GRAPHIC: Skanky Railways

[Skanky Burns]

Civ2 style is still going. Its hard work though.
Slowly getting there

[darthx86]

Originally posted by Skanky Burns
Civ2 style is still going. Its hard work though.
Slowly getting there

Hang in there!

[darthx86]

*bumpage*

[Eyn]

=/

NEVER SEEN SUCH HORRIBLE... THINGS !!!!
.
What is it ? a 70's hippies mod ?

[Skanky Burns]

Civ 2 Railways

They are at around 70% completion. Prolly will be up after Christmas, got family stuff for the next few days (funnily enough)

Eyn, thanks for the kind words
Really makes me want to keep modding...

[darthx86]

Re: Civ 2 Railways

Originally posted by Skanky Burns
They are at around 70% completion. Prolly will be up after Christmas, got family stuff for the next few days (funnily enough)

No sweat - we definitely understand. Have a good holiday!

[Eyn]

highway mod is very good...

... but the blue and pink ones... brrrrr =))))

[Plumbean]

Skanky hows it going cant wait to get it

[joseph1944]

Civ 2 railroads were the best. Thank you in advance.

[soufie77]

Hey Skanky!

I already tried implementing the 100% Civ2 style railroads, before coming up with the first version of the "tidier railroads" mod. My opinion was that the straight lines (especially the verticals) just don't cut it in terms of realism, unless you come up with something radically different. My guess is you might be doing something more than a cut-and-paste job like I did, so I'm looking forward to something innovative.

In the meantime, I'm currently working on an update to the tidier railroads mod which uses only 1 type of tile for railroads which join in all directions. The best solution it seems is to use a different style of railroad (eg. grey and only two pixels thick) drawn in high density, which do not necessarily meet the linkage points in each of the 4 corners and edges. I don't know but it might just work.

Any suggestions?

[Skanky Burns]

Heres how Civ 2 Style turned out



And the Civ 2 Style Thread is here.

To be honest, i thought it would turn out not looking too good, but for the most part they are excellent!!
They still look a bit funny going going through mountians/hills, but no more so than the standard railroads do, and thats Firaxis' fault, nothing a mod can change.

To begin with, i tried copy-n-pasting the crossed-rail tile, but that looked messy and the rails were very thick. So i manually edited the cross-rail tile, making the vertical and horizontal rail lines, making them nice and clean, 4 pixels thick. Then i cut and pasted that tile which made sure that all the rail tiles join properly. As just a bit of trivia, some of the rail tiles that came with Civ 3 are a pixel off, so dont join other rail tiles properly.

After that, it was just a matter of going through each and every rail tile, editing off the bits that werent needed. 256 tiles.
Of course, this was the stage took me weeks to complete.

I was thinking of doing SMAC-style railway tiles, but i was also thinking (as has been pointed out in this thread )that blue railways just dont fit in with the civ theme Soufie, something like your idea could just be the best way to implement railways in Civ 3.

The problem is that we need an at-a-glance ability to determine where our units can move on the map, which tiles are joined to which other tiles, but at the same time we need as little visable ugly railways as possible. They just detract from the aesthetics too much. I was thinking of perhaps railways with only the linkage points drawn, but the 'middle bits' of the tile left clear of railways. Will experiment some more, but i think this would be a bit confusing as well as unrealistic.

[Paddy]

Skanky, You're a bloody marvel

You've cleaned my screen, and provided what every rail administrator requires, order from chaos....

Hope you are having a great new year

[Stormhound]

Skanky,

Isn't one of the original Civ3 rail tiles a big circle? What if you based all the rail tiles on that one, adding little spokes as necessary to show the connections (reminds me of TinkerToys!). That would leave the middle part of each square clear, as well as providing a "bull's eye" to show where each space was (I pretty much have to play with the grid on, but it might work for others).

Just a thought; I'll let you ponder the aesthetics of it.

[soufie77]

uhh, no. Tried it, and it's too ugly.

[Skanky Burns]

Heres a quick test version with both circles included.
Soufie77 is right, its just too ugly. Thanks for the idea though, Stormhound