Open RT2 Wish Lists

[Nick Luo]

Hi all,

I'm new here, and thanks for allowing my post.

I know this topic is over 12 years, but I'm still playing RRT2 recently, since this game contains my childhood memory.

A couple of years ago, I bought the game fro STEAM and restart my RRT2 career again.

Here I'd like to share some of my thoughts.

 

1. I wish the cross-ocean bridge could be double-lined.

My current workaround is to build two parallel bridges together, each for one direction.

But I still hope there could be a mod of doubling the bridge.
 

2. Speaking of mods, isn't there anyone modding the trains or adding new trains to the game?

I know that most of players are modding the trains in RRT3, but I'm really not a fan of the economy system of RRT3.

And I somehow prefer the simplicity of RRT2 more.

I hope there could be a way of adding new engines to the game.

3. I'm the one who like to play the game without pressure, so I always start the game rich.

But being rich for too long can cause problems, too.

That is, the stock value turns negative all of a sudden when the value passes a certain maximum.

I'm an IT guy, so I know what was behind the scene, that is, "32-bit signed integer overflow".

I think the severity of this bug is no less than any other bugs, since this may crash your company, or even crash the game.

Once I had managed to force through this bug, and the worth of my stock holding becomes "Error" in the market view.

But I couldn't reproduce the solution anymore. I just remember that I buy (buy back stock) and sell stocks for many times in a random sequence.

I encounter this bug just yesterday, and this time my game was frozen after a dialog saying that the broker has contacted me and I should handle my purchase power bla bla bla.
However, buying back stock with that "minus" value can devour the company's cash instantly.

If I had a lamp genie that can fix a bug in the game, I will choose this overflow problem first.
Or at least I wish I had an editor that can edit the saved games to reset some necessary values.

 

Hope there's still people playing RRT2, and possibly provide some tech help here.

Edited yesterday at 01:47 AM by Nick Luo
Update and supplement comments

[Nick Luo]

I somehow managed to resolve the stock value overflow problem today, and hope my solution could help anyone got caught by this fatal issue.
When I first see the dialog of broker contacting me, the share value of the stock and owned stock are huge negative numbers.
First, I just sit there and wait for the broker to buy stocks for me.
By then, my cash becomes a great number of negative, but the balance of stocks become normal again.
I then wait for the next year, until I can start selling my stocks.
I sell the stocks until the player (personal) cash becomes positive again (In other words, sell stocks for repaying my "personal debt").
After that, I start buying back my stock using company cash.
If the company does not have that much money, just use the cheat code "powerball" to get the money.
Repeat the password until all company stocks are bought back, and then I can keep playing the game as usual.

Hope this information is helpful.
If there was a  saved file editor, things could have been much easier......

[jeffryfisher]

Isn't the smallest increment of money something like $1000? The overflow bugs could have been pushed out by a factor of 1000 if only the internal storage was number of thousands (just add ',000' to every display).

[Nick Luo]

For a short term solution, this might work.
But to handle this bug properly, the game developers need a way to store huge numbers.
The signed integer upper limit of a 32-bit storage is 2,147,483,647, which is about 2,147M.
Once your company grows large as time elapses, the stock holdings and/or cash will easily pass this limit.
The game can display numbers greater than this number, so I think the game designers were aware of this problem.
But somehow they had some oversights while dealing with the digits in the stock market.
And once the game sees the player has negative number worth of stock value or cash,
the game will consider the player go broke.
Even worse, the game may instantly crash when you click the "view" button to see the stock price chart.
So I think the code behind stock market handling is still far from robust.

Maybe we could have an option to turn off the entire stock market mechanism.
I know stock manipulation is an essence of the game,
but I'm a person that only enjoys watching the trains running, not worrying about the future of my company.