Contour lines

[Yeol]

Does anyone know what the units are of the contour lines? Is there any indication of the absolute height? Maybe there is some indication in some config or ini file?

• This topic was modified 8 years, 8 months ago by Yeol.

[Stonelouse]

i’d like to know that as well.

[Neldot]

I didn’t measure them in the game, but if they’re standard topographic contour lines the thick ones are drawn every 100 meters of elevation, so the thin lines should be every 10 meters.

[Yeol]

That’s what I intuively thought aswell, but then when I start counting thick lines, I don’t find a place that is 450 meters in altitude. I like my Glacier Express to go somewhere, but I don’t see any goal that might satisfy the achievement.

[Stonelouse]

i never took real notice of those thicker lines, but thanks to neldots suggestion i just devised an experiment:

i just built a rail line to a station at a height of 490 m (so i thought, assuming that water level would be at 0 m), then i ran a train up there. first i thought the achievement would unlock immediately after opening that line, but at first it did not unlock. however, as i ran my train up that mountain, suddenly the achievement was shown to be unlocked exactly 100 height metres before i thought it should happen.

so that offers two conclusions:

1. water level is at 100 m

2. the thick contour lines indeed mark 100 m and thus the thinner lines are spaced at 10 m intervals

we can also deduct from that, according to some rough calculations regarding height lines and track segment length, that the maximum gradient in train fever is about 7 to 7,5 percent and the medium gradient thus is 3,5 to 4 percent. that translates to roughly 1:13 and 1:27 gradients for those used to uk measureing.

 

the highest mountain peak on the hilly map that i used to test this is 650 m by the way, so you can definately have high ernough mountains yeol.

[Stonelouse]

please excuse the double posting, but i don’t want this to get lost in an edit:

i had a mistake in my calculation, now i presume the gradients to be around 4.5 % and 2.25 %.

 

here is how i came up with it:

we know that the contour lines are spaced at every 10 height metres. i then built a piece of track at the maximum inclination between two of these lines with the building cost set to 1 $ per metre. i of course bulldozed this piece of track and rebuild it in order to eradicate terraforming costs. it then costs 215-220 $ to build this piece of track, which should indicate its length. then i used pythagorean math to get the angle of the gradient, which turns out to be 2.6°. this then translates to around 4.5 % for the maximum gradient.

now i don’t know for sure whether there is still an error in there somewhere, but it seems that the trains definately can pull more (at a speed of well over 3 kph) weight than the pulling force figures suggest. it appears that the supplied pulling force might be the force that a locomotive can pull at around half its top speed. at least that about what they did when i tested it with the borsig,g3, ae 3/5 and the nohab.

[Yeol]

Thanks for the investigation and for sharing it with us. I’ll look for an oppotunity on my current map.

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