Beiträge von uzurpator

Bummer, really. Especially for the increasing of production over time.

Regarding the procedural generation. I gather I can provide a pool of blank mdl files and fill them with data before they are read. The only requirement would be to load "proper" files before the pool.

I am thinking of this as means to create variants of vehicles provided by mods. I _can_ provide variants of stock vehicles, but I have no control over mods.

The workaround I am thinking are two mods and reliance on load order. First mod would load models and create variants, the second one, run after it, would just load them.

Howdy.

I have taken intrest in TPF2 again and I want to recreate my TPF1 mod - extended gameplay -> Extended Gameplay and Immersion

Just, of course, more better. The central premise of the thing is going to be procedurally generate/modify generate train cars and locomotives from stock assets ( with some repaits added to the mix, because why not ). Giving literally hundreads of vehicles to choose from. Anyhow.

I have some ideas which I'd like to try. I've been reading into the api documentation, but it is really terse on the subject. Some things are mentioned, but I haven't found examples.

Is it possible to modify industry production cap dynamically? - I want to make industries in 1850 to have lower production cap then in 1950 and I want this cap to raise steadily over the years. So - for example - coal mine starts at a 100 production in 1850, but raises to 1000 in 2000.

Likewise - is it possible to alter vehicle data dynamically? - To better simulate steam engines, I want to tie their power output to speed at which they travel at a given moment. API mentions that simulations is pinged forward 5 times per second. This should give me enough resolution. There are some callbacks available, supposedly, but no examples.

In the same vein - I'd like to tie running costs to actual energy usage of a vehicle.

How about payment rates. Can I change the money paid for a service using scripts?

Lastly - has anyone tried to generate *.mdl files procedurally during game load?

The api reference suggests that these things are possible-ish but it also is very terse on the subject.

Version 1.4 of EGI has been released and you can get it from usual places

This release has been set to extending the options when it comes to building infrastructure. Most visibly, now you get two-three track types in each era - for a total of nine types over the span of 150 year
On top of that, bridges are now available throughout entire game and come in several flavors which vary wildly in cost.

A proper HSR 300km/h bridge will push you back a whopping 133 times more dollars then a lowly wooden one. So rethink your strategic and tactical goals. Power building the best is now no longer the best course of action.

Obviously, as a new version - 1.4 - introduces some fixes. Most notable one is sorting out the dithering/moire artifacts when rendering tracks. It now looks much smoother regardless of LOD setting.

For version 1.5 I plan to finally take a looking glass to trucks and, of course, will continue to polish the game further.

Teaser of what I am now working on.

1. More selection of trackage - with a bigger gameplay impact. Three eras: 1850-1900, 1901-1950 and 1951-onward. Each gets three types of track - Siding ( cheap, but severe speed restrictions ), mainline and express. Each track for each era has a different characteristic when it comes to handling of curves. Which leads me to...

2. More permissive curves. In vanilla games a curve can be no smaller then 2000m to allow trains to run at 300km/h. In EGI 1.4 highest tier track will allow 300km/h on curves as tight as 500m.

I don't think so. I make no changes to the cargo distribution.

Hello there.

I proudly announce a release 1.3 of EGI. The highlight of this version is the new animated, power based, and shaded steam from the main locomotive stack. On top of that the mod hosts several other changes - such as tighter, proper coupling of north american freight cars or more physics based locomotive stats in europe.

The mod can be had from the usual places - which is steam or tf.net

I have released here, and on Steam the version 1.2 of the mod.

It mostly is about editing the 'egi_configuration.cfg' and contains:

1. A set of switches to change the behavior of the terrain generator - now you can instrument it how many industries and towns to create and what are the general topography types ( including amount of trees ).

2. A switch was provided which works as a way to artifically stop technological progress at a certain year. In effect - from that year onwards no new vehicles are going to be introduced, so you can play with steam forever. It also should ensure that buildings and other things introduced over the years are not going to be available if they fall after the selected year. It does not work for roads yet.

Update 1.1

- I added fire torch effect to the oil-refinery
- reworked particle effect of steam and diesel. Steam now disperses more naturally and diesel fumes are in two variants - old diesel ( thicker, blacker ) for diesels designed before 1980 and new diesel ( bluish, low emissions one ) for diesels built after 1980
- I ported relevant parts of an LNER A4 animation fix ( mod: 1371438699 )

Next on the chopping block:

- terran generation - create an user friendly presets via config file.

Also - added download link to the TF.net database, because I am an idiot who can't upload.

Hello there.

I'd like to present my mod, which is a result of my dissatisfaction with how the vanilla game plays. I called it "Extended Gameplay and Immersion" because, well, those are my goals. After getting a ton of modded vehicles it also became true that the game became progressively more imbalanced. So I decided to change it.

It is not the first one for me - I already did a balance mod for Train Fever and made one for Transport Fever at the release. Howeve, this one is much more then pushing some vehicle stats around, as it also polishes the game to be more accessible. I used vanilla assets whenever possible and modified some to achieve my goals. Since I almost only play with trains - that is the focus of this mod.

So far the features are:

1. Complete rebalance of the freight cars in both US and EU themes.

I added 144 more freight cars, creating 12 generations of freight cars for each theme. Essentially, if you start at the year 1850, then from 1859 you are going to get an upgraded train car every three years. Up to year 1982. The goal of this was to make the transition from each genration to be as smooth as possible and to give the player an incentive to upgrade existing lines.

What is more important tho, is that I introduced a new running cost scheme which _massively_ reduces running costs of early freight cars. The vanilla game is structured in a way that the first generation of freight cars are massively more expensive per capacity then later freight cars. IN effect - it is very hard to get a reliable freight operations in the early game.

EGI makes freight cars come in easily digestable bits, which cost much less to set up in the early game, so starting out with freight is possible even with the D 1/3 locomotive only.

Freight trains are now also much slower - giving point to the existance of slower locomotives ( like E94 ).

2. Tweaks to other rail vehicles.

Whenever sensible I made adjustments to existing vehicles ( changing power / introduction date etc ) to make the generational improvements less drastic. This is most visible in the US theme, where you suddenly get vehicles with triple the power of the previous locomotives. There are also inconsistencies in the EU scenario, where you get locomotives capable of 140km/h and no carriages to run them at. There is just one minor exception to that.

3. Immersion changes.

I made quite a few minor tweaks to the game which improve the game experience. All tweaks are listed in the readme of the mod, however the most intresting ones are for example:

- steam and diesel locomotives loaded before the mod get their particle systems adjusted. The result is dependant on the power and size of the vehicle.
- load states for vanilla gondolas are adjusted to the technology level and commodity. Iron ore barely shows in the car, because it is five times as dense as coal.
- Baldwin 6-wheels got its tender back.

There are more tweaks such as that, and more will come.

4. Integration with other mods.

EGI, to keep consistent balance, especially with moded freight cars, will modify their speed/capacity to match the progression its sets for itsself. It follows the concept of 'mass ratio' - where the mod adjusts capacity to match expected mass/capacity ratio for a given vehicle in a given year. Likewise it makes sure that a car introduced too early does not exceed the mod expects. Essentially - makes sure that new freight cars neither exceed nor underperform to what the mod expects.

5. Difficulty settings

Since this is a gameplay mod - it also provides difficulty settings - named 'easy', 'medium', 'hard' and 'fever' and they mostly deal with cargo weight. On fever difficulty most commodities weigh as much as 8 tons per unit, which makes even late locomotives struggle. Difficulty is settable from a configuration file.

There are more changes in it, but to list them all would be to list the entire readme.

Extended Gameplay and Immersion
https://steamcommunity.com/sha…iledetails/?id=1568246620

In short:

- 24 new generations of freight cars ( 144 new vehicles in total ) -12 for each theme
- 4 new passenger cars
- numerous balance tweaks
- new freight car running cost formula
- seamless integration with most vehicle mods
- over 100kb of LUA code
- difficulty settings
- ease of use changes ( reversed locomotives, day length change, vehicle rakes )
- lots of other small tweaks

DarkMo is right tho, but the problem is, generally, about mod interoperability.

LUA mods are run in sequence over the same data records.

Take my mod for example - it shamelessly modifies all vehicle records loaded prior and sets their speeds and capacities to fit the balance scheme I envisioned. No-cost and similar mods might get their work overwritten if they were loaded prior to mine. This will end in some game weirdness.

My mod also modifies particle systems. With version 1.1 its going to modify particle sizes to feed the modified shaders. If someone then loads a mod that also modifies that shader, then all particle effects from diesel locomotives are going to become these massive splotches of blue.

If two mods modify the same data - then weirdness is going to occur.

To showcase my work - the sample of what a fire I have gotten and more realistic diesel smoke - instead of throwing char, it throws that blueish tinted translucent fume.

I used the 'size' shader argument. I simply moved the particle system definition ( size01 ) by 130 and 150 - respectively - and that gave me an indication of what effect to use. Particle systems in TPF don't support color natively, so I had to be creative. I think that showcases the problem you will have to deal with. My biggest issue is the translucency of the new shader to legacy vehicles - I don't want all of a sudden all steam engines to breathe fire

EDIT: Regarding the original question. IF you have a way to discern what you are dealing with, THEN in a shader script you can use branching and use whatever methods to pass arguments and that is going to be your issue.

The game reloads shaders on 'load game' and in case of an error, throws a message box with a compiler message. So it is quite straightforward. Inactive mods don't modify shaders in any way.

What you can do with shaders is fairly limited to what you can pass to them. I am rather certain we don't have access to the internals of screen composition/postprocesses etc. Which means that even if you will be able to change shaders for a given surface, it will have to be identical in signature to the one you are replacing.

I am currently working on the smoke shaders because I want a realistic fire and diesel smoke, but I am just modifying the smoke shader and I had to do some pretty janky hacking to get it done.

The game has an acceleration model that does not fit the game scale.

It uses a real world metrics ( kilometres, seconds etc ) when in the world of TF cities are about 2-3 kilometres apart. In real world TGVs need several minutes to get to 300km/h, but on the map of TF they are on the other side of the map by then.

Mod has been updated to version 5080/5112 of the game.

Download: Balance Mod [UPDATED for 5080]

Mod has been updated to be compatible with Version 4831 ( ie, latest ) of Train Fever.

Download: Balance Mod [UPDATED for 4831]

A few clarifications for everyone.

1. This mod is a quick fix to a rather important problem. We discussed this on train-fever.com. I got quite a boost from this, some people asked me to share it, so there it is.

2. Train Fever is CPU limited. Even my low-end Radeon 6850 is, on average, loaded by 50%. The CPU limitation comes from two sources: Simulation and Graphics Preparation. I cannot fix the simulation ( altho, If I had the sources, I would - I am a pro programmer ). I cannot fix the graphics preparation because I don't have the source code.

3. The best way it can be done, with script mods, is to reduce the load on the graphics preparation by using an aggresive level of detail. Since smoke particles and people are the biggest known CPU eaters, they got my attention first.

4. To gets the most of the mod it is best to start a fresh game. Also, train fever tends to speed up during the game session. This is due to how the game is structured.

Now. I would ask you all to do something.

1. Set the lowest graphics setting you can.
2. Load your biggest game.
3. Go to the corner of the map, look away ( like on this screenshot: http://img.photobucket.com/alb…-08_00003_zps7dae873e.jpg ) and get frame rate reading ( use FRAPS or similar software )
4. Post results along with your hardware specs.

This measurement will allow us to judge how much CPU power the game really needs. If you get, let's say, 20fps, then it is quite possible to, actually, increase speed of the game by using the level-of-detail settings.

Performance Hotfix Mod

This is a simple modification to boost the performance of the game, especially late game. It removes visible people and ensures that new buildings in cities are created without particle emitting ( particles are known CPU eaters ) chimneys.

I would like to know how much boost do you guys get. I got from single digit frame rate to upper 30+ in some cases.

Also - are you comfortable with a map with no trees?

Hey guys.

So far the mod has gotten a pretty good feedback, so I think It is time to develop it further. What are your wishes?

I know that compatibility with industry mods is a popular request.
I will also start working on the feature to adjust other vehicles to the Balance Mod, well, balance.
I also want to scour the downloads database for models I can bundle with the mod.

Anything else?

I was testing the physics to ensure that freight car weights are not too excessive. I was trying 10, 20, 30, 40 and lastly 50 car trains. This one is from the last run. About 3000 tonnes attached to the locomotive.

Almost done. In order to keep your intrest - a screeshot.