RRT 3 - Trainmaster

[FMCRR]

Ned, I downloaded everything fine, extracted and did the copy and paste thing with all the files. When I start up the game and go into editor the game shuts down and its saying this in a pop up box, "Pack element <ChemTankA_profile.imb> not found....What ya make of that?

[nedfumpkin]

That means that I included some files that shouldn't be there. Remove the two follwoing files from the data/enginetypes folder:

ChemTankA.car and ChemTankA.cgo.

They are chemicals tankers for the period before chemicals are available, and so aren't used in 1.06 and 1.05.


Sorry about that.

[nedfumpkin]

Here is a new zip file without the two offending files. I still haven't decided whether or not I will be introducing chemicals as a cargo before 1905 or not, but I made the tanker just in case. I am seriously considering leaving the chemical plant at 1905, but chemicals coming in the 1870s or 80s, and having their usage grow with time. I have the cars made, but they are of no use in 1.05 or 1.06 so I left them out but accidently copied the cgo and car files.

This zip replaces the previous zip. After people have had the opportunity to find any other screw ups I've made, I give it to Hawk to post. If you already downloaded the previous zip, then remove the files ChemTankA.car and ChemTankA.cgo from the enginetypes folder, or just simply don't install them. Everything else should work fine.

[FMCRR]

That solved it, Thanks Ned....

[Grandma Ruth]

Here they are in operation

Click on image to enlarge

[nedfumpkin]

Some new stuff on the way....


The Legislature: The seat of government for your capital cities. Demands paper, electronics, furniture, goods, and produces waste. Passengers and mail. Cannot be bought nor built by the player.

The Mint: Where the money is made. Demands paper, gold, steel, machinery, electronics. Mail. Cannot be bought nor built by the player.

The Fort: An 1800s fort the later becomes a tourist trap. Predates the military base.

The Outpost: Similar to the Fort but on a smaller scale.

[nedfumpkin]

Alas, the time has come to seek out volunteers to start the alpha testing phase of RT3 Trainmaster. Over the next week I should have athe alpha version ready to try out to some degree.

To be part of this phase you must be willing to commit to creating a scenario to be included in the release, and as part of the alpha phase that's what I am asking for only.

What you will need:

A fresh clean install of RT3 patched to 1.05. There can be no mods installed, and you should have the CD to play the game.

Scenario ideas:

Trainmaster is designed for the scenario writer as much as for the player. It focuses more on the industry and cargo chain than on the stock market aspects. It allows for more complex scenarios, and that means that it is more work to create a scenario, and the design should factor in a lot of detail work.

There are different threads that can be pursued such as the auto industry, the petroleum industry, the military industrial complex, the tourist industry, the food industry, or the goods industry, or the mining or agricultural industries.

Spawning industries is frowned upon greatly, and the design of Trainmaster does not lend well to it. This is the most important aspect of this mod, and should be kept in mind. Industries should be placed on the map during creation, or added using the events, or built by the player. Only municipal buildings are left to spawn in the game, and these are what forms the cities and is based on growth and service. This should be factored in when creating maps.

Agricultural communities

The biggest difference in Trainmaster is the Agricultural communities that replace farms. These must be placed on the map and should be situated close to a small town because that's what they represent. Production can be controlled by the event editor either by affecting farm production or the individual cargo. There are a mix of farming communities to reperesent most parts of the world.

Limited Industries

These are just like regular industries except you cannot buy or build them. The Legislature and the military establishments are such buildings. They serve a function on the map similar to municipal buildings but are completely within the control of the scenario writer where they can be placed or added via event. An example would be a choice event to decide the capital of the land in the map, and based on the user choice, it gets placed on the map. Or connect A-B by such a date to have the capital in that city.


General Industry

There are 52 cargo that are used in this game. They go from very simple resources to complex finished products. As time progresses so do the cargo in complexity. As much as possible, cargo represents categories, so textiles is all such products from the rope you'll use to hang yourself trying to figure this all out to the suit they will bury you in. :) Games should ideally run on the long side of things at the 35-50 years mark since it can take a while to develop things. One thing that you will notice in Trainmaster is that different industries will compete for cargo.


There is no time limit on when the scenarios need to be completed since there is work still being done and a lot to come that won't necessarily affect scenarios. The documentation at this point is the pages in this message thread, but more will be coming soon.

So if you want to give this a try, think of a scenario idea that might interest you and get back to me with the time period and industry chain.

[Grandma Ruth]

I certainly will think about it and probably do it, but I'm being driven mad just at the moment by the scenario I'm playing and will have to finish it!
I'll get back to you on that, meanwhile look at this:

Click on picture to enlarge

What happened there, do you think? It's been producing white milk and black diesel quite happily for days, then suddenly this !

[nedfumpkin]

I just discovered that I have the wrong profile image for that car. I'll replace it and repack everything. Thanks for alerting me.

[Grandma Ruth]

I forgot to show you this - it doesn't affect the cars themselves

Click to enlarge

Edit: we were posting at the same time!

[nedfumpkin]

I had hoped to write that I have finally finished all the industry models and skins but alas, doing a final check revealed that I still have the Cannery to finish...unless you want pickles from a place that also sells TNT. :)

RT3 coms with 67 different building BCAs. I have 106, which means that Trainmaster is adding 39 new buildings. This includes the railyard structures and municipal buildings that have already been ported out for 1.05 and 1.06.

I will be making the cannery tonight....shouldn't take too long, and then I will pk4 all the files. This leaves finishing sorting out the rest of the freight cars, and thankfully that just means reconfiguring the cars that WP&P already made. This won't take long.

Then it's a once over on the BCA files to settle the supply chain, double checking stuff mostly (trying to document stuff)....and then the alpha version will be ready. Days...it's a matter of days....

And this is what a Lavender Farm looks like....

[WPandP]

Ah, but there is so much more to be done with the freight cars...

I have my sights set on eventually having unique car assets for each cargo; the ones I've released thus far fit into this goal, but come well shy of a full set.

Furthermore, knowing how to achieve 2 and 3-car sets per load now, I want to revise my earlier offerings as multiple cuts. This might be an optional thing, i.e. one PK4 for single cars, one PK4 for multi-cuts, it just takes twice as long to package each car up to do so. The 3DP editing that is required is tedious, but some carbodies can get reused several times over (for instance, the iron hoppers I did all rely on the same body for the final three eras, just the skin changes). It'll go quicker once a library of car models is achieved.

The gameplay effect, though, of heavier freight loads can be readily achieved just in the CAR and CGO files, and I suggest we go ahead and do this as part of the alpha just to see whether gameplay really suffers from cars that weigh 2x or 3x as much as normal. My own testing seemed to indicate that it does not have as great an effect as you'd expect, just enough so that you can see a difference between a Mallet and a Mikado.

As I get individual car sets done, they can be added one by one (the way things are working now), and at some future point when we say the set of freight cars is complete then we can make a full-blown large TrainMaster module out of it. Although it sounds like you're wanting to go ahead and make an alpha TM module out of the cars already available - I'm okay with that, too, as long as we bump up the car weights to get some testing on heavy freight in the real world.

[WPandP]

Also, I think the Lavender Farm is a little over-the-top in its color; there should be some green in the crops, with just a little bit of bloom color on top. Look up Lavender on wikipedia and they've got a few photos of farms. From a distance, it seems that all you see is the purple, but in reality the green contributes to the effect, and the lack of green in your skin makes it feel artificial. Also, I bet that when you just have smaller lavender blooms on top of green stalks, it will make it all feel a bit more delicate and intricate.

[nedfumpkin]

Lavender Farm...point taken, I'll make the correction to the file. It's too pink rather than on the blue side.

The way the farms and agricultural communities are working for crops is:

Tropical Farmstead Co-operative = rubber farm crops which are trees.

Amish, European Co-op, Asian Co-op use the sugar crop which looks like grass mostly.

Western Co-op uses the grain crop, but I darkened it a bit.

Vineyard uses the coffee crop but the coffee beans have been covered with grapes.

Cotton uses cotton.

I tried to figure a way uf using a different skin so that I could have more crops but nothing worked- couldn't find level ground.


The freight cars won't be a big deal since I pretty much have an idea of what I am doing, and mostly I am setting things up so that mod pk4s can be used at a later date same as the express cars.

One thing I want to add is an open boxcar which is pretty much the same as a livestock car but without the smell. As much as possible I'd like to have cars for each cargo, even if at this point they are just duplicates of other cars.

I expect to go with six eras for most cars, and I am thinking that in the last two eras, the weights can rise significantly to represent longer trains. This way those engines from the later periods won't fly like lightning so much. At least not for freight.

[nedfumpkin]

How about this....

[WPandP]

In other words: yeah Ned, that's what I was talking about. I commend your efforts. Bravo.

[nedfumpkin]

This zip is an updated pk4 file for the rainbow tankers. It fixes the profile image of the milk takner for the D era. Just replace the petropak.pk4 file in ExtraUserContent if you have already downloaded the previous zip.

I'm going to get the full zip file sent for posting in the archives over the weekend.

[Grandma Ruth]

Sorry to be a pain, ned - before you post that zip file, will you check it again? I downloaded the pk4 as instructed but it hasn't fixed the problem.

[nedfumpkin]

Actually, I already uploaded the zip file to Hawk for posting, but I did discover that I messed up with the above pk4 and I already fixed it. I must've somehow used the same pk4 thinking it was a new one. In fact, I looked high and low for the new pk4 before finally giving up on it and re-packing everything.

Here's the new zip....

[Hawk]

So is this the zip that I should add to the site, or the other one you uploaded?