![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
So, last weekend I picked up some things to do in my spare time.
Like![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
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.
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.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
From:
no subject
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.
From:
no subject