Railroad Game

The release of SimCity 5 sparked my interest in a new Railroad Tycoon game. Although Electronic Arts seems to have failed to build a SimCity game that works like I want it to work, their failure was mostly in releasing a game that could then not be played….

Until the train game code is working well enough to play an actual game, I’m tempted to do no 3D work. I’ll need an interim user interface and so far, that has not been a problem. It has not been a problem because there has been no real…

I was experimenting last week with handling the coupler distance between train cars and found something interesting. In the picture above, you can clearly see the issue related to how a train car sits on a curved piece of track. The issue is that the linear distance between…

Taking on a big project alone is tricky. I can spend an hour or two per night working on the train game and it takes me a week to make any real progress. I also have spent a few weekend days working all day but that’s because I’m…

I thought that I’d write a little about a scheme I use to avoid constant path finding work in the train game. First, a status report. Coupling and decoupling are working. I had a problem with decoupling where the orientation of the “train” when a new string of…

What is the best way to detect that I have reached a waypoint and possible passed it? I currently manage the waypoints in a way that works well when the train stops at one. The train constantly adjusts it’s deceleration to make it stop at the right spot…

I managed to change the one global train object into a list. I had two trains running for a moment and it was cool. This led to all kinds of other headaches. The drawing code is crappy and needs to be more modular. There is also no good…

I was working last night on changing the waypoint activities that can be specified by the player. I’ll start saying player instead of user because it sounds more fun. I finished some work on the A.I of the trains. They can now detect when they are sitting on…

I was having trouble finding a path. Well, I was actually having trouble programming the path finding algorithm for the railroad game. I’ve never written something like this and what I threw together originally was just wrong. There are a few requirements that exist in this game that…