Epic History of Railroad in Utah (updated)

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universum
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Re: Utah

Post by universum » Sun May 13, 2007 6:38 pm

Baldur wrote: Okey, Universum. First step, don't care about bringing wood into Evanston. With 400,000 in starting money it's easy go connect the nearby "ruralities" to Green River. Because of the low production rate on industries, I did not care about track elevation when connecting to Evanston.

Finishing the first era was really not the main problem, the secong was the challenge. Within the last split secong I was able to deliver the last passenger. Overcoming the second era, the rest is easy. (No offence)
The start in Railroads! is most important. The sooner you get money flowing, the easier it gets. There is not much that could be done about it. Unfortunatelly goals for other eras could be started any time so the challenge of having only limited time to do it is not there either (except for the very first era). Add very different difficulty levels to the mix and you can see that if it is playable and winable on Robber Baron, everything else must be too easy by definition. So for competion, you could try to complete the goals as soon as possible. For example in my last testing, I have completed all goals starting from Odgen on Robber Baron in 1987, with some 60 million in cash and over 140 million of net worth. I am sure it could be done sooner. Maybe we should hold Hall of Fame for the scenario/difficulty combination.
Baldur wrote: The key is growing Salt Lake City into a metropolis.. as you know. And early on buying industries if possible.

And yes, I was lucky cutting track laying 25% early on...

I'll try this one on Robber Baron level - the Basin crashed.

Thank you again for a challenging scenario - the longer the better. It's nice seeing those dual locomotives, but what the heck... I've not seen no such for years, anyway. :wink:

ps. no screenshots of some of your requests because I owerwrite any game I play.

Evald
Difficulty level only controls expenses and income so it should not be reason for crashing if you were able to complete the scenario already. There may be some "random" crash (I have seen one or two myself when testing) so save every now and then to make sure you can restart if it happens. Also it tends to crash when you load saved game if you are already playing the scenario, it is better to restart before loading saved game again.

If you make it on Robber Baron, don't forget to post the saved game. And don't even try without more money, $200,000 and 30% of shares won't be enough to get you on the path to victory.

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Chalako
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Post by Chalako » Tue May 15, 2007 2:01 pm

I tryed to play this map but it crashed before i could get started.

Baldur
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Utah at Robber Baron

Post by Baldur » Thu May 17, 2007 12:32 pm

Done. No CTDs despite my modest computer. Dropped Atanis installer, as there were no maintanence costs on trains. Best map/scenario so far. Completed all the goals in july 1980 - starting in Ogden. Robber Baron and hard train rooting.
Attachments
The last shipment of gold to Salt Lake City, june 1980.
The last shipment of gold to Salt Lake City, june 1980.
Goldtrain_1980.jpg (208.09 KiB) Viewed 13130 times
Victory, July 1980
Victory, July 1980
Utah_victory_1980.gif (183.68 KiB) Viewed 13130 times

Big Papa
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Post by Big Papa » Fri May 18, 2007 4:07 am

universum,
I finally got some time, played into the second era and will have to pick it up from there. I hope my computer will hold out. Your Utah looks nice. It's had to replicate the some of the world's greatest scenery; covering the whole state and all, there just isn't enough room. I like the National Park objectives. Good Job!

Big Papa

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universum
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Post by universum » Sun May 20, 2007 6:39 pm

Chalako wrote:I tryed to play this map but it crashed before i could get started.
Hi Chalako,

I am not sure what is causing the problems you have but it could only be interference with some other maps or insufficient hardware (not enough memory).

Did you use my "manual" installer from original post or Atani's installer? I don't see any reason why you would not be able to run the UTAH scenario except for low end computer with not enough memory.

Fortunately, there is an easy way how to remove any possibility it is because of other maps:

If you want to give it one more try, do this:
1) Go to 'My Documents\My Games' and copy and paste folder 'Sid Meier's Railroads!'. This will create new folder called 'Copy of Sid Meier's Railroads!'. This is important so that you can go back exactly to what you had before.
2) Rename folder 'Sid Meier's Railroads' to 'Sid Meier's Railroads - ORIGINAL' and rename folder 'Copy of Sid Meier's Railroads' to 'Sid Meier's Railroads'. This order is important to preserve time stamps on your original files.
3) Go to 'Sid Meier's Railroads\CustomAssets' and delete everything in it. Do the same with 'Sid Meier's Railroads\UserMaps'. If you want to test that you have done everything right, you can launch the game and see that you only have regular game scenarios and nothing else, exit the game again.
4) Download my "manual" installer from the first post and unzip it into UserMaps and run the '_ENABLE_UTAH_SCENARIO.bat' file.

After that, you should see 'Utah' scenario in the selection screen and should be able to play it.

When you want to restore your original setup, delete 'Sid Meier's Railroads!' folder and rename 'Sid Meier's Railroads! - ORIGINAL' back to 'Sid Meier's Railroads!'. If you want to preserve the UTAH scenario, you can rename it instead of deleting it and then rename it back for playing.

Sorry for this mess, it is caused by very stupid design choice on the Firaxis side. They use file timestamps to determine which global file to use. Unfortunately some modifications could only be achieved by modifying global files and such modifications affect everything.

Let me know if it worked for you or even if you decide not to try.

Thanks.

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universum
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Re: Utah at Robber Baron

Post by universum » Sun May 20, 2007 6:58 pm

Baldur wrote:Done. No CTDs despite my modest computer. Dropped Atanis installer, as there were no maintanence costs on trains. Best map/scenario so far. Completed all the goals in july 1980 - starting in Ogden. Robber Baron and hard train rooting.
Congratulations!

Your Salt Lake City track layout looks similar to mine :D. It seems that 'best' solution evolves independently.

What do you mean by 'modest' computer? Ho much memory do you have?

Are you saying that Atani's installer removes train maintenance costs from the scenario? If that's true, it sucks :( because most people opt for installer version.

It could happen if the difficulty had wrong value for this tag in RRT_Difficulty.xml, like this:
<fTrainMaintModifier>0.0</fTrainMaintModifier>

It could also be that tag is missing completely, although I would expect game to default to 1.

To all,

Can anyone who has Utah scenario installed with Atani's installer find RRT_Difficulty.xml with new difficulty levels and check? Or even better, upload it to this thread so that I can see for myself.

Thanks

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universum
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Post by universum » Sun May 20, 2007 7:20 pm

Big Papa wrote:universum,
I finally got some time, played into the second era and will have to pick it up from there. I hope my computer will hold out. Your Utah looks nice. It's had to replicate the some of the world's greatest scenery; covering the whole state and all, there just isn't enough room. I like the National Park objectives. Good Job!

Big Papa
Thanks, I hope it will work for you all the way through.

I know what you mean by 'finally got some time'. Ever since I started on this scenario, I did not have time for much else.

I am now playing your Basin & Range map. It is looking great and you have done awful lot of work on the custom models. I have installed it manually and it starts just fine but it crashes later in the second era. It is seamingly random but maybe it has something to do with time (maybe new train introduction). I will investigate a little bit further and post whatever I find on your thread.

I thought I was the first to introduce custom newspaper bitmaps but it seems like I have invented it independently at best 8).

Baldur
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Post by Baldur » Sun May 20, 2007 8:48 pm

Universum, maintanance costs were ok on Atani's first installer, the updated version with the moneyfix not. Don't have the XML, reinstalled Railroads when I noticed the bug. (Only the Utah map had the bug.)
Modest computer: Well, at least I got 2 GB of memory - need that for photoshopping. But my videocard has just 512 MB RAM.

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atani
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Post by atani » Sun May 20, 2007 10:06 pm

Baldur wrote:Universum, maintanance costs were ok on Atani's first installer, the updated version with the moneyfix not. Don't have the XML, reinstalled Railroads when I noticed the bug. (Only the Utah map had the bug.)
Version 1.1a (which is in my old post) has the fix for the maintenance cost in it.

If you had installed the 1.1 version of the map which originally had the money fix you should delete the RRT_Difficulty.xml from your CustomAssets\XML folder and then install version 1.1a.

Mike

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Slappy Da Clown
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Location: Michigans Upper Peninsula USA

ok

Post by Slappy Da Clown » Sun May 20, 2007 10:21 pm

gonna try to do this right


I think this is what you want
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RRT_Difficulty.zip
(948 Bytes) Downloaded 418 times
Slappy Da Clown
Dell Dimension 8400
Disk C: 118 GB Available, 145 GB Total
3GB Memory
Intel(R) Pentium(R) 4 CPU 3.60GHz
NVIDIA GeForce 6800 Series GPU

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universum
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Post by universum » Mon May 21, 2007 12:35 am

Thanks Slappy and Atani.

Combined RRT_Difficulty.xml is correct. False alarm.

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BadKharma
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Post by BadKharma » Mon May 21, 2007 1:28 am

universum wrote:
tomasvicente38 wrote:The map is the best one than I have seen, is very original mainly as far as the news of the newspaper and the one of the copper mine. By the way, How you have inserted the photos of the newspaper in the news? Another thing, can be inserted photos in color in the news of the newspaper? I congratulate to you
Hi Tomas,

thanks for nice words. I like your maps too, played all of them.

Finally someone commented on the custom newspaper pictures :D.

Newspaper images are easy to do. They are all the "event_???.dds" files. You need to have editor which can edit DDS files. I have used Paint.NET with DDS plugin. The images are in true color format so you can easily use colors for them. I have chosen to go with "sepia" effect to not diverge from what the game is using. But maybe I should have in some cases because the pictures of Utah scenery would look much better in color. Next time maybe.

All you need to do is to open any of the "event_???.dds", replace the image in it (the size is 742x300 pixels) and save it under name of your choice. Put the image somewhere in your scenario directory or subdirectory under it and reference it from your main scenario file using:

<szNewspaperBitmapSuccess>event_???.dds</szNewspaperBitmapSuccess>

Link to Paint.NET: http://www.getpaint.net/index2.html
DDS plug-in: http://paintdotnet.12.forumer.com/viewt ... sc&start=0

Looking forward to your maps with custom images! Maybe you will first to use colors.

Good luck!
Very interesting information there. I followed the link to the DDS plug-in and discovered a link on that site for a DDS plug-in for photoshop written by NVidia. PS Plug-in Maybe other people with photoshop can also use this. NVidia also has some DDS viewers on that linked page.
Anyway great sceanrio you can really see the amount of work and thought put forward in it's creation. Although I dont have the memory to complete it.

tomasvicente38
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Post by tomasvicente38 » Mon May 28, 2007 9:14 pm

Universum, I have tried with paint net to make the photos of the newspaper and it leaves the following thing to me:


Since you have done it your? To my the photo me the short one by half, as you can observe.
Attachments
tren1.zip
dds
(86.43 KiB) Downloaded 391 times

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universum
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Post by universum » Tue May 29, 2007 12:49 am

Hi Tomas,

your picture has wrong dimensions.

You have to create image 1024x512. The actual picture can only occupy top left corner and have described size (i.e. 742x300).

There will be quite a big portion of the image left empty.

Best way how to do images is to take existing event_xxx.dds file, rename it and use Paint.NET to edit it.

I have fixed your image and uploaded it. Use it as a template.
Attachments
event_tomasvicente.zip
Fixed picture
(87.27 KiB) Downloaded 431 times

tomasvicente38
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Post by tomasvicente38 » Tue May 29, 2007 11:00 am

Universum thanks, with this I will modify some of my maps and I will put them in the forum.

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