simonmd

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  • in reply to: Losing interest in this game #14412
    simonmd
    Participant

    Another tip to add to this is that if you build a line to serve an industry but find its still send a lot of stuff by road, delete a section of the road to force the industry to use your line. Its a bit of a cheat but it works!

    in reply to: RELEASED TO EARLY #14402
    simonmd
    Participant

    I voiced a similar point in the support forum – http://www.train-fever.com/forums/topic/ove-tf-but-paying-to-be-a-beta-tester/

    However, to be fair, I have also not seen the bugs you have mentioned. I find all the menus work fine with a scroll wheel on mine. What I do have a BIG problem with is that I can only use small maps! Medium or large simply are too much for my PC to cope with which leaves me with £200m in the bank and nowhere left to expand in the mid 1970s!! When I think I could be on a much larger map and be planning a huge high speed network to use the TGV on when it comes online in 1981, I’m left feeling very frustrated.

    This game has many minor bugs yes, sometimes crashes for no reason, sometimes freezes, somethings can be VERY annoying like the constant ‘collision’ warning when placing rails but the biggest and most unforgivable flaw is the devs were lazy and didn’t code the core game to use multithreading. Therefore, all of us with powerful muticore CPUs are left with a processor bottleneck as the game will only use ONE of the CPU’s cores, leaving the game unplayable once it gets to a reasonable size.

    I have no clue how easy something like this is to fix but one things for sure, if they don’t fix such a major flaw soon, this game will sink fast. That would be a shame because at it’s heart, is a great game.

    in reply to: trains age faster than game age?! #14399
    simonmd
    Participant

    Are you sure its not a wagon in that trainset that is 26 years old? I’ve noticed that sometimes it will take the age of the oldest item in the set as the age.

    in reply to: New to Train Fever, worth buying? #14364
    simonmd
    Participant

    Yes, a real timetable would be impossible due to the odd way ‘time’ is depicted in the game. An average route can take MONTHS to go from end to end! However, being able to set a waiting time would be a good idea. Also, anyone looking for real world layouts should get TS2015.

    Another thing I would like to be able to do is set each train as a ‘high or low’ priority. By that I mean, passenger trains should not have to give way to goods, branch lines should wait for a mainline express,. etc.

    in reply to: Performance Hotfix Mod #14361
    simonmd
    Participant

    Added the mod last night to a game I’d started to get issues with (late 1800’s, medium map, 4 lines) and only noticed a very small improvement, by 1910, the game was still pretty much unplayable. Granted a lot of the original buildings were still there so the smoke reduction wasn’t huge, i’ll have to try it from a fresh 1850 start. However, the lack of people did ruin the atmosphere totally and as I still got lag even in empty countryside so I can only assume this is more of a simulation based lag, not so much a graphical one. The fact that multithreading is not used I think is an important factor as an individual core on a modern CPU is often weaker on its own than that of an older single core processor. I think there is the big issue and something that needs to be addressed by the devs urgently.

    Could you Please release an updated mod that brings the people back? Even as just an ascetic mod, I have found the amount of smoke in the later stages of the game totally daft. No town/city in 2040 has dark smoke belching from its buildings!

    • This reply was modified 9 years, 3 months ago by simonmd.
    • This reply was modified 9 years, 3 months ago by simonmd.
    in reply to: New to Train Fever, worth buying? #14355
    simonmd
    Participant

    If I can offer some help / advise on the above,

    1. Yes you CAN have more than one raw material serve one goods producer, like oil to a refinery, wood to sawmill etc. I have a game saved right now that does exactly that with two oil wells serving a common refinery, I guess its all down to in game demand and other weird stuff behind the scenes.

    2. Signals are EASY once you understand the basics. Simply put, a signal’s JOB is to show whether the path ahead is clear or not. It will only indicate upto the next station or signal, this is worth remembering if you have a long stretch of double track, put extra signals both ways along the line so a train doesn’t wait for another many miles ahead to clear.

    3. People using trains. I can only assume you are making a line too long or something because I have ALWAYS found that in the long run, passenger traffic is by far the biggest cash generator. My only thoughts are this, choose towns that are being supplied by goods as well, a town with a dead economy will not need a passenger line!

    4. Roads on tracks is a pain sometimes but you can still delete the section of line, place the road, then re draw the line over it. Yeeeeess, it should work both ways but ho-hum, early days…..

    5. Auto renue. I’m not a fan of this idea, I like the fact the I make the  choice when to upgrade stock or vehicles. What is a pain is the current way of doing it, ie, you loose the goods they are carrying unless you wait the entire trip until they are empty. There should be a ‘return to depot AFTER dropping off goods/passenger’ option.

    in reply to: New to Train Fever, worth buying? #14353
    simonmd
    Participant

    Most of the above is something that can be worked around. Timetables for example, I’ve found a good layout with good spacing of signals means the trains end up running at a reasonable interval. However, the game is TERRIBLY bugged, the biggest problem is the performance issue. Once you get to grips with what this game is about and what it can do, even the most powerful machine will struggle to cope. I have an i7 CPU with 4GB of RAM and an ATI Radeon HD 6950 card which I built specifically as a gaming PC. It copes easily with high resource programs such as FarCry, Crysis, etc. as well as easily running MS Flight simulator and Train Simulator 2015 with all the settings on max. Train Fever though seems to have a major performance flaw right now, as soon as you get half way successful, it becomes a frustrating slideshow. Even when paused, it seems to have trouble, making fiddly things such as track laying and station placement VERY frustrating!

    You must bear in mind that this has been produced by a small ‘indi’ developer though on a tight budget and that the game itself is still relatively new so hopefully it can be fixed. I MEAN hopefully as well because at its core is a GREAT game, anyone who like simulation and / or railways will enjoy it a great deal, whether you buy it now or not depends on your budget right now. We are promised as patch in the new year and there are modders releasing new content almost daily.

    in reply to: Performance Hotfix Mod #14334
    simonmd
    Participant

    Well I’m going to give the above a go and report back. At the moment, I’m having all kinds of performance issues and it’s spoiling the game so anything is worth a try. My last scenario on a large map, had to be abandoned in 1910 due to the lag making it unplayable and my present game (medium map, 5 lines, around 10m in the bank at 1900) is starting to suffer as well. One thing I have noticed is that when lag or stuttering occurs, the hard drive is being read constantly and the lag frees up once the HD stops. This I can only assume is something to do with the program having to access a graphic file for rendering as the HD would have nothing to do with the CPU working on the Sim’ side of things.

    in reply to: Did the 20 min rule for cargo changed ? #14319
    simonmd
    Participant

    It’s not 20 min interval, it’s 20 min TOT Journey time. Therefore, if you had a train every 5 mins but the time taken from the agent’s start to their destination is more than 20 mins, it won’t run.

    in reply to: Performance Hotfix Mod #14317
    simonmd
    Participant

    Seconded, can we please have one with just no smoke? It’s strangely satisfying to see a train pull in and a flood of people exit the station, its what the game is all about after all.

    in reply to: Still no performance update? #14301
    simonmd
    Participant

    Watching this with interest and hoping that the above mod will indeed help. I too have a pretty powerful machine that runs things like Flight Simulator X, Train Simulator 2015 and big games like FarCry, Crisis, etc. Yet after the mid/late 20th century, stuttering and low frames to spoil it immensely. I recently got into the mid 21st century with tons of money to play with but gave up due to performance issues meaning it wasn’t playable anymore. Have now restarted back in the steam era and hope the above mod can help before I get to expand in the 20th century.

    in reply to: Is The TGV Ever Profitable? #14211
    simonmd
    Participant

    Old thread I know but yes, I’m making a FORTUNE with TGVs! I now have 4 running, 3 on a mainline serving 4 town and another on a connecting spur to 1 town. That particular one was a short version but I had to replace with a 120 seater due to overloading! I have made nearly 200m in around 20 years mainly from high speed.

    in reply to: General Suggestions #14208
    simonmd
    Participant

    Perfect, exactly how it should be. Now I think of it, another economic factor that would be great to add to the game would be tourism. You could then re invent an old branch line as a ‘historic line’ served with older stock that would attract visitors. No clue how difficult that would be to code into the game but being able to keep a steam line running as an attraction would be cool. Would be nice to keep ALL stock available to buy as well so this could be made easier.

    • This reply was modified 9 years, 3 months ago by simonmd.
    in reply to: Map question #14206
    simonmd
    Participant

    I think it should be like the amendment due to be made to the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy about the Earth, ie, changed from ‘Flat’ to ‘Mostly Flat’………

    in reply to: Losing interest in this game #14205
    simonmd
    Participant

     

     

    I have been playing this game since it was available and i am strugeling to gain a profit.

     

    I have been playing this for only a few days and am now in the mid 21st century with over $200m in the bank! However, the first few tries I was just like you, the point is, its a challenge and you have to be able to identify supply and demand. If it was simply Build line – Auto get money – Build more lines – Auto get tons of money……. it wouldn’t be much of a ‘game’ would it? You’d just basically have a virtual trainset.

    Here is my strategy and it seems to work really well. Start the game, click the bottom right icon that shows you the goods traffic, BUILD NOTHING, then click fast forward and wait at LEAST 1 year. then pause the game and have a good look around the landscape and you’ll see where goods and supplies are flowing well down country roads. Then, you have a good indication of the supply and demand chain and where to build a profitable line / truck / waggon route. This will get you a-started and give you a nice annual income. Then, the towns that are newly boosted by the extra goods your first line or two is bringing in should be given a passenger line to help bring in workers / shoppers to further aid growth. Pretty soon you’ll find that line is making loads of cash and you’ll be on your way.

    A minus is, that you can’t experiment, because there’s no ‘cheat mode’.

    Yes you can. The game saves every year anyway and you can of course save manually as well. So start building a new line after a save and if it turns out to be a mistake, quit, reload the last good save and you can try something else.

Viewing 15 posts - 211 through 225 (of 232 total)