Tip of the day ideas (tips to be shown while loading a map)

[electricmonk2k]

One of the things that Train Fever is lacking is a series of “Did you know…” tips that are shown when a map is being loaded. These would come in handy, as many people have trouble trying to figure out the quirks. So I thought I’d create this thread so we can share our ideas for such tips. This would also be a good opportunity to mention the “20 minute rule” somewhere in-game.

Here are my suggestions:

• You can only deliver as much goods to a town as it demands.
• Passengers and goods will only make their journey if it takes 20 minutes or less of real-time to complete.
• The journey-time not only depends on how fast a service is, but also how long someone has to wait. It is therefore a good idea to keep the frequency of the services high to reduce waiting-times.
• Passengers or goods will disappear if there is a delay that causes the journey to be longer than 20 minutes, or if the source or destination building is demolished.
• Building a track close to another track double-tracks it (the bit between the two tracks tracks is filled in). You can build any number of parallel tracks this way.
• To build a level-crossing, you must build the rails on top of the road. You cannot build the rails over a segment-boundary in the road, and only one level-crossing per road-segment is allowed. However, double-track (or any number of joined parallel tracks) crossing a road is considered a single level-crossing.
• A bridge can only be built if it has sufficient height clearance over what it is trying to cross. Likewise, tunnels can only be built if they are deep enough.
• When building a road, press ‘M’ and ‘N’ to change the humpiness of the road. If the road is long enough, it will become a bridge or tunnel.
• To double-track a bridge or tunnel, drag the second track from near the start of a single-track bridge/tunnel all the way to the end.
• When building, you can force a track-segment to be straight by building a long track-segment and moving it until it snaps to a straight length of track (it helps if the camera is zoomed right in and tilted to the horizon in the direction of the start of the track).
• The altitude of station depends on the altitude of the small road segment coming out of the station. This is where you want to build your hill/depression to change the altitude of the station.
• When building a station, if it is not connected to anything, press ‘M’ and ‘N’ to rotate the station. Holding down ‘SHIFT’ while doing so will give finer control of the rotation.
• When building track or stations, holding down ‘SHIFT’ will disable all snapping except for the ability to build straight tracks.
• If you have a large segment of railway track, but only want to remove a small part, place a signal where you want to split the segment and then place another signal nearby. You have now split the segment. Likewise, you can do something similar with roads by building a junction where you want to split the road-segment.
• You can only have one bus-stop per road-segment. To get round this, split the segment into two.
• When building a new road-segment joined to an existing road-segment and starting from the existing road-segment, the position of the mouse relative to the purple circle can change the segment’s curvature.
• You can use the raise/lower terrain tools to create land-slopes steeper than the slopes to the side of the track you get when normally building track.
• Train-routes are automatically worked out, but if you want fine control over the exact path a train will take (eg. select the exact platform a train will use), make use of waypoints. Waypoints can be added to routes just like stations. As well as regular waypoints, signals can also be used as waypoints.
• Secondary industries have a hint at the bottom of their ‘details’ tab. This gives a hint as to how to make the industry more productive (eg. ship more goods, deliver more raw-materials).
• There are plenty of downloadable mods and enhancements, including new rolling-stock, buildings, decorations, maps, and even gameplay-enhancements. See http://www.train-fever.net

These tips could either be displayed when loading a map, or as a dialog that appears when a map has loaded. If the latter, there should be an option to not show the tip-dialog, but then if an update adds new tips, it should re-enable the tips (and display the first new tip when it does so). Perhaps there could also be a user-editable tips-file (which is separate from the game’s built-in tips-file, because this could be updated with a patch). This user-editable tips file could even be downloaded in case a third-party is maintaining a list of tips.

If you have any ideas of your own for such tips, please post them in a reply.

[Anonymous]

• Main road connections can only be bypassed with a new road of the same or better standard.
• To straighten roads, build junctions either end of the section to be straightened and connect them with a bypass. Delete the old road then reconnect the ends with a new straight or smoothly curved section. Delete the bypass and make good any earthworks.
• When replacing a road/rail crossing, build a temporary road bypass with a tunnel well below the level of the rail then delete the old road to clear the site. This will allow you to relay the track to remove any odd humps and dips where the rail crossed the road, before building the new crossing (over-bridge or underpass). Complete the job by demolishing the temporary road bypass and levelling any earthworks.
• There is no Undo, only the last saved version: Save versions frequently when creating a new route.

[electricmonk2k]

• When choosing a locomotive, as well as the maximum speed, also take into account how fast it can accelerate, and how it can handle steep uphill slopes.

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