Transarctica Remake / Blog: Recent posts

I put up a new version, 7a, because there were some issues with the previous:

• I accidentally left in the training mode with always visible roamers and improved starting train.
• I bumped up the supply and it occasionally causes an error on the market generation. I think I fixed it.
• The Viking Union trains spawn up faster and with slightly more force.
• I added new graphics
• Updated the sounds a bit. Now there is break sound, alarm sound and movement sounds that reflect the speed of the train.
• The blinking alarm light is working in case there is something nearby.... read more

The fix for the movement bug turned out to be much more time consuming than expected. At one point, I got really mad and created a new system instead of trying to patch it up with strings and tape. Now, it works as far as I can tell.

The Viking Union trains also utilize the new code which helped with their hidden movement and respawn. If you kill a VU train, you will receive loot and the VU train will respawn at a VU station some time later, with higher combat values. ... read more

For the last couple of months, the development slowed down quite a bit. I had to concentrate on other, very important tasks. Such is life. However, I still got some stuff done:

• Now you can receive loot after train combat.
• I added roamers, like mammoth herds and nomads. They roam the landscape freely.
• You can do mammoth hunt.
• Updated some graphics.
• Touched up the UI a little.
• Added coal mines. They work differently than in the original. You can obtain coordinate parts in the cities, and you have to find them on the map.
• You can get quest related news and/or chatter in cities.
• The multi language support started to work.
• You can switch the sound on and off.... read more

During the last two weeks, I concentrated on the Viking Union trains and the graphics improvements and made good progress on both.

• The VU trains are in the game now. Eight of them drive around the map and you can do some off screen combat with them. Currently, you suffer some damage but win all the time. This will change and loot will be introduced later on.
• The main map graphics were greatly improved all around. All the tiles were redrawn. The smoke is now generated by particle systems and give you clues about the direction of your train. ... read more

Changelogs:

Map

• Updated the map itself. I found that some hills were missing.
• The destroyed bridges look better.

Events

• You can rebuild destroyed bridges. The more slaves, mammoths, cranes and soldiers you have, the less rails you will need.
• The bridge monster can do real damage to the train. It eats meat, soldiers, slaves and mammoth and randomly damages your wagons. A Harpoon can keep it away. ... read more

Thanks to Gridranger, now I have admin rights. With that I could finally add all the recent updates, and there were many!

Current features:

• The complete original game map is in and traversable (save for the hidden areas). Switches and tunnels working. The map graphics are all updated. I will add the original graphics back as an option.

• Working engine controls. Speed, coal shoveling, pressure gauge etc. ... read more

Because of family reasons I was not able to progress in the last two weeks but the project is alive. Soon a new commit will come adding some functioning dashboard elements like the start/stop and the direction buttons to the current code base.

Against all appearances development not halted in the past three weeks.

I was working on an invisible frame widget that is an object halfway between a cocos node and a container like the div tag in HTML or the Frame object in TkInter. It took a lot of designing and testing to pick the best of the different conceptions. And all of thet for somthing that is invisible. :)

But the proof of the pudding is in the eating so I wanted to use the frame to contain something. Thats why I started to work on the clock widget. Of course to do that I had to draw the pieces of the clock first. With that done I assembled the clock widget and put it on the map scene. It was easy but I started to clean the code around it remembering the boy scout rule. http://programmer.97things.oreilly.com/wiki/index.php/The_Boy_Scout_Rule... read more

For milestone 2 functions left in draft stage after reaching milestone 1 were finished.

• Scarabaeus rejoined to the project and continued to work on the music
• TZoli, Ornicar and Oun Fouge made great progress exploring the resources for example save structure and role of different resource files
• Multilayer handling is upgraded [#18] at tha map and edge scrolling is introduced [#27]
• Diagonal rail handling was added and pathfinding is now node based [#19]
• Cities can reside on multiple tiles [#20]
• Event system was reordered [#21]
• The resized orignial tileset made by TZoli was updated with metadata [#22]
• Language handling [#25] was prepaired... read more

Ticket [#18] was done: [r19]

• Development work:
  • XML city format created.
  • Loader for city format added. Cities now could be any rectangular shape.
  • City object added.
• Code cleaning:
  • Activemaplayer is merged with mapscrollmanager
• Fixes:
  • Config model was relocated to models.
  • Minor import fixes were introduced.

The hunt is still on.

The news of the week that Scarabeaus is back! :) We started to brainstorm about a team name.

[r18] is committed bringing the following changes:

• Tile based movement is replaced by node based movement. Node based one has lower impact on CPU and overpass-underpass animations are very easy to handle while they would need serious work in case of tile based movement.
• Movement on screen are now calculated from train speed, ingame time, game speed and tile width in kilometres.
• Additional config parameters added for speed calculation.
• Target node added player's train class.
• Maps are updated with node informations.
• Town event detection is simplified.
• Fixed the exception caused by clicking outside maps those are smaller than the screen.... read more

Scrolling have been implemented [#27] and tile size is corrected on the [Map] page.

Tzoli progressed with the game save exploring.

The hunt for the "mastermind" behind the the viking trains is still on. Currently multiple explanations are considered:

• an AI, that is not too comlplicated but covers a few cases
• quadrants that are monitored and visited if required
• predefinied patrol ways
• pathfinding that may be simplified to save resources and may executes random pathfindig methods if can not find the way. Node placement is another thing to find out if pathfinding is the case:
  • every tile is node
  • every switch is a node
  • nodes was be placed and se manually

The day before yesterday TZoli and me started to track Viking train movements. It seems more complex then we tought. TZoli posted about it to the forums so any fan of the game could help us with his or her observations: http://forums.sunlightsystems.de/viewtopic.php?f=20&t=635 So, let's hunt them!

Yesterday we successfully measured how much distance (km) a pixel and a tile represents. See [Map] for details.

Milestone 1

• It was reached on the 3rd of December 2015.
• For details, check out [Feature list]

What happened since

• TZoli continued to explore the [Original save structure].
• TZoli and Oun Fouge managed to extract new informations about the original file contents.
• Event system was reorganized. [#21]
• Multilayer map handling [#18] was added so the TZoli created original tile based map can be loaded. It could be found in our repository currenty, however, we have no intentions to use it. We will create our own map.