Utah: Treasure House, development thread.

[dda40x]

Utah: Treasure House
Map development thread.


Hey y'all!

I am currently working on a new scenario based on Universum & Karsten's The Epic History Of Utah map.


So far, I've resized the map in two respects:

First, map size has been reduced to 18x18. With all of the custom assets and track routes that players will eventually end up with, I've noticed that the original Utah map eventually gets pretty bogged down, making it harder to complete without crashes for those of us with lower end/Windows 32 bit systems, even with the 3gb enabler in place. So far, this size reduction has helped, and I'm no longer seeing the CPU and memory usage hovering at near 100%, as I was on the original Utah map.

Secondly, I've utilized the 'edge area' that was in place on the original Utah map, but not accessable for use. This allows Ely, Grand Junction, and Wells to be placed closer to their 'actual' locations, and for Cedar City to be placed where Beaver resides now in Utah.

The area outside of the viewing/play area is now featureless, excepting a ring of rugged terrain I've added around the playable map area. This significantly reduces the amount of video memory required for rendering the 'useless' terrain, but still gives the illusion of terrain on the horizon for screen shots and such.

I've also tweaked the terrain a bit, to conform more closely to the actual terrain. For example, Bear Lake is now displayed, as is the Bear River. Also, I've made a 'weak' attempt to show the canyons/travel routes immediately to the east of SLC, and have also represented the Bingham Canyon Open Pit Mine on the map terrain.

Starting locations have been changed a bit:

Rock Springs, where Union Pacific enters the map area, as a starting point on the road to Promontory Point.

The relocated Grand Junction provides the starting point where D&RGW makes it's foray into Utah.

Wells provides the entry point for the Central (later Southern) Pacific Railroad onto the map.

Finally, the last starting location is Milford, Utah, although I am still debating the merits of choosing Cedar City instead. Historically, several efforts were made to extend track lines from Milford to Los Angeles, ultimately resulting in the Los Angeles and Salt Lake Railroad.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Los_Angele ... e_Railroad


A second Transcontinental Railroad route will be a new initial condition for the first Era, connecting Grand Junction with Provo and Milford/Cedar City. I've thrown Ely in as a destination requirement as well for this second route. This second route is a 'manufacture' of sorts, to give the two Southern railroads a reason to build a competing route toWells/Promontory/Ogden/Rock Springs.

Obviously, it won't be realistically possible for a player to complete both routes in the victory time frame allowed. Completing every victory conditon won't be realistically possible under the current mechanics.

Mining is a huge component of this map. I'm still working out the details, but essentially most copper, silver and gold ore on the map need to be shipped to smelters on the map. Building a new smelter in Magna, and also one Sandy are two new victory conditions. Sandy was introduced to give the 'southern' players a separate destination for their ore.

Potash mines are now represented, which produce potash for fertilizing nearby farms. I've modified existing graphics/models for this, based on the existing taconite ore mine/cars model, to which I've applied appropriate skin coloration. I like the copper mine annex that was built for Four Corners, but that model wasn't properly displaying for me; no buildup was being shown visually when I tried to port this model into my map, despite including all the related files I could spot. If I could get that model, with appropriate recoloration, to show proper potash buildup, I'd love to use it, but I'm happy with the solution I have for now.

Great Salt Lake Minerals

Copper mines are also now suitably represented. I ended up using the existing ore mine model, with appropriate skin recoloration, as this displays stockpiling better in mountainous terrain.

Life at the Bingham Copper Mine

I'd prefer to use a few of the models we have floating around for this map, especially any models that relate to D&RGW, Southern Pacific and the mighty Union Pacific, assuming permissions are not an issue. I plan to include appropriate modeler credits in a readme with this map, as I strongly feel that the various modelers should receive recognition for their work when it is used.

Engine performance stats are being changed, to better fit in with the map scale, real life locomotive stats, and victory conditions. Many trains will be traveling more slowly than you've seen in other scenarios. As a result, purpose built fast passenger locomotives will be more significant in the game, as many early game and later freight locomotives won't be travelling fast enough for a significant passenger speed bonus.

Obviously, I'll be reworking the values of various goods to reflect what I have in mind for this map.

Many of the goals on the original Utah map will probably be similarly represented on the new map, with several new conditions being introduced as well. Defense Depot Ogden plays a significant role in victory conditions, involving Army & AAF bases in Tooele, Dugway and Wendover.

Finally, I'm working on Frontier Station Annexes. These represent whistle stops where trains restocked their water and fuel while delivering and picking up passengers and goods to this area. They will have low production levels, but will provide needed income in the early game to facilitate expansion into other areas of the map, and to help increase the growth of nearby cities.

Everything will of course be packaged in S.A.M. 2 format, so that you may simply drop the unzipped map folder into Custom maps without any additional fuss.

That's it for now. More as I have it!

DDA40X

[dda40x]

Quick update.

Here's a comparison of the original Utah map thumbnail versus the revised one. Keep in mind that the new map is 18x18, or 10% smaller than the old one, despite the thumbnails being the same size.

The Epic History Of Utah Thumbnail vs. Utah:Treasure House Thumbnail

I'm slowly figuring out Blender for my water tower. I've been having a UV issue, and the handling of UV textures in that program is taking me some time to become familiar with.

Water Tower screenshot

The above screenshot is not of the current rendering, just what I've done with vertex shading. The UV/texture render has a lot of pink pieces at the moment...

I am currently planning on pairing this with the Frontier Depot Annex model, and cobbling together a town model for the Frontier Depot location/industry that is placed on the map. I'll need to extend the legs to match the length of the depot legs, which should not present a problem.

I did a quick experiment with the patent files which was unsuccessful. Browsing of the various threads indicates that no one has figured out how to access the other variables in the game engine as of yet. I'd like to introduce a patent that increases flat out top speed of engines, to reflect advances in the designs, but it looks like I'll have to do this with new locomotive descriptions instead. This would be of more importance in an Eastern US scenario, where the 4-4-0 went through several upgrades in performance throughout it's life, as the 4-4-0 arrangement remained useful for many many years.

I'd rather not clutter the roundhouse unnecessarily in the process, though.

The Shay was well represented in Utah history, so I plan to use said locomotive with this map. I've reduced the maintenance cost that was listed from another scenario for the Shay, to make it more competitive/more compelling in the long term versus other, faster designs.

Still multitasking and hammering away at various aspects of this, especially the victory conditions. I'm envisioning four separate sets of victory conditions, each tied to your starting position, especially for the early game, with more 'mutual' victory conditions coming into play later in the game once you've eliminated your competitors.

Here's an example of a minor terrain adjustments I made to the original map:

Wendover new terrain

The blue-green roof building to the right is a Potash mine. I'd like to lose the mountain and reconfigure this so it sits flat on the map, but I need to figure out how to properly place the buildup nodes and such first.

I may bump up the hills to the west of Wendover a bit more, to make them a little more challenging to build through. Note the mountain immediately to the north of Wendover. If you remember the shot in the movie Independence Day, where the mothership crashes into the mountains near 'Area 51' at the end of the movie, this 'real world' location is the same mountain 'bowl' the CG guys used in that film sequence. But I digress...

Back to it!

[karsten]

Looks like this will be an interesting mod!

For those screenshots, you can drag the "PAUSE" message outside the visible screen area with the mouse.

[dda40x]

I pissed off Railroads, and broke my scenario. After a few tries, I finally managed to find a backup that I could work from, and I am in the midst of rebuilding. I'm backing up my user/game folder more often now as I go along, so I don't have to go back so far next time.

Also, my xml editor seems to be pissing off Railroads, so I'm back to editing with notepad. Dunno why, but since I stopped using the xml editing program I stopped having issues, other than the usual boneheaded coding errors.

The map editor hasn't been very helpful to me in placing my industries, as it locks up if I try to work with existing code, or add anything to the base code. Sometimes it works, but I've found that testing live, and then hand editing the coordinates and such is working out better. I had a lot of stuff placed already before I started having issues (I did a fresh full reinstall btw, which didn't help), so it is just a matter of copy and pasting locations from the old code to the new code in a lot of cases. I'm still using the map editor for coloring/terrain purposes, of course, but then I just substitute the edited map for the existing map files, and all is good.

In the meantime, I've been doing some reading in various threads on various sites, and came across the rule of 100 for industries. This might explain why my scenario would crash after a while, seeing I added some industries on top of what was already there. The original T.E.H.O.Utah scenario counts out to about 100 industries, assuming every city eventually ends up with 3 industries apiece.

So I'm in the midst of paring some things back. Some cities really only need to be annexes, as historically they didn't grow all that much. Plus, I'm removing unneeded industry annex sites here and there, so I can drop down to around the magic 100 number. As mentioned above, I'll tailor the output of the various frontier depots to the local economies.

What would be cool would be a terrainmap that was based on the coal mine terrain map, with the cone reversing on the z axis about halfway up the cone, so that you have a circular hole with banks. The buildings and coal piles, etc. could be perched on both the outside radius and inside radius of the embankment. This would easily simulate an open pit mine in such a way that it could be instantly added to any map, without having to paint/build one on the existing map. This is a little beyond my abilities at the moment, though. I figured out the .tga file adjustment, but don't really know how to manipulate the building nodes...

Weak attempt at an open pit mine

I have two open pit mines on my map so far, the Kennecott/Rio Tinto Bingham copper mine, and the coal mine in Kemmerer Wyoming, which is currently the largest open pit coal mine in the U.S., well according to U.P. anyways...
http://www.uprr.com/customers/energy/co ... erer.shtml

Several industries are multitasking, as I have a lot going on with the delivery/conversion front...

Well, back to it!

[dda40x]

I played around with the terrainmap of my copper pits for a bit, and here's what I came up with:

Bingham Copper Pit

At some point, I'll have to figure out how to move the copper(coal) mine building off center, so that it isn't buried in the middle like it is now, but I like it so far. It looks more or less like it is supposed to now...

I may tackle my potash mines next, to see if I can make them look more like potash mines and less like mountains.

[Lowell]

Say...any progress?

This looks like a good scenario. On the pit mines...have you thought of making the green circle annex area larger? It might allow you to set the mine buildings off to the ledge of the pit area and still have room below at ground level to lay the annex track. I did that on the clay pits on the mud skippers map if you want to see how I sized them up.

I would like to see the new landscape size as well. I always liked that map.

We need more pics...info etc.