywhere; the game thinks of it in the same category as Restaurants. However, for functional reasons you want to build it within a station's capture radius, preferably as close as possible to the station itself.

I'm finding that in TrainMaster the Yards are rather critical, because with all the industries having multiple varied demands and production formulae, there is a tendency for cargo to want to move in all manner of different directions. The Yards impose some order, coaxing cargo to go where you want it to.

One thing I noticed, though, is that if you're trying to move coal, then a Water Tower works just as well as a Hopper Yard - because it has the same small demand for coal and thus works the same way. I'm not sure if I like this, but it interested me when I saw coal pooling up at my Service Tower instead of the Hopper Yard!

[MrScott1964]

Are service towers now demanding coal? I missed that. How does that work? I can understand coal being needed for the steam engines but what happens at the end of the steam era?

[nedfumpkin]

I wanted to make the water towers and the maintenance facilities consume the cargos that make railroads run. The water tower also demands .5 sand and .3 explosives in addition to .5 coal. Maintenance facilites demand .5 petroleum and .5 machinery.

If it ends up not being a good idea, then I can change them back or tweak them down.

Right now the water towers demand coal until the end, but now that you borugh it up, I'll stop them in 1970.

And yes, the yard structures are very important since the cargo is drawn by so many competing industries. This will help manage things.

[MrScott1964]

Right now the water towers demand coal until the end, but now that you borugh it up, I'll stop them in 1970.

I like coming up with little details like that.

[nedfumpkin]

Thank you. It's stuff like that where I need the help the most.

Right now I am working out in my head how to create the station windows so that they will show if there are yard stucture or station amenities in a more sensible way. Hopefully it will help once I get it down.

I'm also working on listing the last of the indutries, and I'll be documenting the yard structures and station amenities to be included in the next patch. (Tomorrow)

[WPandP]

Actually, Ned, I'd have them switch from coal to diesel at about 1960. My N&W, the last of the major US railroads to dieselize, was out of the steam biz by 1960, and no doubt most players of RRT3 will be running diesels by then.

The Yards have really tiny demands, like 0.3 or less, so that would be why the tower was winning out over the yard. So maybe just cranking down the demand to 0.2 for towers, possibly up the hopper yard to 0.4, would preserve the right balance. The thing is, the yard cannot get too demanding, or you'll start seeing it consuming loads. Cargo that walks over the map to the hopper yard arrives at a certain slow rate, if the demand exceeds this rate then the yard will eat everything that arrives. That's in theory; of course, in practice you usually place a yard where it can draw from multiple load sources.

The Maint. Shed should also have its demand set lower for petroleum, though I think 0.5 for machinery is fine... unless one is trying to move machinery in a specific direction. It seemed to me that getting mines to produce more, by bringing machinery back on the return trip, just wasn't happening, since there was so much demand for machinery. The town where the machinery was made was consuming a bunch of it, meaning my train is only bringing back a half load, and it doesn't go very far towards helping the mine. The solution, of course, is to build Yards and take control of the machinery flow, but if a Maint. Shed is interfering then you'll find yourself having to demolish and relocate the shed.

So, maybe as a general rule, just do Towers/Sheds as 0.2 maximum demand, and do Yards as 0.3 or 0.4 for those cargoes that overlap.

What would be really cool is if we could make a larger "Engine Terminal" that has a full-blown roundhouse, and acts as both Towers and Shed, that could then demand higher amounts because you know, as a player, that it's something you've got to deal with - perhaps it even acts as a station, to accept such deliveries. But, that's something for Rail Mogul, should it ever happen; just don't see a way to make it happen here.

[MrScott1964]

What would be really cool is if we could make a larger "Engine Terminal" that has a full-blown roundhouse

Now that would give it that "railroad operation" feeling to the game.

You know what I always wanted to see...It would just be eye candy but, telegraph wires along the track and some crossings. Now the crossing would be a pretty stupid idea knowing that there are no roads to cross in RRT3.

[nedfumpkin]

The yards are demanding .2 of their respecitve cargos. I'll lower the demands for the service towers and the maintenance sheds.

I did try to make a shanty that would act as a station and also have a drawm but couldn't get it to work. I'm also tring to figure out a roundhouse, but so far nothing seems to be coming to mind.

Machinery and paper are two cargos that are demanded all over the place. It is intentional in the design that these two be difficult to manage. The idea is that there is wear an tear on machinery, or re-tooling, and this is to be taken into account in production. At the same time, machinery is parts, so some industries have to incorporate them into their products.

Paper is ingrained into our society to such a degree that if we were to select the one thing that distinguishes us from the animals, its that we are consumers of paper. This is why it is a "burden" cargo like machinery.

To make telegraph lines, I could probably modify the electric track and replace regular track with it. I'll see if it is feasible.

[nedfumpkin]

I've finished listing the rest of the general industries and update the txt file. The changes to the actual industries will be in the next patch, and that will include also the station buildings doc as well.

The additions are listed at the bottom of the page.

[WPandP]

I agree that paper and machinery should be too tough to channel, so that means that a Maint. Shed with noticeably higher demand than the Yard is fine.

I'm wondering whether coal mines ought to be more productive, especially in early years. The way you have them set up, they produce a trickle until they get fed with catalysts like machinery. However, in the early game coal is in extreme demand. Moreover, in the early days, coal mining just required willing manual labor; as time went on, it became more mechanized, thus more dependent on the product of other industries. So, instead of 0.5 coal or 2.0 coal when fed machines, maybe initially it could be 2.0 coal with no input, say until about 1880, then 1.0 coal or 2.0 with input until about 1925ish, then your 0.5 coal baseline. I might be off in my amounts or dates, I'm just trying to get across the concept. This would also represent mines "playing out", where in order to get any more usable ores it requires mega machines; a man with a pickaxe just can't get to it anymore.

Telegraph lines, as part of the track model (replacing electric catenary perhaps), in my opinion wouldn't look right, because the poles would be forced to be too close together. I'm not sure it is worth pursuing this.