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 November 21, 2024 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.

[jeffryfisher]

That's over 2 billion, which when expressing thousands would accommodate 2 trillion dollars, both plus and minus. Since RR Tycoon doesn't suffer inflation like the real world does, 2 trillion should be adequate for all cash amounts in the game.

[cypher5]

I'm sorry if this isn't the proper topic, but I'm scratching my head over this:

I want to trigger an endgame event for hauling, for example, 5 loads of autos from a certain territory to another.

Is it possible with the functions we have available? The editor tutorials and files either aren't much help or I'm just not finding the correct function (they're not all that self-explanatory in some cases)

Thanks in advance.

[cypher5]

Nevermind, I think I got it. So many years after playing this as a kid, I suddendly start obsessing over the editor.

[jeffryfisher]

Territory triggers are tricky. IIRC, you check a per-territory box and (for just one) fill in the ID number of the destination. Then you find the function for hauling cargo to territory from territory and feed it the amount, cargo ID, and source territory ID. It has been so long that I forget the exact format, but I know that US History has one for hauling passengers from Washington DC to Galt's Gulch.

EDIT: Galt's Gulch (event 662 in my spread sheet) is too complex, but Seattle (716) looks like one worth emulating. It uses a function called

CompanyTerritoryLoadsHauledFromLifetimeToTerritory(#)

where you pass in the "from" terr-ID and it returns the number of loads. Combined with other conditions (player company, destination territory ID), you should get what you want.

[trar]

I stumbled across the Railroad Tycoon 2 untold strategies document again and noticed there was a wishlist section at the bottom much like this thread, with an additional list of things the author thought were not good ideas. Personally, I think most of them could be implemented in modified forms, with the option to turn them all off and play a purist game for those who want to:

• Tunnels would be a nice QOL feature, but it's definitely true that having hundred-mile long tunnels would be unrealistic. Tunnel lengths could be severely restricted to address this, with longer (but still reasonable) tunnel lengths possible in the 20th/21st centuries. Maximum tunnel lengths could be an editable scenario/mission property to reflect the different scales between maps.
• The max train length could be shortened in the early 19th century, and gradually lengthened over the course of time. Spitballing one possible implementation: 3 car maximum in the earliest years, 4 cars max before the 1850s, 5 cars max from then until the 1900s or 1910s, 6 cars max until the '40s or '50s, 7 or even 8 cars max in the late 20th century and on. It would certainly depict the increased hauling power of locomotives over time. However it might also interfere with the difficulty of "loads hauled" goals for scenarios/campaign missions.
• Adding two engines on one train might add a little complexity, but I think it could be a viable option once electric locos are established and beefier diesels come out in the mid 20th century (the option would not be available for steam locos). It would increase speed a bit and increase traction a lot, making steep grades less of a problem, but it would take up a train slot meaning you'd be sacrificing a cargo car. The F3A+B is basically this but in the form of a single discrete locomotive, so perhaps the option could become available for subsequent diesel and electric engines.
• I fully agree that making the player carry empty cars back to their origin is a dumb idea, so I have no suggestions here. RT2 doesn't reach that level of granularity.

My own humble suggestions would be:

• Add freight/switching yards as station buildings to increase turnaround and overall efficiency. The whole station upgrade screen would probably need some QOL/overhaul work put into it for any hypothetical OpenRT2 though.
• UI and in-game menu graphics changing to reflect what era the player is in, eg. the stock market screen going digital in the '90s. The 19th century style still looks good but it's not exactly fitting for scenarios set in, say, the 1990s. This is an art project more than it is a development thing though, so YMMV. The game's bluegrass music while excellent has the same, er, issue, but I usually just listen to external music in those cases.

Edited 15 hours ago by trar