Smr Simple!

Hi McBarnacle, it's good to see an effort to improve an old map!

But probably you will need to invest more work before it becomes interesting to play.

Firstly, it needs a good scenario. As you say yourself, "decent objectives turn a good map into an excellent one" - I could not agree more, and others in this thread have said the same.

Secondly, the map scenery is a bit drab, the terrain is jagged and unsmoothed, I think Tomas spent only a day or two working on it, it was his last before moving on. So, like Snoopy suggests, for inspiration you could have a look at Bobby's Austrailia, which has nice scenery and excellent reskinned rolling stock. One of the best-looking prototypes for this type of continental map is "America" by Stormfather.

Thirdly, there is the important issue of stability of this Australia map.

• As Snoopy suggests, the .fpk file should be unpacked and only the necessary files kept in a single subfolder in the map folder.
• As with many old SAM maps, there is no RRT_EVENTS file, which will crash the map sooner or later.

Check out Janksica's NAFTA II map for a good example of a simple RRT_EVENTS file which never crashes, and see how he keeps all unpacked assets in a single "warehouse" subfolder.

Good luck and much success!

Hi karsten,

Yeah, I see your point but I am still learning how to mod these scenarios.

For example, yesterday I fixed the graphics issue with the fishery to the north of the map - just above where the new village Carpentaria is - as, in the height elevation map, if you move this fishery a mountain almost the size of Mount Everest appears.

I've now flattened that a bit so that it looks OK if you move the fishery to somewhere were you can actually connect to it!!

I would like to sort out the issue that the entire country seems to be on a plateau but haven't fixed that yet.

That's interesting about the events file. I have the occasional issue where I get a CTD early on in the game when a "news headline" will crash the game. I'll look into that.

Has anyone tried the map to see if it works as is so I know if it's worth my carrying on? (Objectives is the next thing I want to add).

McB

Hi all,

OK, thanks to the advice karsten gave me I have now done the following further improvements:-

1 ) Unpacked the .fpk file and added all the assets contained into a folder within the main map folder.

2 ) Added a basic events folder to stop the random CTDs when news headlines are generated.

3 ) Fixed a graphics glitch to the north of Carpentaria

4 ) Moved 2 city start locations and made all start location cities to be towns.

5 ) Added some objectives.

Hope you all like it.

McB

This looks like it is going in the right direction! One tip, the scenario objectives are still a bit generic. What people like to see is some historic sense in why they are trying to solve these transport problems - so you might want to link objectives to a bit of authentic Australian background.

Have a look at how Recoup rethought and reworked his scenario "Western Russia" here on the forum a number of times to come up with an engaging story line.

Good maps are like good Scotch malt whisky, "must be aged for at least three years" OK, not that long, but the more thinking and time is invested, the smoother it gets!

Here is a working version of this map. For more versions, go to this site and join-up!!

http://www.sidmeiersrailroads.net

snoopy55 wrote:Here is a working version of this map. For more versions, go to this site and join-up!!

http://www.sidmeiersrailroads.net

Thanks for sharing. For some reason this website won't load.
I even tried with a proxy and all I get are 403 (forbidden) or 503 (Service not available).

p.s
too bad the smrsimple site itself is no longer maintained (new maps etc...)

Hmmmmm, that's odd. Try this - go here, which is the map download section. http://smrsimple.com Down in the lower right corner you'll find this - vzbob's Forum . That should get you there, unless there is something else is keeping you from it..........

What browser were you using? Try latest version of Firefox.

The setup of the site isn't very friendly to the casual user. Obviously, I will never complain as it's the right of the owner, who pays real money for upkeep, to setup however he wishes. Maybe low traffic is by design and it's definitely secure. Creators will probably be more likely to make the effort, but some of the players (audience) probably wont.

As far as I know, there's nothing stopping the upload of some maps from over there in the forum posts on this site. As I understand it, the owner of this site is just too busy coding games. What kind of maps do you like to play? At what difficulty level? I did work on finishing up a couple awhile back that I could post over here if you are interested.

I can give you a teaser that Slider38 has almost finished working on a new map. It's in testing. I didn't ask him before mentioning it, but he normally posts them over here, so I would say it's "coming soon."

Hi,
Sorry for the late response and thanks for trying to help.
The link to vzbob's Forum on the site is the same http://www.sidmeiersrailroads.net/ - and leads to the same result - a blank page.

I'm using Chrome, but have also tried IE/Edge.
I think it's something more profound than my browser as google search does not produce any results for "site:sidmeiersrailroads.net" and nothing of help when searching "vzbob's Forum".

In any way - I would love to see more maps here of any kind - I have tried almost every map listed - and there are plenty.
Since there were no updates I stopped playing (I thought this site is dead, and so is the game).

I will check the new Connecticut map soon - glad to see the community is still alive.
Thanks again and keep doing a great job

Sadly http://www.sidmeiersrailroads.net/ is a blank page over on this side of the ocean too. In the past my understanding was this is based on ISP. For example being in Tokyo at work our ISP is Biglobe, a big japanese ISP. Yet it gets caught in a asia wide ban, thus the blank page.

From what I can remember if you can get in vzbob's forum is wonderful, just a bit hard to enter is all.

Even if you can see the site you need a membership and a couple of posts before you can view images or download files. The people who sign up, but never make enough posts to unlock images or downloads surprise me. If you have an interest in modeling I can't recommend getting on there enough. Also, there is a community pool of all the custom engines, buildings, etc.. It's easy to plug them in your map.

In the couple of maps I tinkered with, attempting to finish some 90%-done maps in collaboration with Snoopy55, the most I did was xml edits and plugging in some new assets from the community pool. My intention was to explore options to change up gameplay strategy. For example, in one, Seefra 3, industries actually cost a realistic amount. All resources start at maximum production, and city growth has been changed up. All cities exchange the various goods for passengers, but the smaller city sizes have better conversion rates. I posted the map here. viewtopic.php?f=42&t=4697

pyrocks, I'm running win 8.1. Using (YUCK) Internet Explorer I got there with http://www.sidmeiersrailroads.net/porta ... e0ecfa4904 and http://www.sidmeiersrailroads.net/portal.php Opera gets me there also with both. And I just installed Firefox and it also works.

AND. I just did a search of 'sid meier's railroads bobby's using Bing and his site is the first to show!

Also, a search for Sid Meier's Railroads! - Wikipedia, the References section at the bottom has a link to the sites Wiki listing of custom maps. Now I HAVE to update that!

For whatever reason Bobby's site seems invisible to Google. Maybe he managed to lock the bots out so they can't sniff around. The first hit for the search you did being the game's page on wikipedia. The SMR wiki map list you just updated is used as a reference.

Maybe it's because there is no search functionality on his site without being logged in? Which brings up the point that I can't search on THIS site right now. Times out to a blank page. Tried it in two browsers. Never fear, in the meantime I can still search by entering the site address followed by my query in Google. Obviously this trick doesn't work for Bobby's site.