Railroad Tycoon 3 - Trainmaster Alpha 1

[WPandP]

One other thing I noticed from playing earlier:

The Amish Community has a barn that isn't skinned quite right. Not that there is any technical flaw with it... it's just that Amish barns are white, with green window trim if present, grey slate roof. At least, those in Lancaster, PA are... I just did a Google image search and I see tons of bright red barns. I think these might just be Amish in terms of construction techniques; a real Amish community would disdain the showiness of the bright red. Maybe I'm wrong, maybe real Amish barns are red sometimes. Still, when I think of Amish I think white.

Do you want me to do a skin for this? Let me know how I can help.

[nedfumpkin]

I've increaded the production of the coal mine so that it produces 1 load per yer rather than .5. Same for the others except the gold mines.

I would have to say that the Colliery is the "easy" coal mine, and the strip mine is the "hard" coal mine. Deep mines will generate passenger traffic so they will have a bit more revenue from the workers going back and forth. Strip mines are intentionally more difficult to get going. I did this to be more of a challenge, and provide different map making options.

The Amish Community is using the skin from the corn farm. I liked the shape of the buildings for that purpose, but never gave any thought to the colour scheme. It would be relatively easy to repaint the buildings white, but if you want to do it, by all means help yourself.

One of the things that has been tearing me up has been how to name the different farms. The Amish Community is more representative than specific. It's meant to represent small traditional communities, and Amish and Mennonites are such a thing. I can't think of a another name to use.

Currently the building detail window displays the message that output is increased by fertilizer. I've successfully changed that to read "Traditional folk with little use for modern technology." Of course, that it is being displayed on other farms is still to be corrected. :)

The same goes for the Commune. Its design is more so that a bit of "colour" can be added to the map. It represents any community such as a monestary, hippie love fest, kibbutz, etc.

So if anyone can come up with better names, I'm all for it. I tried to use what I thought would be inuitive terms, but I am always open to suggestion.

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On another note, I tried adding new players and have been completely unsuccessful. I was wondering if someone could also try so I can determine if this is endemic or just me. Thanks in advance.

If for some reason new players can't be added, then I am going to be changing some of the default players.

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I think I've finally figured out a way of adding a new type of house. I'm going to call it the bungalow. I've been working on a way of having the houses change much more over the years, and there are inherent problems with setting definitive end dates. By creating a bungalow (1958), I'll create a late brick house that will spawn evenly with the other houses, but will have a more modern set of demands. It'll allow for more changes. Still a theory, but a very plausible one and I'll let y'all know later today.


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Edit... I am working on a series of events to create a method of determining a set amount of a resource before it dries up, with reduced production once 1/2 has been extracted. I'll post it when I have it all typed out.

[Zteuer]

Hi

After some testing I have been thinking that the following issues might be in need of balancing.

I'm having a problem with the storage sheds. I'm trying to use them to move machines and explosives to mines. The problem is that it is costing me 100-200k a year pr shed. Maybe they consume too much of the parts, I guess that's where the cost comes from. Would it perhaps solve the problem if they were instead of consuming 0.1 pr year, maybe they would produce 0.1 from 0.1 machines (like a production facility only input and output is the same cargo).

The bank is producing 1.0 gold from 0.7 gold. On my testmap with 16 small houses (in 2 towns with 8 each) and 2 iron mines (who produce small ammounts of gold), the gold keeps piling up. I'm up to about 15 gold in each town. Maybe it would be better to make the banks "profit" smaller from gold, or maybe it's just an unintended side effect from my special testmap.

Zteuer

[nedfumpkin]

I had the same prolem with the gold piling up at banks too. I'll try lowering the demand and see if that helps.

I'm working on the railyard structures right now and it appears that the formula for machinery is what's causing the problem. It's to consume .5 machinery in exchange for .2 machinery. It should be .2 = .2. The shed's etc, are supposed to lose money, because they are part of the cost of operating a railroad. But they aren't supposed to lose that much, so I am going to lower it to .1=.1 so that the production is less, thus less of a loss. The idea is that storage isn't free.

I'll have the fix later today.

[nedfumpkin]

I finished documenting and tweaking the Railyard Structures and Station Amenities. I'll be uploading the files later. Here's the text file with how things should work.

Trainmaster_Railyard_Structures.txt

(6.61 KiB) Downloaded 148 times

I noticed that I had quite a few erros in the recipes, so that could have been causing all kinds of problems. I though I had fixed everything when I did them for 1.05 and 1.06. Ooops. :)

All the Railyard Structures are perceived as Restaurants by the game. The Restaurant and Tavern are both Taverns now. This is the only way I could get the game to display the correct messages, and icons for these typse of things...which I am going to be working on now. The Hotel is still a Hotel, and so is the Post Office.

[MrScott1964]

I'll have the fix later today.

I've been working on another project. I needed to clean some crap out of my computer and I ended up re-installed RRT3. I'm waiting for Ned's next update before I re-install Trainmaster. Somebody give me a yell when it's ready.

[nedfumpkin]

And here it is...


Here's the latest patch. As always, it is cumulative so only the latest patch needs to be installed.

This completes all the industries, rail yard structures, station amenities, etc. and documents them all. The municipal buildings come next.

This also fixes the game message for the station buildings. The icons on the station detail have also been fixed. So has the lavender farm, and the Class Y6

Agricultural communities no longer have the message about fertilizer.


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The links here have been removed since all the latest files are now located here:

viewtopic.php?f=74&t=1883

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[MrScott1964]

I wanna make sure I got this right...
At this point I need the Alpha 1 zip (At the beginning of the thread) and the Alpha 1D zip you just posted...correct?

[nedfumpkin]

That is correct. Alpha_1d has all the stuff from 1a, 1b, 1c. I copied the link to the Alpha.zip to the post with the patch.

Also, this patch changes the Dining Car to First Class Carriages.

[ishaybas]

Wait for me wait for me!!

Hey, I would love the alpha test the game .. I Just opened the forum and saw it!
Maybe this thread should be a sticky one on top ..

I'll have time to download and play only next weekend, but be sure I'll have feedback.
In the meantime, some ideas I would really love to see:

1. in RT3 there is only one load/unload time variable. However, passengers take much less time to load than cargo.. I think it would be great if there can be a cargo load/unload and a passenger/express load/unload. It will make the game more 'real' and give some more value to express trains.
2. How about a random map generator? something like Civilization does ... I know its a project on his own, but even just a random terrain would give a good start to build original scenarios.
3. Stations that can get more than two tracks, and have more than just two trains going in and out at the same time.

More soon ..

Hawk, we're all with you.

[nedfumpkin]

Ishaybas, off the top of my head, I cannot figure out a way to accomplish the things you suggest, but I will look into the possibility. I'll especially try to figure out a way to have more tracks at stations. But I dunno....

I should have a playable map very soon. I spent a lot of time over the weekend trying to figure out the cargo dsiplay with some success, so I'll get back to map making tonight.

The mechanics of the cargo aspects of the game are essentially done now. The municipal buildings are the "people in your naighbourhood" so the cargo recipes are for information mostly since they spawn based on the city size. The tweaking that I'll be doing is for balancing, rather than functionality. The bungalow idea is still a just concept, so I'll be working on that too.

[ishaybas]

How much access do you have to the game's engine actual code?
I would assume that dividing cargo and passenger load time is something
they did not think about originally and will probably require deep code changes.
Or maybe no and that will be cool ..

A random map generator could be some external utility, but it will require some dev time.

Wish I could help!

[MrScott1964]

When I look at some of the production formulas, there is cargo marked with a 0. What does this mean?

[WPandP]

Unfortunately, in the game, cargo demands/production are rounded down to whole numbers, so 0.5 gets reported as 0 in-game. The exception, I've noticed, is the House, which reports out to two decimal places for all of its demands. Maybe this is hard-coded into the game; Ned has verified, though, that such fractional cargo formulae actually do work.

[MrScott1964]

Ok I see...Now, I'm not a professional, (I only play one on TV) but is there a way to make the game think that every building is a house? This way you can get all the factional numbers.

[WPandP]

The game must have custom code for the Houses, because it randomizes among several different models for each instance of a house on the map, yet they all share the same BuildingTypes BCA file. Other buildings don't do this, you can't have multiple variants that are randomly chosen; the stations have variants, but they are selected by architectural style.

I don't know if Ned has tried this, maybe he has: I wonder if a house can have a production formula, the way an industry converts one cargo into another. I know they have demands and some production, but I don't know about conversions.

I think Ned is looking into other ways to deal with this issue of rounding down. We might just have to live with it, perhaps rely on a TrainMaster cheat-sheet that we keep printed out on our desks.

[nedfumpkin]

Isaybas, If something is inside the RT3.exe, I will say that it is most likely beyond my reach. For now anyways. One thing I want at all times is for this to work on Vista without crashing, and without the losing functionality of the game. But anthing else as far as files I have been able to modify to some degree with success. So it all depends on where stuff is located.


The cargo display for buildings is something that I am working on. I am trying to figure out a way of displaying everything in decimals. Right now, anything less than 1 shows as a zero.

The House and station have small numbers for cargo, and I've also noticed that some buildings display their cargo recipe different than others. I think the display information is located in the buildingdetail.win file, but I've not so far deciphered it. Ideally, I'd like to have everything displayed with small icons, and at least 1 decimal place.

The cargo recipes are in fact working, however, I have yet to conduct controlled tests to exmine profitability. I want it so that if an industry is fully supllied then it will pay itself off in less than 10 years.

Here's my to do list in order....

- Document the municipal buildings. They are beyond the player's control, although the map maker can place them, but a lot of the buildings are new, and others have changed. Industrial parks are good to know about. :)

- Finish the intro map I am working on. Sort of a tutorial to show the basic concepts.

- Work on more cosmentic stuff for the game such as the menus, cargo display, game messages, etc.

- Finish the freight cars. With most of the cars having their cargo icons removed, there is a lot of empty space on the image file, and I am thinking of making the cargo icon larger for the box car, and then having it so that RR roadnames, or company logos can be used to customize box cars differently. This will also entail remapping the skin, but it could work out well. It's one way of overcoming the problem with reversing skins.

- finish the express car mods.

- make the scenarios I have planned.

- Put together some fancier documentation.

...anything else that needs to be done.


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Late reply.... I am going to work on the bungalow idea over the course of the week, and I'll be checking production/demand issues with the houses. I am pretty sure that it can do exchanges, I will have to seen, and have an answer later tonight.

[WPandP]

Ned-

Regarding fixing the reversing skins, the real way to handle this is to edit the 3DP. I've already done it a couple of times, such as on the Class A 2-6-6-4's tender, and it is something I intend to do as I move forward on my overall suite of rolling stock mods. I need to go back and revisit some of my earlier cars that were developed with mirrored sides. The benefit of doing it this way is that once you fix the Body.3DP file, you've fixed the problem for all of the skins that might use that particular body.

Still, if you can find out how to paint the company logo rather than the cargo icon onto the decal model, I'm all for the effort! The only thing is, once you do this, then all your trains become captive-fleet rolling stock, you never see any of the roadname variety that you get with interchange. But it would be a cool feature to unlock.

My overall goal is still to develop a set of cars which has a unique skin for each cargo, plus which offers freight cars in multiple-car sets, and then to release this all as one giant mod. I know you're taking car mods and fitting them into your TM scheme, so probably my ultimate package won't be "TM-compliant" in the sense of just swapping in a PK4; one will still need to install CAR and CGO files. However, it wouldn't be incompatible, either, so I'm just gonna keep developing cars and let you use as many as you see fit.

I have some other comments about the overall rolling stock / engines, but maybe I'll email you about those. I'm at work now, I jotted notes down at home.

[nedfumpkin]

I checked the House BCA, and I've discovered that it doesn't display supply or exchanges. Exchanges are displayed as demand. The more I am thinking about it, the more I beleive that I am going to have completely lay out the industry display anew. As long as I can find where it is set, I can probably figure it out.

There's basically two ways I can go with the cargo icons. On the one hand there can be a complete set of unique cars for each cargo, and then it could be set to take roadname stuff. That way cars could be skinned in such a way that they are essentially blanks, and then we could have a swappable pk4 file that includes the cargo icons with other company specific skins, and then all the trains would appear with that road name set. One wouldn't necessarily be limited to roadnames....graffiti could also be used. :)

The other way is to continuue using it to display cargo, but only certain cargo would make use of it. And that seems like a waste.

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I'm interested in hearing your ideas about rollingstock and engines. I am working on putting together a bunch of paks for the freight cars similar to the express cars. My intention is to have a car for every cargo covering four or six eras.

[WPandP]

My approach has been to try to use roadnames and paint schemes that fit the cargo, such that Produce is hauled in "Western Fruit Express" cars, and one that I'll be working on soon will be Cotton in "Cotton Belt" boxcars. Other ones, like Coal, are hauled in a roadname that is especially attached to that cargo, as the Norfolk & Western was. That's my goal, but I'm also trying to stick with major color families or themes for the types of cars, so all the reefers are yellow, covered hoppers grey, etc. I've already branched out from this a bit, in that my hopper cars do not have this family resemblance; coal is black, iron is dark red, and bauxite is brown to light red. I might go ahead and branch out with the boxcars, too, rather than have them all be boxcar red (i.e. brown). Anyhoo, my intention was to get rid of the cargo decal altogether.

The difficulty with the cargo decal is that its skin is called up by the game engine, not by the CAR or 3DP file. So how do you get the game engine to call up something other than the cargo icon as the skin? If you can figure out that part of it, then it does indeed open up lots of possibilities. Be aware, though, in order to stretch a decal over a whole car side, we'll have to edit the 3DP file for the decal; at the moment it's just a little square where the cargo icon occurs.