The American Transcontinental Railroad- Version 1.2a Final

stormfather · Post by **stormfather** » Fri Mar 23, 2007 5:40 pm

dick810 wrote:than i quess if understand what you are saying you are not going to be able to complete or win everyscenerio

I've never seen the game fail to include a specific industry, but I assure you that lumber mills are included in the scenario's XML files. Unfortunately, map makers have no control over how the game distributes industries. On plenty of occasions, on both standard and custom maps, I've seen only one instance of a particular resource placed, but I've never seen (or noticed) 0. Try starting a new game of this map and see if there are any lumber mills, if not let me know because that means that there is a serious problem, either with my map or with your global XML files. However, I think you'll find that if you restart the map, there will be lumber mills.

dick810 · Post by **dick810** » Sat Mar 24, 2007 2:27 am

tried it again trees did show up appears you have to play somewhat aggressively don't mind that what exactly happens when you place the express passenger service lown the east coast?

stormfather · Post by **stormfather** » Mon Mar 26, 2007 8:44 pm

dick810 wrote:tried it again trees did show up appears you have to play somewhat aggressively don't mind that what exactly happens when you place the express passenger service lown the east coast?

The express passenger line is just another victory condition, it gives you a few more points on your ending score. And gets your company in the newspaper again, of course.

Version 1.3 is just about done. I don't have the XMLs in front of me, so I won't be able to list all the changes, but some of the major ones are:

A new era, from 1961-2003. This new era includes some more victory conditions. The game now lasts 160 years, from 1843 until 1993.
The GP9, a freight train from the late 50's. (Made by eilelwen)
The GP38-2, a freight train from the 70's.
and an as yet unreleased new train by me:
The AEM7, an electric passenger train from the early 80's. (There's a small thread in the Mods-Trains forum about it with some pics)
The AC4400 (Made by eilelwen, published by Choobacca), a freight train from the 90's
If I have time I'll try my hand at reskinning the TGV into an Acela or a HHP8, but no promises!

Canada and Mexico now have (semi)-authentic geography, as well as some cities and victory conditions.

I've added in some important american cities that were left out, notably Pittsburgh, Sioux Falls, and... um... possibly some others that weren't notable enough for me to remember.

I've made a new resource, the Iron Mine, as well as two new goods, Iron Ore and Machinery. Iron Ore is shipped to Steel Mills to make Steel, while Machinery is made at Assembly Plants. Machinery falls somewhere between Goods and Autos on the price scale, and is demanded by cities. Essentially, Machinery gives you something to do with all that steel in the pre-auto era (Machinery is demanded by cities.)

New icons for the Stock Market and the Military Base.

I've fixed up a lot of typos and lackluster text and played around with some of the victory conditions as well.

I fixed the tendermod problem. It seems that I never properly installed the tendermod on my system and always sort of thought it was working. Well, it works with Manifest Destiny now.

I got rid of the bad start locations, leaving Santa Fe, Omaha, New York, and Norfolk.

After playing Choobacca & Big Papa's Basin and Range Demo, I realized that I can no longer stand the manufactured goods car. If I get some free time I want to try my hand at reskinning one of the in-game box cars (the food car comes to mind) into a manufactured goods boxcar.

Hopefully, I can post it within a few days, I just have to implement a few more things and test them out to make sure they work. And I'm not good with deadlines (Looking through my old posts, I see that I said 'update in a week' over a month ago...) but it's coming, I promise.

Any suggestions? I'd love some input before this thing gets finalized.

dick810 · Post by **dick810** » Mon Mar 26, 2007 8:56 pm

will be looking forward to playing the new version

snoopy55 · Post by **snoopy55** » Mon Mar 26, 2007 9:06 pm

After playing Choobacca & Big Papa's Basin and Range Demo, I realized that I can no longer stand the manufactured goods car. If I get some free time I want to try my hand at reskinning one of the in-game box cars (the food car comes to mind) into a manufactured goods boxcar.

Hey, to save you a bit of time, there is the brown boxcar from Basin and Range. But if you're going to do it, make it a CNW car.

choobacca · Post by **choobacca** » Mon Mar 26, 2007 9:50 pm

snoopy55 wrote:
After playing Choobacca & Big Papa's Basin and Range Demo, I realized that I can no longer stand the manufactured goods car. If I get some free time I want to try my hand at reskinning one of the in-game box cars (the food car comes to mind) into a manufactured goods boxcar.
Hey, to save you a bit of time, there is the brown boxcar from Basin and Range. But if you're going to do it, make it a CNW car.

The brown boxcar from the Basin and Range demo is a modified Food Car. I removed the ice hatches as they don't belong on general boxcars. So if you want a general box car instead of a reefer, feel free to skin the box car from the B&R demo.

stormfather · Post by **stormfather** » Wed Mar 28, 2007 2:27 am

Thanks for the offer Choobacca, but I finished my boxcars before I saw it. I did the same thing as you did as far as making the hatches up top invisible and smoothing out the roof texture beneath it. I'm still not 100% satisfied with my modern boxcar yet.

Was there any trick to making the taconite car fill up properly? I noticed earlier today that the taconite ore car in Chicago to the Rockies fills up with a whitish mineral instead of coal, was it simply a matter of reskinning the coal or was there more to it? I'm going to add iron to the map and I'm wondering what I'm getting myself into

snoopy55 · Post by **snoopy55** » Wed Mar 28, 2007 5:15 am

stormfather wrote:I'm going to add iron to the map and I'm wondering what I'm getting myself into

Iron and all it's needs are already available. MID_EAST has it.

choobacca · Post by **choobacca** » Wed Mar 28, 2007 3:04 pm

stormfather wrote:Was there any trick to making the taconite car fill up properly? I noticed earlier today that the taconite ore car in Chicago to the Rockies fills up with a whitish mineral instead of coal, was it simply a matter of reskinning the coal or was there more to it?

It is just reskinning. When you open the texture file, it will be obvious to you what needs painting.

2391212 · Post by **2391212** » Thu Mar 29, 2007 1:42 pm

Stormfather,
Any chance of you using the railcars from the Basin map? They are fantastic and far more realistic than the toy-like default cars.

Keep up the great work, I love this map!
Will

train of thought · Post by **train of thought** » Fri Mar 30, 2007 12:21 am

Quick question ... tried to find the map link in the first post but can't find it ... any ideas? Thx

train of thought · Post by **train of thought** » Fri Mar 30, 2007 12:23 am

ok... never mind ... train of thought still boarding at the station...

dick810 · Post by **dick810** » Fri Mar 30, 2007 3:07 pm

so isthe latest and greatest version out?

Jagabot · Post by **Jagabot** » Sat Mar 31, 2007 5:37 am

This is one of the few maps that I've found to work very well, be planned out intelligently, have enough of each resource type to have a shot at accomplishing all goals on the hardest level, and doesn't crash all the time.

MidEast crashes for me regardless of what I do; it crashes, always, within about 30 minutes. Other maps from this site crash the moment you edit track to improve the grade/approach once you have some extra cash to tinker with the efficiency of your main lines. This map, however, is very stable.

This is a great player-made Railroads! map, lots of fun single player, very nice geography design as well. It has quality that surpasses some of the included game maps. (Not that that's saying a whole lot, I agree, but you've done a superb job. Good enough job to compel me to post here.) It's player maps such as yours that have given Railroads! some actual replay value outside of multi-player. If Firaxis came out with an expansion that included your map it would make it worth paying $19.95-29.95 almost by itself.

I was able to accomplish all the goals on my 3rd time playing the map, that says a lot to me about what a good job you did. I think the most challenging things in your map are some of the final era goals (getting arms to the east coast in time was interesting as I had no arms manufacturing outside of the mid-west.) I never have problems performance-wise with SMR (core2 duo 6800 w. 4GB DDR2-6400 & an EVGA 7800GTX-KO) so big maps like this one are loads of fun to play.

I'm very pleased that I managed to find this website and forum after a couple hours looking for player-made Railroads! maps, scenarios, addons, mods and trains. There aren't enough links with the keywords for it to rank high enough on Google, hopefully this post will help that slightly while complimenting you on a job well done!

maestro70 · Post by **maestro70** » Fri Apr 13, 2007 12:27 am

I am excited to play with BEER! I love this map, but could you do me (and maybe a few of us others) a favor and roll it out in file that (the setup one) that installs everything for me...I have had a lot trouble getting some of the manual ones to work properly.

Smr Simple!

The American Transcontinental Railroad- Version 1.2a Final

Question

Map download?

dolh!

Where is version 2....