Re: Basin And Range 2-maps CIC build Size 13 -18
Posted: Fri Nov 23, 2012 7:38 pm
Lowell, Great Map!! Played it all the way through and completed all VCs 9 years early on Investor Level with Basin $$. Nice Landscape, Rolling Stock, and Event Pics. No startup or crashing problems and games saved OK . With all the powerful engines it makes sense that this should be a large map like this size 18. One minor problem. . . when I bought an AC4400 engine a display popped up saying “AC4400_NRML.dds not found”. I checked the files and found this file misspelled “AC4400_nmrl.dds”. You may want to fix this, the engine texture looks a little flat around the trucks and it may look better once the game can find this file.
I read through your comments on this thread and found them interesting, too. You mentioned that you started the map with Sat Data (presumably a digital elevation map DEM) but you ended up painting the map by hand. I had this same problem with my Japan map. I wasted days trying to get the DEM map to work during game play. Apparently DEMs either have pixel to pixel elevation differences greater than the game can handle or artifacts that foul-up the game. Screen resolution during game play is a lot higher than the 72 ppi of the map tga file, and the game must use some smoothing algorithms to create the high-resolution look during game play. Also there can only be 256 different elevations in the map (i.e. max shades of gray) while the DEM may have more. One thing I noticed in your map.tga file, your rivers show up in the third panel as blue on a white background, while in all my maps this panel is just a white field. Similarly, your rivers show up as white on a blue background in the sixth panel while mine are always fully blue. I guess this results from changing water color during map painting in the Terrain Editor?
As great as this map is, it is not very challenging to make all VC deliveries. Basically I had all the tracks laid and trains running that were needed half way through the game, requiring only 12 trains and 8000 miles of track. I then had to wait out the rest of the game to see that VCs were met. The last goal met was Arms to Poison Mesa. It takes 200 carloads of steel to yield 80 carloads of arms (ratio 1:0.4) with long hauls for the taconite, pellets, steel, and arms, so it takes a while. I would suggest you either reduce all Era 2 goals by half and reduce the Era 2 time by half or add some more goals - maybe gold, food, autos and/or paper, all of which are already in the game but have no delivery goals. I like your idea concerning the distribution center receiving and shipping more goods, too. If you increased the inputoutput ratio for steel to arms, then this goal could be reached sooner and the steel diverted to auto production. Raising the inputoutput ratio for autos to scrap from 0.3 to 0.6 would also allow more steel to be used to produce autos, after meeting the arms goal, more steel would be available for auto production. Shipping gold to Poison Mesa with separate goals to ship autos to 3 or 4 cities across the map would increase the difficulty of the map, but game play and track laying may get slow. That may be the reason Choobacca did not have too many VC goals.
The rolling stock looks great except for the mfg goods car which is a short box car. These box cars look too small especially when being pulled by a large modern engine. See my screen shot below. I would suggest replacing it with one of Slider38s large box cars from his new Lake Michigan West map. The Santa Fe refer is short too but it looks so good I would not change it (see pic). I have included a few other screen shots for my run of Basin and Range.
I now understand your CIC file structure. I had looked at your files before but did not understand all the repeated file names, but now I see the master files contain the detailed info while the localized files contain only variable name and location data. I guess this file structure limits the number of files loaded into memory at the beginning of the game to only those needed for the map and no others. Right? I can see where this could be an advantage, but it is a little more work to create all the xml files. It may be worth it if the map plays faster, with fewer crashes.
I read through your comments on this thread and found them interesting, too. You mentioned that you started the map with Sat Data (presumably a digital elevation map DEM) but you ended up painting the map by hand. I had this same problem with my Japan map. I wasted days trying to get the DEM map to work during game play. Apparently DEMs either have pixel to pixel elevation differences greater than the game can handle or artifacts that foul-up the game. Screen resolution during game play is a lot higher than the 72 ppi of the map tga file, and the game must use some smoothing algorithms to create the high-resolution look during game play. Also there can only be 256 different elevations in the map (i.e. max shades of gray) while the DEM may have more. One thing I noticed in your map.tga file, your rivers show up in the third panel as blue on a white background, while in all my maps this panel is just a white field. Similarly, your rivers show up as white on a blue background in the sixth panel while mine are always fully blue. I guess this results from changing water color during map painting in the Terrain Editor?
As great as this map is, it is not very challenging to make all VC deliveries. Basically I had all the tracks laid and trains running that were needed half way through the game, requiring only 12 trains and 8000 miles of track. I then had to wait out the rest of the game to see that VCs were met. The last goal met was Arms to Poison Mesa. It takes 200 carloads of steel to yield 80 carloads of arms (ratio 1:0.4) with long hauls for the taconite, pellets, steel, and arms, so it takes a while. I would suggest you either reduce all Era 2 goals by half and reduce the Era 2 time by half or add some more goals - maybe gold, food, autos and/or paper, all of which are already in the game but have no delivery goals. I like your idea concerning the distribution center receiving and shipping more goods, too. If you increased the inputoutput ratio for steel to arms, then this goal could be reached sooner and the steel diverted to auto production. Raising the inputoutput ratio for autos to scrap from 0.3 to 0.6 would also allow more steel to be used to produce autos, after meeting the arms goal, more steel would be available for auto production. Shipping gold to Poison Mesa with separate goals to ship autos to 3 or 4 cities across the map would increase the difficulty of the map, but game play and track laying may get slow. That may be the reason Choobacca did not have too many VC goals.
The rolling stock looks great except for the mfg goods car which is a short box car. These box cars look too small especially when being pulled by a large modern engine. See my screen shot below. I would suggest replacing it with one of Slider38s large box cars from his new Lake Michigan West map. The Santa Fe refer is short too but it looks so good I would not change it (see pic). I have included a few other screen shots for my run of Basin and Range.
I now understand your CIC file structure. I had looked at your files before but did not understand all the repeated file names, but now I see the master files contain the detailed info while the localized files contain only variable name and location data. I guess this file structure limits the number of files loaded into memory at the beginning of the game to only those needed for the map and no others. Right? I can see where this could be an advantage, but it is a little more work to create all the xml files. It may be worth it if the map plays faster, with fewer crashes.