I could not find any post about it: It is a transportation game in development featuring 3d graphics and procedural cities.
Their web page: http://www.train-fever.com
which has pretty impressive graphics and videos.
Some game desing decisions: http://www.train-fever.com/2013/08/major-game-design-decisions/
The reason why I post this:
Quote
There will be a 256 square kilometer terrain with a one meter resolution. Third, we decided to include more than 50 vehicles in the initial release.
256 square kilometer = 16km x 16 km. That is small. Try to fit one main real-world railroad line into such a map ???
It's been mentioned somewhere before I'm pretty sure. I remember looking at the game when they were wanting funding and not being convinced it was a good investment. Essentially - people pay for the game to be built, get a very limited return even if it does happen to be profitable, and if it is profitable the company keeps any extra profit, all intellectual property and can reuse this is any number of future games! In the mean time they all get paid very comfortable salaries regardless of any success.
The scale isn't actually as small as it looks. Their claimed tile scale of 1m is significantly smaller than Experimental (125m currently) or Standard (1km), and the smaller the tiles, the smaller the real world size of the map. However they are showing people changing from bus to rail and back to bus all in the space of 2 or 3 kilometers so they seem to be simulating much larger distances than the realistic look of the map would indicate.
That said the 3d graphics do look very good - if they could make maps as big as simutrans with that kind of detail that would be extremely impressive but I think computer power won't be capable of that for another 5 or 10 years yet...
They do credit Simutrans as being one of the inspirations behind their game though :)
Quote from: Dwachs on September 03, 2013, 06:57:41 AMThe reason why I post this:256 square kilometer = 16km x 16 km. That is small. Try to fit one main real-world railroad line into such a map ???
Until someone figures out how to extend the world limit. I doubt that they will keep the game with this limitation for much longer.
Quote from: kierongreen on September 03, 2013, 07:26:02 AMThey do credit Simutrans as being one of the inspirations behind their game though :)
For those who want to see: http://www.train-fever.com/game-info/genre-history/ (http://www.train-fever.com/game-info/genre-history/)
Quote from: Dwachs on September 03, 2013, 06:57:41 AM
The reason why I post this:256 square kilometer = 16km x 16 km. That is small. Try to fit one main real-world railroad line into such a map ???
Does Bristol Temple Meads to Severn Beach fit into that sort of size box? It'll all be lines of that sort of nature, won't it?
Hehe, I have invested in this game :) It is progressing very promising, but they focus on passenger transportation, in fact that was the only goal in the beginning. After we started to feed them with input they have been talking about to include some sort of freight as well.
The city growth is a procedural simulation/algorithm, quite advance. Would love to see Simutrans have something similar :)
Se demonstration video (http://www.cs.purdue.edu/cgvlab/papers/aliaga/eg2012-video.wmv) or read the paper (http://www.cs.purdue.edu/cgvlab/papers/aliaga/eg2012.pdf). Here is a slide (PDF) describing some of the city growth generation.
I think Basil Weber have a degree in urban development or something...
This is interesting: especially since what is planned in respect of cities (http://www.train-fever.com/game-info/simulation/) is intriguingly similar to what I am hoping to achieve with Experimental.
As to the 256x256km limit, however, I suspect that that is performance related: note that the web page (linked above) refers to each individual person being simulated. This is likely to require a great deal of memory, memory bandwidth and CPU power compared to Simutrans's more abstracted system of doing things, leading to a limitation in size.
This reminds me rather of Cities in Motion 2 in terms of style, actually, only possibly with a better city growth algorithm (CIM2's city growth is one of the weaker aspects of the game).
Those guys published an update: http://www.train-fever.com/2013/11/streets-bridges-and-lanes/
And also the scale: http://www.train-fever.com/2013/11/visual-updates-incoming/ 256 km (tile) with 1m resolution.
This seems to contain all the stuff requested often for Simutrans. Well, maybe participation will drop in 2014Q2 ...
256km is not long enough for long distance journeys...
As pointed out 256 square km is only 16km by 16km so even less than you think!
Ohh, it's 256 sq. km. not 256 km. sq? Well, that should be just about enough for an urban 'bus service...
No it is 256 kilometers, with object every 1 m (more like 256000*256000 at the limit).
Do they have 256k x 256k height points as well then? Surely not that would need 2^36 bytes for that alone...
Quote from: kierongreen on December 02, 2013, 11:47:09 PM
Do they have 256k x 256k height points as well then? Surely not that would need 2^36 bytes for that alone...
There are games with bigger maps, in terms of data size. And the amount of data in Google Earth must be mindboggling.
QuoteThe terrain in Train Fever is up to 256 square kilometers large
So it is 16x16 km (or 8x32 km, or 4x64 km). Certainly not 256x256 km... with a resolution of 1 m you would then need 32 billion tiles. If every tile is 1 byte you would need 32GB of memory. If it is something reasonable like 100 byte you would need 3,2 TB of memory. You can't run that on Windows, you can just store it on a modern computer...
QuoteThere are games with bigger maps, in terms of data size.
Bigger than 2^36? As Combuijs points out this is 32GB at least...
Quote from: kierongreen on December 03, 2013, 05:19:12 PM
Bigger than 2^36? As Combuijs points out this is 32GB at least...
FlightGear's global terrain data set is 13 GB compressed. I haven't tried unzipping it, but it could easily reach 32 GB when unzipped. This might include navigational aids, buildings, trees and roads, but not meteorological data and moving aircraft.
Flight simulators are a completely different beast to transport simulators though. In a flight sim while the terrain might be huge essentially only the area around the aeroplane actually needs to be in memory. Whereas in a transport simulator the entire map needs to be held in memory.
maybe it works by compressing/bundling untouched terrain into simpler 3D objects?
of course, I have little understanding of how coding can work, so that might not be it either.
Sort of like how a clean simutrans map can start off small, but once cities and vehicles are added, can swell to quite a hefty size.
Quote from: kierongreen on December 03, 2013, 06:00:24 PM
Flight simulators are a completely different beast to transport simulators though. In a flight sim while the terrain might be huge essentially only the area around the aeroplane actually needs to be in memory. Whereas in a transport simulator the entire map needs to be held in memory.
Not necessarily. As long as the (rail)roads are curves in 3D space, you only need these relatively simple curves in memory all the time in order to simulate the vehicles. Only the area currently in the viewport needs to be kept in memory, and at different levels of detail depending on distance. Google Earth actually has autogenerated 3D buildings (and even trees) with an accuracy close to one meter in some areas, like Paris. It clearly pages in regions with increasingly better level of detail the closer to the camera it is. The paging takes time, but it is also streamed over the Internet.
I think the have 256 x 256 tiles which have a coordinate resolution of 1024 ... Those tile are then mainly providing the grid and terrain type, while the stuff on these tiles seems to be more fine grained. Of course that is a guess, but an early demo showed a grid drawing.
QuoteCombining satellite, aerial and street level imagery, Google Maps has over 20 petabytes of data, which is equal to approximately 21 million gigabytes, or around 20,500 terabytes.
Crazy.
Train Fever looks very, very promising... I'm eager to have it in my hands. I only hope that it runs on Linux... But I guess that that is asking too much...
The original city engine they built on it was an academic project using OpenGL, as far as I remeber. Hence it could run on unix. But then you have to distribute a binary, which is a problem (as simutrans shows).
Some time ago they announced there will be a version for Windows, one for Mac and one for Linux.
I just bump the topic up to announce that the game has already been released (Windows version). The developers said that the Linux and Mac versions will be released this week. I haven't been able to play it yet for that reason.
Has anyone had a chance to play this in detail yet? I'd be interested to know what the game mechanics are like.
To be fair the passenger distribution seems wildly erratic. The development of the cities is quite lacklustre and much simplified (probably due to desire to conserve computing power) from what initial development suggested. Point work really bothers me; there can be no double crossovers or complex point-work, which seriously limits the ability to efficiently make flat junctions.
Looks pretty good though; quite a nice selection of modded trains and all at this point, too. Unfortunately, the performance is absolutely awful. Really bad; you get 1-5 fps for a well-developed map even with a high-spec computer; it's worse than the current exp. online game. Most of the performance appear to be due to the graphics.
Industries work really poorly. You cannot have trains wait to load very often, because they are extremely touchy about delivery time. Goods act essentially like passengers. They demand service frequencies of 8 minutes (real time) or less, and they will quite readily refuse to use your services if it is any slower, even if this means they don't produce anything. City traffic once automobiles with faster speed appear will clog up the inter-city roads totally (and eventually gridlock cities entirely). You cannot run the trams and buses in a city at this point, though the latest patch somewhat improved this issue (one work around is to demolish the inter-city roads, it will make the intra-city traffic manageable). The traffic lane use and so on is very poor and will often lead to one of two lanes on long sections of four-lane roads being totally stopped while the other has zero vehicles using it.
I'm also quite fond of playing TF lately. The model is very different from ST, though.
Construction work (fully 3D) can be a pain, but that is something quite usual in 3D transportation games. Maps are relatively small, but not ridiculously crowded.
But the heart of the game is surely the "20 minute" rule. A passenger or a piece of goods will refuse to travel (or even disappear from the vehicle) if that time limit is exceeded. As pointed out in the preceding post, although vehicles have the option of waiting till full loaded, that is practically useless, since that waiting time will add to the 20 minute rule: in places with low traffic, the waiting time would be a significant part of the overall time and in places with high traffic, that waiting time would be very small and thus, useless.
Goods transportation is generated by a demand model. Wherever there is a demand, you can serve products there and that will make cities grow and generate more demand. Eventually, factories increase production. You can borrow money for an interest too.
The goods chain is very shallow. There are only a few types of goods and raw materials (wood, oil, coal, iron ore) and all that chains end up in a generic "goods" merchandise. Since there are not contracts, goods can be carried to wherever places there is a demand. All goods merchandise is equivalent.
The game is also quite picky when changing lines or vehicles. You can have a well developed goods line that drops to zero simply because you have to replace a vehicle.
There is also that disturbance of vehicles getting old and need of replacement. Now they have made a patch that automatize that a bit, though.
In signals you have two kinds: one-way and two-way. PBS is used. There are also way points, but not automatic selection of platform.
Stations are passenger ones or goods ones, but not mixed. Regarding transportation means, the game has trains, lorries, buses, and trams, but lacks ships or planes.
Finally, all passengers are simulated as "agents". They have their destinations, etc. and you can follow them around the map.
I would recommend the game, specially since there aren't that much choices for transport simulation fans. It also has potential, but since the simulation is very detailed, performance can really be an issue.
Very interesting analysis - thank you.