The title of this post is misleading; it implies that I’m just starting work on this game. The reality is that I started work on this game over 20 years ago (around 2004) and I just took a bit of time off to wait for 3D rendering to get to a level needed for this game. I posted a lot about this game back in 2012, so this is not even close to development log #1.
Posts in the Railroad Game Category
I’m going to reiterate content from the earlier posts (linked above) since I’m starting on a new implementation of the game using Unity, and a new “start” to the devlog seems reasonable.
The video above shows one of my earliest attempts at the game. It shows a train with a locomotive and five cars moving around a small network. the locomotive is not at the “front” of the train. There are way points on the route that are set up so the train drops off cars as it moves to each new waypoint. Towards the end of the video, tre train picks up some of the cars it dropped off earlier.
And in regards to that 2013 post where I wrote this: “I may revisit this project but creating a real game of this complexity is well beyond the scope of a home project.”, yeah, that’s no longer my opinion. I may have been thinking about the 3D rendering of this game, and with modern tools, that’s no longer a serious issue.
At this time, I’ve started a Unity 3D project and I did some work on the terrain and some of the survey visualizations. A video of the surveying experiment is shown below:
The video shows “ghost” slices through and above the terrain to show where cuts and fills will go. This also shows my point tracking on the terrain where I place a large 3D arrow and a stamp of crosshairs directly onto the terrain. The terrain only ha a grid tecture at this point in time, since dirt, grass, rocks, etc., are not difficult to add later.
I’m going to cut this post short and add another later today or tomorrow with some more details about the terrain “slicing” rendering. The category search earlier in this post will include this post in the results, so getting to this devlog is as easy as using the category menu on my blog home page and selecting “Railroad Game”.