jeffryfisher

Excellent research -- Yes, that answers my question perfectly.

It never recovered?

Aha... It's that month delay that I never put together. When you delivered pax and the demand went down, did it decline at both stations (eventually), or just the one receiving the delivery?

I can't recall seeing that before. I've made a note to check on it (might be weeks before I play though). Let us know if the effect is repeatable, especially on other maps.

I can't recall if anyone ever discovered how to extract loco graphics. If you do succeed, then please upload (and tell us what you learned about extracting, editing and recompiling).

Sorry, I can't help you. My RT-2 (and SimCity-4 etc) runs on a dedicated old-game desktop machine that still boots Win-98 pro (where I suppressed a couple of troublesome updates too). It's well beyond its approved life, but it will never upgrade if I can help it.

I don't recall Blue Baron, but I do have my own tips scattered among the many comments on this site. The biggest: 1) Cross lines on diagonals that meet at a point -- Trains can pass through each other at full speed because they never share the same square. 2) When electrifying, first build non-electric track. Then add wires starting from the southeast and upgrading just one tile at a time. You end up paying for just the first link -- all 1-tile extensions to the north and west are free (you'll learn the exact compass points through experience).

I have never heard the name "Supernova" (wrt Thunderbird) before now.

Ubuntu has been upgrading TB without asking permission for years now (since about the same time the sync broke between WIn-10 and Linux), and there's no way to even ask it to wait until I'm ready. Likewise Firefox -- It'll sometimes become unusable in the middle of the day because it has upgraded without my knowledge or consent, and then I'm forced to restart it, even losing work / losing my browsing place(s).

How democratic! Once upon a time, it was possible for Firefox and Thunderbird to each have one profile on one shared partition used by both Win-10 and Ubuntu on my dual-boot machine. I could then achieve "synchronization" internally because each version literally read the same files as the other. Then some genius broke one of the cardinal design laws of all Mozilla applications by making OS-dependent versions of one or more files in their profiles, forcing me (I hate being forced) to assign my profiles to one OS and abandon the other. Now when I ask about synchronization, I am told to upload all of my (personal and private) email and browsing data to Mozilla's cloud. Like Hell I will.

There's life... I'll download your maps.

Yes -- I had an RT2 backup data disk instead of my backup install disk in the optical drive (similar writing on the upper surface). Note to self: After backing up my saved games etc, don't leave the disk near the computer.

Doubtful it messed with drivers. I think only vital security updates are sent to Win-7 these days. I'll look at the compatibility setting and then see if Win-10 can work for me as well as it does for you (luckily my Win-10 laptop has a DVD / CD drive to spin the key).

For a couple years now, I've needed to launch RT2 twice before it would actually "open". Now it just runs in the background without ever claiming the screen. Even though I don't play very often anymore, I'll be very sad if one of my favorite games has been obsolesced by Microshaft Does anyone have any suggestions?

Your experience may be different, but that doesn't make mine untrue, just not universal. Also: I'm not the only developer who has run into this phenomenon and tried to figure out a workaround -- Our discussions should be in the archives back around ~2010. There must be some tangent factor at work (some map-wide setting?) that makes some maps amenable to planted buildings while other maps aren't. I know that the original 1950 Australia map (one of my favorites) starts with an auto plant outside Melbourne that doesn't disturb the city generation. However, every port I ever placed on my US History map killed the entire city -- permanently. Besides guaranteeing port trade at a couple key coastal cities (New York for the Northern States and Charleston for the South), I had wanted to create at least one inland port on the Mississippi River. Using map-editing tools, I could create a patch of water at St Louis and place a port, but then St Louis failed to launch. I spent entirely too many days trying various configurations of city placement, water, port placement and reserved cells, but nothing worked. I abandoned the effort, St Louis generates normally, and I warn other developers that planting buildings can stifle city generation -- You can try it and maybe get lucky, but make sure you test it before you invest time playing only to discover too late that a key metro area is barren. YMMV

The only sure way to have a building right where you want it is to plant it yourself, but there's a bug in the game where having a planted building can prevent anything from spawning randomly within that city/region. Somebody claimed a workaround, but I never got it to work, so I never ever plant buildings on my maps. Instead, I set high percentages for my desired building to appear, usually in a few towns or economic regions. That doesn't guarantee that the map will always start with that building, but one is likely to appear (at least after the year that the building becomes available). The townhouse is just another building, but it is normally allowed only on "metra" maps. To enable it on your map, you'll need to dive into the settings, find the buildings, scroll way down to townhouse and check/uncheck a box. Once enabled, you might also need to open up a few cities and give some weight to their appearance -- It has been so long that I can't recall.

I don't have it either. I think it must have been superseded by editor3.txt

Gosh... I has been so long that I don't recall how we separated truth from documentation. My vague recollection is that rot has to do with how long something sits waiting to be picked up. But I don't trust my memory... I just know that the answer is buried in our message archives.

To celebrate Christmas, I fired up RT2 again for the first time in months. I resumed a US History map that has powerful modern electrics zipping around in 1977+. In finding freight to replace some dried-up passenger consists, I found my self using a bit of knowledge that I forgot to mention back in August: There are two classes of freight. They're not given names in-game, but I call them slow and fast, with "fast" also being more distance-sensitive. "Slow" freight is all your heavy bulk materials like logs, iron and coal. "Fast" is high value-added finished products like automobiles, goods and food. Some may be hard to guess, so look up the chart (the complete extracted data table is among in the several spreadsheets we use for modding, and I think it's bundled with my US History map). I especially like Cattle -> Food because both are high-value fast freight. To make money on bulk, haul slow trains minimal distance using inexpensive engines set to low priority. To make money on fast freights, haul them long distance at good speed at high or normal priority like passengers (especially after your passengers / mail take to the skies and highways).

The game is unbalanced, especially in the early 1800s. Maybe it's just too easy to raise big bucks and build inter-city long lines decades before they emerged in real life. Still, you can make money on freight if the distance is short and the locomotive is cheap. Income shifts somewhat in the "2nd century", and then pax & mail dry up in the 1960s after the announcement of air travel. In my US History map, I gave certain freights some added value: You can reduce the costs of building rails by producing lumber and steel. I created some fuel cost triggers as well. And yes, I separate freight depots from passenger terminals in all but my lowest-traffic towns. It's also a good idea to keep slow freights on their own tracks where they won't be frozen out by a steady stream of express trains overrunning them. Carefully placed diagonal crossings can allow a network of freight lines to be completely isolated from an overlapping net of express lines.

I hear that -- But then we'd definitely need some visual compression on all map scales larger than Metra. Otherwise the trains look to be hundreds of miles long 😮

I just wish the source code had been kept by someone, but between Take2 and Sid Meyer's follow-on company, it was lost

Especially since all we have are old threads now -- But I still look for new messages every day. Open RT2 isn't being worked on, but the wish-list remains for the day when somebody figures out how to launch such a project.

I've enabled it in TSC, but it appeared as a mono-colored model without a skin. Given its cost, dates and effectiveness, it is never the best engine for any use case unless a bunch of other engines are left out of a scenario. I deactivated it again because I was never going to buy one. It's my understanding that it was a switch engine in RL, a use-case that is lost in a game about main line hauling. That may be why it was deactivated by the time RT2 upgraded to TSC.

Try pausing the game while building track and managing trains.