IDEA - git repo of all RRT2 maps

[alexgophermix]

Hey guys,

 

I've been looking for new scenarios to play lately and had a few thoughts. As this game is now more than 10 years old, the community and resources are shrinking. This means that finding certain favourites that aren't saved locally and making sure you're getting the latest version can be difficult.  With this in mind - why not host all RRT2 maps in a single GitHub repo?

 

There are several advantages to this:

• freely availabe, and reliable storage via GitHub
• changelog can be maintained and the latest version is easy to find
• anyone can edit/maintain maps as needed
• on top of viewing repo history, you can also directly view text files and images on github thus retaining ability to find out more about maps without needing to download/play them
• easy to download all maps at once (if you're like me and hate downloading them one by one). We can go nuts with scripting later to allow quick copying of all maps from nested directories directly to your RRT2 install or bundling them into a handy zip etc. etc.

I have created a simple proof of concept GitHub repo that you can find here: https://github.com/oseparovic/RRT2Maps. In the future the maps can be sorted by region and broken into their own separate directories as well for storage of assets and readme's specific to the maps.

 

Just to state some obvious things:

• I am not making any money from this
• I am not claiming ownership of any of these scenarios

Let me know your thoughts on this!

[Gwizz]

I see no problem with having another RRT2 map site.  Over time there has been a number of RRT2 sites that maintained a list of down-loadable maps.  Almost all are now defunct.  Hawk has a collection of RRT2 maps at his site.

 

The terminal has been a dependable site for RRT2 maps for a long time, thanks to Gobalopper.  I have roughly 95% of all maps shared by others and I keep them as a private backup.  These are English language maps. 

 

I am willing to share my map collection with anyone.   I do need to pull all these maps together into a file that is easy to use and search.   Not all maps have read-me dialogs.  I normally made start up dialogs a part of each of my maps.

 

But, knowing more about each map before it is downloaded would be worthwhile.  

[Gobalopper]

Feel free to download the maps here and host elsewhere. Also, if we're missing maps I'm more than willing to have them hosted here.

[alexgophermix]

Thanks for the support!

 

I'll start pulling together all the maps into a structure something like this:

 

/Area/

/Area/Region/

/Area/Region/Map/<map>.MP2

/Area/Region/Map/<map>.txt

 

This way hopefully the maps will be fairly organized and we'll have room for readmes etc.

 

If you have any questions about git, or GitHub feel free to contact me. If anyone reading this would like to contribute, by all means let me know and I'll set you up as a contributor. Also if you see anything isn't working or missing please let me know!

 

Thanks again

[outofmage]

alex, storing all the maps in git is a very good idea. It can sort all the maps and make it easier to search. You can start to pull all the maps into this structure now, since I'm on a travel for a week, otherwise I am very glad to help. It would be perfect if you can make a tutorial here for how to use git, so that we can make this map library an open source.

[alexgophermix]

I'll add a short write up on how to use git to clone the repo etc. in the readme which can be expanded on later. Thanks for the suggestion :)

[alexgophermix]

I started adding a few of the maps from the Terminal map directory to the repo and I just realized two things:

• With the current structure there's no way to differentiate between RRT2 vanilla and TSC maps. Perhaps as an alternative we can do something like this?
  /RRT2/Area/
  /RRT2/Area/Region/
  /RRT2/Area//Region/Map/<map>.MP2
  /RRT2/Area/Region/Map/<map>.txt
  /TSC/Area/
  /TSC/Area/Region/
  /TSC/Area//Region/Map/<map>.MP2
  /TSC/Area/Region/Map/<map>.txt
• For users downloading maps especially those that grab all the maps at once, how would they differentiate between ones that came with the game and ones that they downloaded from the in-game menu? Could we add a prefix to all the map names (like MapPack - )? If so can this be done by simply renaming the files, or would you have to change the name in the editor (in which case it might be too much work)...

[outofmage]

Alex, people are using Platinum Version now, the map file format is not a problem, you can simply put them together.

Comparing maps available with players' own map collections is very hard, this feature can be added in the future if more users want to use this git repo. 

[alexgophermix]

Thanks for the tips. I'll keep everything together and, if we really need it, I can write scripts to pull just RRT2 map files for those still on the older game. As for prefixing map names, it does sound too difficult and probably unnecessary so don't worry about that.

 

I've added in most of the maps to the repo now. There are a few "Other" maps missing but most "Earth" maps have been added. Anyone is interested, feel free to have a look, poke around, download some maps and give feedback :)

[alexgophermix]

Hey guys, I've finished the scripts to zip up ALL map files located in the repo. If you don't want to install all the maps you can also just grab individual map files from the project and copy paste them into your Railroad Tycoon 2\Maps directory. Here are the links:

 

RRT2Maps Project Homepage

RRT2Maps Download Link

 

The download link can also be found on the right hand side of the project homepage under "Download Zip"

 

For explainations on how to use RRT2 maps, see one of these two writeups:

 

RRT2Maps thegameengine.org post

RRT2Maps GitHub readme

 

Enjoy :)

[jeffryfisher]

I visited GitHub, but I can't find a list of what maps it has (or anything about the directory structure you mentioned in this thread).

[alexgophermix]

Ah, I forgot to mention, the structure has been changed slightly. All maps are in the Maps directory now. So for example the Lion of Africa map is in:

/Maps/Earth/Africa/LionOfAfrica

 

As of yet, there's no published list of included maps, instead if you want to see all the maps in the project you'll have to download it and run the appropriate zip_all_maps script. This will compile all .MAP/.MP2 files into a zip file called all_maps.zip which you can then browse to check the full contents.

 

Also you can navigate the file structure directly on GitHub by clicking on the folders in the project itself.

 

Sorry for the confusion :)

 

If there's anything I can do to improve the writeup here or on GitHub let me know!