So as I said in the previous post, the Something that I am resolving to Get Done will be inspired by Railroad Tycoon. If you've never played that game, I will give a brief recap as many aspects of my game will be based on it. RT was a business simulation in which you built a railway across a map (various regions were playable, such as the UK, Europe, Eastern US etc.). To make money, you ran trains which picked up and delivered cargoes, such as mail and passengers between towns and cities, and materials and goods between industries and ports. It cost you money to build new track, stations and trains, and you had to pay maintenance on what you already had.

Playing against you were (up to three) computer-controlled opponents, theoretically doing the same thing as you (though one of the major annoyances of RT was that the AI followed very different rules than the player, joining cities to cities with straight-line track and obviously operating some kind of statistical simulation of profit rather than actual trains and cargoes). You couldn't cross an opponent's track with your own, so it was pretty easy to get boxed in by enemies, with the only way to expand being to initiate a "rate war" by running a track into an opponent's station. There were also various financial machinations where you could buy and sell stock in all the railroads to attempt to get a controlling interest and make more money.

As the game progressed, newer locomotives would be introduced - for instance, in the UK scenario starting in 1830, you start with only the rather low powered Planet class engine, which can barely pull one wagon, and as time goes on get newer and better steam engines which can pull heavier loads and do so faster, and eventually diesel and electric locomotives which can pull large trains at high speed. The more cargo you deliver and the faster you deliver it, the more money you earn, so upgrading the engines is a must.

One slightly odd aspect of the game is that the economic simulation runs at a different rate than the train simulation. Thus though you see trains moving from city to city pulling their loads, they might take a year or more of game time to make a single trip (with a year corresponding to about 10 minutes of real time). The official explanation of this is that a single day of train operations is expanded to a two-year fiscal period, with each day representing the average performance of the train over the whole period. This is a bit hard to graps at first, but actually works quite well, giving you a feel for the movement and efficiency of the trains, but allowing time to progress fast enough that building new tracks and introducing new engines makes sense. It's a scheme that I will probably be following with my game.

So that was Railroad Tycoon, but as I said before although my game will be inspired by it, I don't intend to make a slavish copy of it. I want the game to be more like a virtual train set - you will control trains individually, for instance (though a certain amount of automation with signals and an "automatic driver" will be possible), unlike RT where trains moved from station to station without human intervention. Another major difference will be the much closer scale - stations won't be a single-tile object, but spread over a number of tiles, with platforms and buildings that can be placed next to the track. Wagons won't magically appear when needed (as in RT), but will need to be built and stored at sidings and shunted to the right locations. This will make my game a rather more micro-managed sim than RT, but hopefully by good design can be kept fun. More details of these aspects in later posts, plus how things will work as a multiplayer game, but for the moment I want to talk about the graphics.

Railroad Tycoon was a strictly 2D, top-down experience, and looks rather dated even compared to many BYOND games nowadays. The series didn't end there though - RT2 introduced isometric graphics, and RT3 was a full-3D environment with a free camera. I'd like to upgrade the graphics somewhat over RT's top-down look, and isometric is the obvious way to go. But there are complications as I'll explain.

Most "isometric" game don't use a true isometric projection, instead opting for a so-called 1:2 isometric which looks better when applied to pixel art. Technically, a cube drawn in true isometric would have it's top and bottom edges at 30° to the horizontal, but in 1:2 isometric they are instead at 26.6° (= atan(0.5)). In BYOND, though, even pseudo-isometric is tricky to do. We are stuck with a uniform 2D grid which imposes a lot of work on a programmer trying to adapt it to the non-uniform vertical scale of isometric projection. Instead, I'm going for a compromise, called military projection, where the cube's edges are 45° to the horizontal. Although this looks a little distorted, it emphasises a top-down view over the side view, and there is no need to fight the standard BYOND grid at every stage. Another benefit of the near-top-down view is that fewer objects will overlap those behind them - always a problem in isometric systems, since you are looking more to the side. The few remaining cases (e.g. tall buildings or structures) can be handled by careful use of the object layers.

More details, and perhaps some placeholder art to show the "look" of the game, in the next update. So far the game doesn't have a finalized name - for a while, I was using Railway Tycoon, currently I'm thinking Age of Steam, though that's also a misnomer since I fully intend to cover diesel and electric locomotives as well. Perhaps a name will suggest itself as the game progresses.