New Industries Needed.......

[rodea2007]

Looks great Rodea! Add a small fenced in area to the Annex so the horses don't run away, and a larger fenced in area for the Barn, with maybe a different skin to the Barn, and you have a whole new Industry! The fencing I just converted from Grizzly's work will do it.

Keep up the good work!

As pictures shown below Fence Did you mean Snoopy?

[snoopy55]

Well, I was talking about the one in this thread: viewtopic.php?f=73&t=1251&p=10065#p10065 BUT, what you have looks great! Keep going with it!

[rodea2007]

Well, I was talking about the one in this thread: viewtopic.php?f=73&t=1251&p=10065#p10065 BUT, what you have looks great! Keep going with it!

Not hard to make a fence around the horse farm, but there are some problems will arise some of horses will located outside the fence, because you will not be able to determine where to position the horses stock file it will be appear

[snoopy55]

Don't worry about it, that is just the way the game is. Maybe do two versions, one with fences and one without, that way a map maker can decide what he wants.

[snoopy55]

I found a project for someone to try.

We pass this grain tower every time we go St Louis. The only good pics are from Opera's maps, so here they are.

[Gabriel Bakker]

Has anybody made an Airport? I'm trying to finish my first map before I learn blender and nifskope, and I need an Airport to supply Tourists ..

I hope to start making my own models for my second map (because what I have in mind will require a LOT of custom models, and I wanted to have something finished to share before I start asking for the kind of help it will take to figure out all those extra programs.)

Anyway, this post started out asking for ideas, so I hope its not impolite to suggest an Airport.. At a minimum, a control tower, runway, fences and a couple buildings, but would be awesome if it actually had animations of planes landing and taking off from time to time..

Forgive me if someone already made and posted one and I just didn't find it yet.. I have searched, though I may have missed a spot somewhere out there in the internet.

Gabriel

[snoopy55]

Hmmmmm..... You might want to start up several maps just to look at the animation the Industries contain. The way this game was built it uses a lot of memory for nothing and leaves little for details. It can only use 2Gb of memory by itself. There is a 3 Gig Enabler and a 4Gig Virtual Memory Enabler available by going to the menu at the top left on the main page and clicking on Utility Programs, then SMR Extras.

What we have learned over the years is that extra detail and animation sucks the life out of this game. Also, people mainly play the maps to win them. They may look over the neat stuff the first time or two, but after that it becomes play to win.

Another thing to remember is that In-City and Out-Of-City Industries have a preset size limit. And AIs do not believe in going around Industries, they would not hesitate to run a track right down your runway!

Don't get me wrong, we are all for new material for this game and many new maps, but be careful SMR does not dash your hopes with it's limitations.

[NSrailfan]

Gabriel I would be more than happy to build an airport for you, but I would ask that you go and paint it. I'm also open to creating any models you may need, getting them ready by unwrapping the UVW map, but I would like for someone else to paint them. I find the painting to be a tad time consuming, and I've been a little busy lately.

[Gabriel Bakker]

Sure, I'll paint it.

After this initial map is completed and posted, My next step is to learn to make models. I would like to make a map set on the moon, and that will require me to remake every model in the game to have bubbles over it. So that is gonna be a daunting task, but one of the reasons I'm excited to make railroads maps is, I've been meaning to learn Blender and 3d modelling for a long time. I also have been trying to make games in Unity, and to do anything really cool there, I have to be able to make my own models.

So what I'm saying is, yes, I look forward to working with you in any way I can with the process. I can start with painting it, I know how to use image editing programs. Just tell me what to do (what file to change, etc) and I'll do it. I have read through some of the simple tutorials for painting models that are located on this site so that will give me a starting point. They scribble numbers on the different faces of the thing, and I can look in NifSkope to see what number is for each face, and then use the image editor to paint each face the way I want it .. do I understand that correctly so far?

As snoopy55 pointed out, for Game Resources' sake, it should be pretty simple. But it seems like it needs at least, a runway, a control tower, and some kind of terminal building. Perhaps a wind sock too. I can use the ski resort annex someone posted in the Industries thread for the depot. It looks good for any outlying industry that uses passengers.

Snoopy55: I agree completely - I'm more of a conceptual person then a graphics person anyway, and for me, the biggest fun in creating a map is devising the economy and such. The games i've worked on in unity are like that too, terrible art but the focus has been on the puzzle and the concepts (still not that great, but, hey, we all gotta start somewhere). So, for now, I got my map working using the Airforce Base that you posted in the BB_Industries thread. It works for now, but would be better if it had a runway at least. But anyway, at least there's a placeholder building out there so you have something to build your tracks to and the economy works.

Also, thank you everyone who worked on those industries .. I've made 3 new goods for this map and I'll package them up and submit them, but thanks to the help of everyone on this forum, and all the traincars and industries, my map is now progressing rapidly. I spent a week searching on the internet, a few days struggling to get the very basics in place, and then I found this forum, and in just one day I have the whole economy in place and I'm polishing up the final details.. Then it will just be a matter of upgrading it with better art as I learn how to make it, or people help me.

As for the computer player building tracks over the runway, there's probably nothing I can do about that. So the players will just have to use their imaginations and deal with it.

Although doesn't the game push the industry aside? I never see the computer players build their tracks through a house for example.

But I guess the runway would be done the same way as the fields on a grain farm, and they do build tracks through those of course.

[snoopy55]

Now that you mention it, the Airport as a whole would get moved if someone or something tried to put a track across it. (Hey, I've not played this game in years, just created for it )

I will point out one important thing, your placements will have to be set, not random, and you will have to create a perfectly flat area to put your airport. If you don't, it may end up partly in the air and/or partly underground.

I can see it, Hanger, short Runway and Tower. An Office type building as the Annex. Maybe the Depot or Station, minus the growth, with the animation, skinned differently with the sign changed.

I'll stop here for now or I'll have it all made up and posted.. .... Back to my SD Series Engines........

[Gabriel Bakker]

Yeah, that'd be awesome.

And .. the depot is not even necessary .. the one from the BB industry "Ski Resort 2" would probably work fine.. at any rate, I'm using it for all my outside industries that accept tourists for now.

[snoopy55]

Just a note on the use of Blender...... Start with version 2.49b. Play with that, learn from it, and if you get the itch, go to the newer versions. When they decided to update it to add more possible games it could handle they 'adjusted' it (sounds better than 'screwed it up') and it tends to have problems working with SMR.

You can find it under 'Utility Programs' in the Menu on the main screen.

[Gabriel Bakker]

Ok, awesome. Thanks for letting me know.

I had a similar problem with MicroDEM .. I could not get it to install, and could not get it to work. I understand everyone on these forums is working with an older version of MicroDEM that was more stable, but I couldn't find anywhere to get it.

I eventually gave up and found a greyscale elevation map of the whole earth!!! It was super cool and I was gonna post it on the Railroads Forums for future map makers to use. It was easy, I just opened it in Gimp and cut, pasted, and resized the section of the map I wanted. It didn't have a huge amount of detail but it did have enough detail to fully map out a fairly small region of the earth, enough for my purposes.

Then, I realized my mistake. .. What I'd found was not an elevation map at all, but a weather map, showing snowfall or Temperature or Something!!! It worked for my purposes which were a mountainous area famous for its snowfall and skiing.. Naturally, the snow was thickest in the highest parts of the mountains. But it failed miserably when I tried to use it to make a map of the earth. Greenland was surrounded by huge impenetrable cliffs, while many equatorial coastal regions were in the ocean. (maybe if I made a map of global warming or something )


Anyway:
1) Where is a good place to get a stable and easy to use version of MicroDEM?
2) Would anyone be interested in posting an elevation map as greyscale image of the entire earth for future map makers who don't have MicroDEM to use?
also .. c) if you answer question 1 above, I'll try to do 2 myself. (But it might take me a little while as my days off are at an end and I gotta finish some paying projects this week before I can get back to this fun stuff.)

[snoopy55]

MicroDEM...... what in tarnation is that? Everybody uses it huh........ I gotta search for this one........

I found it!!!!

viewtopic.php?p=5122#p5122

MY thread, MY posts, My information........ Hey, what can I say... .....

The downloads for the version we were using is there.

As to a map of the earth, well, if you find the time, go for it, but don't go out of your way, we do not have to many mappers left right now.

There is some other talk of it on the forum. Go up to the top, click on 'Search' and enter MicroDEM. Or anything else you want to search for.

[Gabriel Bakker]

Thats pretty funny I'm the same way, though. Who has time and brainpower to remember everything they've said! I'm doing good if I can remember even some of the important stuff

Thanks for the help with the MicroDEM installer. I'll try it out soon and if I have easy luck getting an image for the whole earth i'll share it.

For now, my priorities are:
1) Finishing this map (i'm so close to it at least being playable)
2) Taking care of my business customers before they find someone else and I end up living under a bridge and surfing the internet from the local Mc. Donalds with the other hobos.
3) all that other stuff, microdem, map of earth, blender, and new models and the other two maps.

Technically, I should be putting number 2 in front of number 1 .. but I'm so close, and its like an itch in my brain! I have to get it working!!! I didn't spend all week on this for nothing!

Gabriel

[slider38]

I never could get Microdem to work either. I use a topo map from unisys. It does require a bunch of hand work but at least it gives you an idea of the elevations in which you are working. You basically end up having to stitch various maps together, but it works for me.
http://weather.unisys.com/usgs/relief.php

[Gabriel Bakker]

Do they have elevation data too, or is it just a relief map shaded from the NorthWest?

I ran into that problem when I was working on my map, several of the "elevation data" maps that I found looked too good to be true.. Then when I looked closer I realized they were relief maps, not elevation data, which is why they looked so good.

Relief data looks more natural to us humans, but relief data would make the NW sides of mountains look like tall plateaus and the SE sides look like canyons, and the flat land of lower elevations look like higher then the SE sides of mountains.

And thats what it did for me, in my maps, until I realized the problem.

Gabriel

[Gabriel Bakker]

This is a little closer to what we need here:

http://weather.unisys.com/usgs/index.php

We just need to figure out a good way to decolorize it in such a way that it uses the color key at the bottom and translates into the greyscale of SMR's map representation. Does anyone know a good program for doing "color swapping" on an image like that? In otherwords, keep black as black, change purple to dark grey, change blue to slightly lighter grey and so on, all the way up to red, which we want to be very light grey, and then finally the grey to white for the highest peaks should be translated to the whitest shades of grey?

Gabriel

[Gabriel Bakker]

After hours of searching, and following a whole bunch of frustrating dead ends, I finally managed to find a grey-scale world elevation map. It was a bit dim for our purposes and so would have shown a lot of places as much lower then they were, but adjusting the "levels" in gimp resulted in a better image with a proper scale from sea level to the top of Mount Everest.

There do appear to be some flaws in the images i'm working with, so I can't promise this is perfect. But this is what I have so far. Hopefully, this will help anyone with experience in an image editor to get exactly what they need to make elevation based maps for any part of the earth aside from Antarctica. (Antarctica elevation maps are surprisingly easier to find with a simple google image search.)

The file is quite large, so I'm hosting it on my companies website as its to big to be posted on this forum.

But you can download it here. You won't have to stitch anything together. Just open this image in Gimp or Photoshop or your image editor of choice, and copy and paste the section you want into a new window. Then, adjust the height range using the "Adjust Levels" button (in Gimp its on the dropdown menu Colors->Levels) and you can change it to something that works well for the part of the world you're using.

http://www.sageax.com/downloads/WorldElevationGreyscale.tga

The original file is also available for download if anyone wants to take a go at adjusting it from the original data. Let me know if thats desirable and I'll post it too. Its just that its a large file, and I pay for my internet by the Megabyte (rural internet connections in america suck), so I didn't want to post it unless at least one person wanted to use it.

But the modified one above should suit your needs, and its not a relief map, its a true grey-scale DEM based elevation image.

Enjoy!
Gabriel

PS. I was able to install MicroDEM thanks to Snoopy's files, but I was not able to get it to work. It errors with "Access Violation" any time I try to open anything. This was taken from an image file I found on a website.

[Batchman]

Hopefully in the right place, here.

Looking to get an industry slightly modded, or perhaps modded two or three times (will have to go back and refresh my research on what I need) and another one possibly created.

Back on page one of the Building Blocks there are both an Army Base (with a couple of tanks in front of it) and an Airforce Base which seems to be the exact same building, but without the tanks. The thing is, I'd love to see it, but perhaps with a couple of bi-planes in place of the tanks. The bi-planes could fit perfectly in earlier years, and even in later years, it isn't unheard of to see retired planes, missiles, tanks, and so on use as decorations on some military bases.

Also think there may be a problem with the building block for the Air Force base, as when I tried to install and use it, the game flashed me a little on screen message about missing files from that base.

As to my comment about modded two or three times, I'd love to include a sign on both army and airforce base with name of base, but including each base two or three times with different names might (or might not) be too large of a memory hog. Somebody else would have to tell me how bad that would be.

The other one I would like to see would be a Navy base with a port-type building and a military ship in the water. (I don't desire any animation on it, to be easier.) On the other hand, I've seen that people often seem to have lots of problems getting port-type industries to work, so I can be talked out of this if it's going to be a major, major hassle to get it working.

It's just for my scenario I've set up five (currently, might eventually decide to add one more) military bases around the country, just using the locations of some of the largest military bases in the USA, but it doesn't quite fit to have MacDill Air Force Base, for example, with a couple of tanks sitting in front of it. All of them need to have arms shipped to them, because all branches of the military use arms, just different times, so the generic good of arms works just fine.

Any thoughts, interest, and willingness?