Gun and Fames...

[jsbowden]

So, last weekend I picked up some things to do in my spare time.

Like publius1, I picked up Sid Meier's Railroads. Great game except for it's habit of randomly crashing to the desktop.


It's just like playing the original, except back then you lived with the mantra of 'Save Early and Often' because instead of your application crashing, your whole machine would just stop on occasion. We're talking Hard Reset stop. The original had a smarter train routing algorithm too, but you couldn't have more than 32 (or maybe it was 16...it was 15 years ago now) trains, so it had less to try and figure out. One other minor quibble are the maps. The original game scaled the maps better, and the maps covered more gegraphical area. The NE US map went as far south as Richmond and as far west and Pittsburg. Europe was available as an entire region, not just France and Germany as seperate maps. The othe US regions were also more comprehensive. This makes a huge difference in gameplay when you're battling for control of a region with 3 other railroads. You had more cities to connect and more raw materials sites to deliver from. RRT2 and 3 also added the entirety of the continental US as a single map, with the objective there to be the first one to build a transcon. There are fewer engines available as well now.

These things aside, the game is STILL the digital equivalent of crack. I've spent a whole lot of hours in sandbox mode learning how to manipulate track layout (and holy shit, it's REALLY easy to lay track badly, and a pain in the ass to fix once you have because selecting individual sections of overlapping track is one of those things I can only call infururiatingly difficult). It really needs a keyboard shortcut to let you cycle through all curently visible track segments on the screen instead of fucking around with camera angles and mouse positions hoping to find the magic pixel that will select that one fucking piece of track you need to get rid of. Oh, and SAVE once you find it, because deleting it is one of the leading causes of crashing to the desktop. Changing a train's destination and cargo handling is another popular way to find yourself staring at your desktop.


My other pickup last weekend was GTR 2: FIA GT Racing Game. This is every track and car on the FIA GP circuit from the 04 and 05 seasons. It's very cool, has great physics, awe inspiring rendering of tracks and cars, and like every other driving sim on the planet, has the annoying feature that requires me to hit various milestones before I can use certain cars and certain tracks.


You know what I want? I want a fucking driving sim that is the equivalent of MS Flight Simulator. Gimme a big choice of a ton of different makes and models of car, and a big section of the world to drive them in. Throw in a few dedicated race tracks too for those Formula 1 and other race vehicles that aren't really built for driving through the center of downtown (and hey, taking normal street legal performance vehicles on a race track is also fun, I'm tempted to do it with mine out here in the big blue room, just so I can take it up to 155mph once without fear of killing myself or others in traffic or poor road conditions, and not having to worry about the whole going to jail for driving like a totally insane nutjob on a public roadway thing).

I'm just totally not interested in the whole "race your way to the top" thing. I just want to drive nice cars that I can't hope to afford in as realistic a simulator as can currently be built on commodity PC hardware. Hell, I have six different Need For Speed titles sitting on my desk at home (Porsche Unleashed, Hot Pursuit 2, Most Wanted: Black Edition, and three others I can't even remember), and they'd all be improved tremendously with nothing more than a sandbox mode that lets me drive any car on any track without having to do the ridiculous challenge and career bullshit.

The NFS titles are more arcadey physics than realistic, but hey, even that can be fun. The problem with a highly realistic sim is feedback. My wheel is one of the best out there ( Logitech MOMO Racing ), but that still isn't the same as actually being in a car. You can't feel how much chassis sway you've got, and no wheel out there can convey the actual feeling of slippage and/or yaw you get as you near the point where your angular momentum is overcoming the friction you need to make that turn (lateral forces are what I'm trying to talk about here); you don't get the feel of linear G forces in acceleration and braking either, which are huge things most of us don't even think about. I have no idea how well the brakes are or are not doing their job in a sim. Visual feedback just really doesn't convey what what acelleration tells us. Usually I have no idea in a driving sim that I've pushed to far until I'm trying to recover from having broke traction. The arcadey physics cut you a little slack, which is fine since I don't have all the feedback I really need for a completely honest model. Sometimes though, I really want the realism.


In other news, my breakfast was growing, so I have no food and I must eat.

Comments

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

I miss the ability to lay track with the keyboard, from the original Railroad Tycoon. As well, I find the double- and triple-tracking interface brainnumbing.

The maps, too: Why are they so small? And why the fuck is the game slowing down so much? I've got a 256MB graphics card, 2GB of RAM, and a 3GHz processor. There is *no excuse* for a *train sim* to crawl like that, even if it does have to think about a whole 25 trains at once between me and my opponents. Give me my whole continent maps! Add a zoom function to the minimap and just take the exact same maps, only bigger! And let me choose my starting city - even if it's only "pick which of these two you like", that would be better.

(And the tracking. HOLY CRAP. I can't imagine how many times I've layed track to a city, planted a depot, then laid track off the far end of that city a year later, in a straight line, and then been told that the new station at the end of the line *can't see* the one down the road at all until I build an annoying curve completely around it.)

Is there a way to purchase an industry from a computer? Or to sell an industry? Why not?

Finally, the computer AI is flat-out *stupid*. The only way it has a chance on higher difficulties is to blatantly cheat, since it *can't* build sane track arrangements or arrange deliveries properly. And its got a complex about keeping up with you - the AI will sell all its stock to get cash to expand to match you, and then never be able to afford to refinance any of it because you bought stock in the mean time and drove the price way up. And, of course, it's not profiting from all that extra cash, because it can't build tracks or trains right.

Things I like: Much less station customisation required than 1, and the impossible complex maintenance requirements of 2 are shot, too. And Vanderbilt cries when you buy him out, which is awesome. It's a damn good game. I just want something more like Railroad Tycoon, or, dare I say it, something more like Civ where the games go for a *long time* and require planning and effort, rather than the almost arcade feeling that it's got, where a whole complex game might last an hour and a half before completing the scenario.

In fact, there we go. That's what I want: I want Railroads, with the tracking bugs fixed, much bigger maps, a clock that advances more slowly while the game progresses at the same rate, and a smarter enemy AI. And that's something that should be able to come in a patch.

[jsbowden.livejournal.com]

God damnit, the comment below WAS a response to this one, but for whatever reason LJ didn't nest it.

[jsbowden.livejournal.com]

Yeah, upgrading depots, stations, and terminals in RRT1 could be somewhat annoying, but the ability to add a switching yard and have track come in and out of a terminal at any variant of 30deg was a damn nice feature, and one I miss. RRT1 required signal stations whenever you branched a track outside of a station or terminal, but it would also use those as points where a train could change direction and it would use them as part of the routing algorithm. Any station or annex could be reached from any other using that method.

I only have a 128MB graphics card (3.5 year old Radeon 9800 Pro), but I have a 3ghz P4 Canterwood (800mhz FSB, HT) and 2GB RAM, and I haven't seen any crawling. It runs fine for me, performance wise, right up to the point where it crashes.

You know what I REALLY want, aside from larger maps? I want a track section that IS a dedicated crossover. It should be an elongated 'X' and allow trains to switch from either track to the other. Instead I have to lay crossover sections by hand, and they can't overlap. This really fucks you when the distance between terminals/annexes is short and you have a lot of trains running through a section.

It's like having a big tabletop model RR without needing to dedicate a couple hundred ft^2 of house to it though, and being able to select a train and follow it around is cool. The graphics are pretty too.

You can purchase an industry, but you can't sell one. Select the city, then click on the industry you want to buy. It starts and auction, highest bidder wins. You can't do it in sandbox mode though.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

> the ability to add a switching yard and have track come in and out
> of a terminal at any variant of 30deg was a damn nice feature,

That must have been a 2 thing. I could never get started on 2.

> RRT1 required signal stations whenever you branched a track
> outside of a station or terminal, but it would also use those as
> points where a train could change direction and it would use them
> as part of the routing algorithm.

It didn't *require* them, but if you didn't, then it would count the entire section of track as "occupied" if there was a train on any of it.

But yeah.

> Any station or annex could be reached from any other using that
> method.

And come on, would it *kill* the game designers to let you say "Move to station X" and have the train figure out that it needs to turn around at station Y first, rather than refusing to let me make the routing at all?

It crawls when it's trying to animate a large number of trains at once. It really doesn't crash that often for me, just once or twice so far.

> I want a track section that IS a dedicated crossover.

Uh, yeah. I'm totally on top of that. That would be great, especially when I'm trying to triple-track a station with multiple spur lines going to nearby industries.

And I know how to buy the industry if it's unowned. I want to be able to make a bid on an industry owned by my competition, though: Hey, man, I see you're short on cash, and I control all the oil and coal for 3/4 of a map around. Want to sell me that power plant you bought for some unknown damn stupid reason? I'm not shipping anything there as long as you own it, but, hey, $400K now gives you a $300K profit. Nice, yes?

(Humour: Showing torrain that there was a tiny village near one of her terminals that had a power plant, with *two* Large Oil Wells on the same screen.
She was dubious when I said she should buy the power plant immediately - after all, $100K is a big chunk of cash. She was more dubious when I suggested she take a slightly longer track route because the curve would be shorter (faster trains and able to be double-tracked) and she was REALLY shocked when I said she should triple-track this tiny town, put in a Terminal, and run 4 trains on infinite loop from the wells to it.

And then, of course, she saw the money start coming in.)

[jsbowden.livejournal.com]

Maybe that was a 2 thing. I could just be on crack too.

Hmmm...you're correct...it wasn't required, but it made routing a hell of a lot easier.

Apparently, yeah, moving to a station to change direction would be fatal to them or something.

I don't have performance issues, but I do know how to crash the game on command, and sometimes I find new and exciting ways to accomplish this. I once deleted a section of track, saved, crashed, and after that, the game would crash every time I tried to load that save game. I had to pull the up most recent auto save to stop it happening.

I'm only running at 1280x1024@32bpp, FS AA level 3, with everything else at default. What graphics options are you trying to run?

Yeah, owning an industry you can pour raw resources through is a license to print money. I've got a US SW game where I have FIVE cattle ranches near LV, and there was no stockyard there. I built one. I put a power plant in LA and have 8 trains from 4 large oil wells pouring in to it and 10 trains from 6 vineyards going in to my winery there. San Diego is home to a grain processing plant with 4 large farms feeding it.

In a NE US scenario, I have a power plant in York, PA with 3 coal mines and 4 oil wells feeding it. The money from THAT, she is free...

[annewashere.livejournal.com]

I am so confused. I have been playing Railroads! A lot for the past week, and it has crashed ONCE, never slows down, and I have no difficulties laying track at all.

I have no experience with the previous games, however.

I am annoyed at the small size of the maps, enough that I don't really like playing with three opponents.

[jsbowden.livejournal.com]

Laying track is easy. Laying track that allows trains to move through a terminal across multiple sections of track (from York, trains to WDC passing through B-more have to move from the northern most track coming across a bridge to the southernmost tracks exiting, and then go back again)...you can only have 3 sections of track going through a terminal (oh, you can BUILD more, but the trains will only USE the 3 that fit under the arch proper), so I've got five or six parallel tracks on either side of that terminal, condensing to three, which 20 trains have to move through and around each other. It's maddening. Oh, and if you don't have a nice sweeping bit of crossover, the trains have to slow down to <20mph to use it, which backs up trains behind it waiting for it to finish crossing over and build back up to speed.

[annewashere.livejournal.com]

I see the problem! I have never done that - in other words, I win handily without having to ever condense lots of tracks down to three. I don't think I'm killing myself not having all those tracks, since my waiting is 5-10% and I really try not to have more than 3-4 things going on between cities. By the end I am making much more money than I can spend and it is a mopping up action.

Perhaps I am playing it wrong, but I don't think so, seeing as how I've been playing on the third difficulty, whatever that is.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

What routing difficulty do you have it set to?

[annewashere.livejournal.com]

The middle one. Like I said, though, it isn't usually an issue since I don't have too many trains competing for the tracks.

[jsbowden.livejournal.com]

I got tired of playing against a silly AI, and I'm now playing in the sandbox building the largest rail systems I can. I've connected just about every city, and have connected every resource on the map. People, mail, cargo, raw materials, and finished goods all have different centers of demand and destinations. Doing things like this worked far better in RRT1, but there was no sandbox, I'd just play till my competitors were wiped out, and the continue on from there building rail systems as I saw fit on the millions I had sitting in the bank and no more competition.

I don't have the time, space, or money to build elaborate model railroads, so this is a nice substitute for me.

[annewashere.livejournal.com]

I can definitely see that. I'm already getting tired of the silly AI, as you put it, and if you took sandbox mode (or honestly, after-winning mode) as far as you could take it would probably get very unwieldy.

[voltbang.livejournal.com]

I'm wanting a new driving game. I have NFS:MW black and compared to NFS:Underground2 it sucks. Sucks sucks sucks sucks. U2 had a great feel to it and you could balance the car right at the edge of it's traction. The cars felt different. You could tell by how the car handled if it was front or rear wheel drive, if the engine was in front or back. MW has no feel for the car at all. Of course it doesn't help that my logitech nascar wheel is barely supported and can't control any of the cars well enough to drive a in a straight line. My understanding is that it's a crap shoot for any combination of wheel and graphics card to actually work under MW. Anyway, looks like GTR has a demo, maybe I will download it tonight.

[jsbowden.livejournal.com]

Do so. It's an amazing piece of software. Every car is unique in acceleration, handling, and braking, and I suspect it's as close to real as they could get it. Two different 911 GT2s from different race teams have different feels (not much, I mean, a 911 is a 911 is a 911), but you can tell that the cars were modded differently from the base model.

It's all racing all the time though, and it's GT. There are no street races, and no leisurely drives through urban, rural, coastal, etc. areas just because (which one of the things I like about NFS: Porsche Unleashed, once you've unlocked the various models and tracks, you can just go in to free ride mode and cruise around the landscapes).

[voltbang.livejournal.com]

Pulled it down last night night and tried it out. Works well on my PC and looks like fun, but I understand the NFS Carbon demo is available, and I want to give that a try before I commit my race game dollars. NFS has more streetable cars, and for me, that's appealing. Plus I like all the different formats of racing available in the NFS games. But, if the simulation is as bad as it was in most wanted, forget it. The GTR simulation is good and drivable and all. I didn't get much past controlling my speed through the corners and trying to pick my apex, but that's enough to show that there is driving to be done in the game, unlike most wanted, which was pretty much just "keep the wheel turned the right way".