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Train Fever Releases September 4th, currently in Beta. Steam Store Link: http://store.steampowered.com/app/304730/ Official website: http://www.train-fever.com/ Interactive Guide that explains a poo poo ton of things: http://trainfeverguide.26miledrive.com/  What is Train Fever? It is a game about trains and transit, including trucks and buses. It offers a more realistic and larger scale approach than, say, Railroads!, presenting you with vast maps that you can plow through with trains and cars. This is like a more modern and spergy take on Transport Tycoon with a larger scale, better graphics and steam support. It also takes the sperginess to the point of building signals, train yards, switch tracks and other similar things and does not just let trains run on a shared track willy nilly. The game requires a fair deal of planning and structure to make sure everything flows fluently. The graphics are not grand, but rather on a Banished level, in other words a regular indie game. The official website says this. Shameless copy paste since this does sum it all up very nicely.: quote:It’s the year 1850, and there are great times ahead! Establish a transport company and be its manager. Build infrastructure such as railways and stations, purchase transportation vehicles and manage lines. Fulfill the people’s needs and watch cities evolve dynamically. Gameplay is shown in these videos from beta LPers. So is it good? Yeah man, you can be cautiously optimistic. The beta players like it and it does seem okayish. Besides that, teh developers are very open to suggestions, such as a cooperative multiplayer/shared company in the way of Anno, down the road. This is in English. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6-8ijI3RU9E     
Vahakyla fucked around with this message at 17:50 on Sep 7, 2014 |
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Aug 28, 2014 17:15
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Is there an end date or scenario mode to manage? Or do you keep building until you run out of money/get bored? It looks to be up my alley.
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Aug 28, 2014 17:19
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Harlock posted:Is there an end date or scenario mode to manage? Or do you keep building until you run out of money/get bored? Apparently Banished served as a bit of an inspiration according to a dev, where the game is ended by the player's whim. Or death.
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Aug 28, 2014 17:22
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Oh hey pre-ordered this 3 weeks ago. One more week to wait 
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Aug 28, 2014 17:46
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Is there freight transport or it's just passengers?
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Aug 28, 2014 18:25
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Judging by the screenshots and videos, there is freight.
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Aug 28, 2014 18:27
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HardDisk posted:Is there freight transport or it's just passengers? Yes. Industries grow slowly by themselves, but you can influence their growth with freight, too.
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Aug 28, 2014 18:30
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So when you say more spergy than TT, does that mean it is way more difficult?
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Aug 28, 2014 18:46
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I've been looking forward to this, it's like a simple TTD with a lot less features but also a lot less impenetrable sperg. I'm pretty sad it looks like they radically scaled back the procedural cities thing. In the "technology" preview video procedural buildings were being built in all sorts of odd shapes to fit every scrap of land, but in every beta video I've seen it's all square buildings fitting along curved roads with a lot of wasted space between. Doesn't look like a packed in european town, looks more like a US suburb. The amount of vehicles and industries and cargos is very limited too. Just passengers plus maybe 3 two-step production chains. But, this is a very small indie game and they've clearly kept it simple to actually be able to create a polished product, and boy does it look nice and polished! I just hope in the future mods or expansion packs will add more complexity to the economy. I also worry with such simple production chains and no real goals (just sandbox) once you quickly master how to set up basic lines and watch the trains go you'll get bored. But hopefully unlike banished they won't take 12 years to release any sort of modding tools. This is the sort of game I'd also be happy to buy DLC for. Vehicle packs, new industries. All they need to do is keep adding to the game following the features of TTD or other tycoon games. Coal mines, power plants, farms, just more stuff. Baronjutter fucked around with this message at 18:49 on Aug 28, 2014 |
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Aug 28, 2014 18:46
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ToastyPotato posted:So when you say more spergy than TT, does that mean it is way more difficult? I thing TT is more difficult per se, but this game is more about trains that are actual length and realistic grades of the track and setting up proper signaling. And train yards that turn trains, comparing that to the admittedly difficult nature of TT; but where the actual tracks and trains are fairly arcade and simple. Kinda in the same way that Arma 3 might be more realistic, but Cod 2 on hardcore is more difficult. Vahakyla fucked around with this message at 18:53 on Aug 28, 2014 |
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Aug 28, 2014 18:50
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Vahakyla posted:Yes. Industries grow slowly by themselves, but you can influence their growth with freight, too. I hope this game is fun, then. I really want a Transport Tycoon sequel that doesn't suck, even if there's only trains. Kilonum posted:Judging by the screenshots and videos, there is freight. Videos and screenshots are just a little too much conspicuous for me to check at work, and I couldn't find anything in text last time. Oh well.
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Aug 28, 2014 18:51
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Baronjutter posted:I've been looking forward to this, it's like a simple TTD with a lot less features but also a lot less impenetrable sperg. I'm pretty sad it looks like they radically scaled back the procedural cities thing. In the "technology" preview video procedural buildings were being built in all sorts of odd shapes to fit every scrap of land, but in every beta video I've seen it's all square buildings fitting along curved roads with a lot of wasted space between. Doesn't look like a packed in european town, looks more like a US suburb. With a game like SM Railroads! I found myself coming back time and time again. The game is not super deep and it has limited options, but building trains, like cities, has a special allure for me. I have put more than 500 hours into SM Railroads! with the only wish of it being more realistic. If this game lets me build trains that move stuff around, I am happy. I do wish it will actually offer a multiplayer for me and my wife down the road, since that is what shines in Railroads for me.
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Aug 28, 2014 18:58
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What I haven't seen any mention of is competitors, AI or humans. Even if the game is nominally sandbox there still needs to be something to measure yourself against, either dynamic goals of some sort, or other players in the market.
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Aug 28, 2014 19:03
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nielsm posted:What I haven't seen any mention of is competitors, AI or humans. Even if the game is nominally sandbox there still needs to be something to measure yourself against, either dynamic goals of some sort, or other players in the market. I agree. The big problem is that AI is usually super dumb, and makes up for it by cheating. If this is an indie game, I'm guessing that the AI is subpar as usual, or missing altogether.
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Aug 28, 2014 19:46
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Vahakyla posted:With a game like SM Railroads! I found myself coming back time and time again. The game is not super deep and it has limited options, but building trains, like cities, has a special allure for me. I have put more than 500 hours into SM Railroads! with the only wish of it being more realistic. If this game lets me build trains that move stuff around, I am happy. I loved RRT 3 but put maybe 2-3 hours into Railroads! before the lack of complexity eliminated all replay value  It was just all too easy to have perfectly balanced networks. Factory A always needs 1 of input C. City size X can always connect to this many cities of size Y. Everything was so perfectly quantified you'd often get into situations where things were so perfectly balanced any expansion would simply throw that balance off. In a good transport simulator the more you grow the more your entire network should change. RRT3 had such a better industry/freight system, and like Train Fever goods would move slowly on their own even without you.
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Aug 28, 2014 19:57
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Volmarias posted:I agree. The big problem is that AI is usually super dumb, and makes up for it by cheating. If this is an indie game, I'm guessing that the AI is subpar as usual, or missing altogether. I'll rather do without AI than with a poor one. I can't imagine it being any sort of simple to make a good AI for building in a free-form world like this.
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Aug 28, 2014 19:59
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This looks interesting. I'm a bit worried it might be too simple, though. One thing I really love about TTD is the ability to make train highways with like 5 tracks in both directions running across the map to accommodate the majority of your lines, and major stations with one or two input/output lines and signals to distribute incoming trains to an available track in the station. With no mixed-use stations and seemingly only one type of signal, it would seem like these kinds of intricate systems wouldn't be possible in this game. Please tell me I'm wrong.
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Aug 28, 2014 20:12
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Shame they didn't go for Simcity style 'toy town' graphics for this, that style always suits these games far more than the weird 'realistic' ones that are always attempted (CiM2 was absolutely hideous). Also as previously mentioned the procedural stuff seems to have change significantly since they started. There's some nice looking features like the routes stuff and autoseperation, which makes it far more accessible and less annoying that OpenTTD, but other than that it seems pretty basic.
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Aug 28, 2014 20:16
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I would imagine the cartoonish style of SimCity 2013 was pretty demanding.
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Aug 28, 2014 22:48
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Metrication posted:Shame they didn't go for Simcity style 'toy town' graphics for this, that style always suits these games far more than the weird 'realistic' ones that are always attempted (CiM2 was absolutely hideous). Also as previously mentioned the procedural stuff seems to have change significantly since they started. There's some nice looking features like the routes stuff and autoseperation, which makes it far more accessible and less annoying that OpenTTD, but other than that it seems pretty basic.  I was going to hold off to see if this was actually poo poo (because, I mean, the Steam store page has it as "casual", though that may be just from the user-submitted tags) because I'm not sure how much I'm going to get out of it. But the talk about switches and signals and that has me thinking about pulling the trigger on the pre-order. I'm not even like Baronjutter in that I can be pretty satisfied even if things aren't simulated to the degree of a Borges map *. The trailers look good but they seem to only cover the basic stuff, not any real mechanics of setting up routes and managing logistics.
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Aug 29, 2014 02:33
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I always liked that toon graphics set in TTD somehow.
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Aug 29, 2014 03:37
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I've gone against my better judgment and pre-ordered. I'll probably regret it, but if there's still something I'm willing to take a gamble on, it's an updated TTD clone. Thanks for the heads up btw, this game completely slipped under my radar.
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Aug 29, 2014 09:49
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Can you build spergy and insane track/signal stuff like you can in OpenTTD?
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Aug 29, 2014 09:52
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While the game seems to only have "one kind of signal", that's honestly all that should be required, if the dispatcher/route-setting code for trains is sufficiently smart. In real world railroad signalling, there's rarely more than one or two types of signals. You probably can build lots of odd switching systems and all. On the other hand it seems the options for building stations are really limited, and that might limit what you can do of interesting things.
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Aug 29, 2014 10:12
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nielsm posted:While the game seems to only have "one kind of signal", that's honestly all that should be required, if the dispatcher/route-setting code for trains is sufficiently smart. In real world railroad signalling, there's rarely more than one or two types of signals. You probably can build lots of odd switching systems and all. One thing I like doing in OpenTTD is building monster Ro-Ro stations with bay platforms and goods depots attached, hopefully something approaching this is eventually possible in Train Fever. (the less loving around with entry/exit and path signals, the better)
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Aug 29, 2014 10:22
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This sounds like it was made for me. I can't say I'll preorder but I'm looking forward to what this thread has to say about it when the game drops.
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Aug 29, 2014 10:58
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If the game can handle this sensibly, with all signals being represented by a single type (in real-life, a signal signal-head type is sufficient) then all should be fine for me. There's two potentially hard parts about this: First, trains need to "release" track after they pass it, so if a train enters track 2, then the moment it has crossed the switch point on the through-track, and the switch moved to straight position, the entry signal should be able to let a train into track 1 without the previous train being still or having crossed further signals. The second is that trains leaving via exit B always need to go via track 0, so if the next train is going to exit B the entry signal must not turn green until it can set a route to track 0 and track 0 is clear.
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Aug 29, 2014 11:06
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The let's play I linked in OP shows the player talking and making signals and using them to make segments of track where the choo choos release them after passing the next signal.
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Aug 29, 2014 11:10
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Are there waypoints?
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Aug 29, 2014 11:16
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Metrication posted:Are there waypoints? Not yet, at least that's what I've gathered from the video. They're supposedly working on them?
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Aug 29, 2014 11:17
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I'm still not convinced the single signal type will be able to act as a pre-signal as well. One of the major components of making huge train networks is the ability to tell a train coming from a single input line to wait at a signal before a split/junction, so that it will automatically be given the next available spot at the station. What I assume will happen if you try and act as if a block signal is a pre-signal is that the "pre-signal" will go green as long as there are no trains in the space between it and the signals at the branches ahead of it, meaning an incoming train will go to one of the branches (and wait for that specific branch to become available) which is exactly what you want to avoid.
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Aug 29, 2014 11:57
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Joda posted:I'm still not convinced the single signal type will be able to act as a pre-signal as well. One of the major components of making huge train networks is the ability to tell a train coming from a single input line to wait at a signal before a split/junction, so that it will automatically be given the next available spot at the station. What I assume will happen if you try and act as if a block signal is a pre-signal is that the "pre-signal" will go green as long as there are no trains in the space between it and the signals at the branches ahead of it, meaning an incoming train will go to one of the branches (and wait for that specific branch to become available) which is exactly what you want to avoid. If you re-read my explanation/diagram above, the TTDPatch/OpenTTD notion of a "pre-signal" should not be needed at all. The main thing to consider is that signals should not be at the entry to the individual tracks, but only at their exits. (In the real world, a pre-signal is not a signal you stop at, but one that helps the train driver manage braking towards a main signal further down the line, he can't see.) If you consider a signal that can turn green if it can make a valid, not-blocked route to any signal ahead of it, and ignores trains that may be in the same "block" but won't actually prevent the approaching train from reaching the next signal, then that lets you have a single signal control entry into a station with multiple tracks, selecting an appropriate and free track for each train as they arrive. The TTDPatch notion of pre-signals really needs to go away, it's stupid and wrong. Edit:  Whenever a train wants to pass a signal, it needs to reserve a path to a following signal (or to end of line). A path can only follow valid track and can not be occupied by other trains, or cross other reserved paths. When a path has been reserved, the signal can turn green and let the train pass. The switches on the track are changed to match the path. The train then drives along, and each time it leaves a track segment it releases the path for that segment. That means there is a path ahead of the train, but not behind it, and that the switches etc. leading in to the station are only occupied or reserved when a train is actively entering.
nielsm fucked around with this message at 12:16 on Aug 29, 2014 |
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Aug 29, 2014 12:11
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What struck me was the fact that upgrading stations is not a feature now. If you want a bigger one, tough tits.
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Aug 29, 2014 17:58
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This should be pretty interesting, but I will definitely be waiting for word of mouth.
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Aug 29, 2014 18:11
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I'm less about signals and more just interested in running lots of different trains around. I saw "over 50 vehicles" being advertised, but that includes trams and road traffic and things seem staggered over several time periods-- does that effectively mean there's like maybe only 3 different locomotives available at any given time, or what?
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Aug 29, 2014 18:22
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Train engines can have half a decade of service, so the fleet should be tens of engines any given moment, I'd wager.
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Aug 29, 2014 18:27
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Vahakyla posted:What struck me was the fact that upgrading stations is not a feature now. If you want a bigger one, tough tits. They've got a feature like in TTD where you can demolish a station and it leaves a little ghost icon. If you build a new station there within a few moments the system will treat it as an upgrade and all your existing trains will not need to be re-scheduled. Not as ideal as actual station upgrades, but it shows they've at least addressed the problem. The track building looks very awesome and fun. I've always been less interested in signal sperging and more interested in surveying good routes, making choices between curves, grades, and expensive tunnels/bridges. Looks like they have enough signal options to get things done. I've been trying to get into openTTD lately while I wait for this game to come out and holy poo poo the signal system. There's like 10 types of signals and a bunch of other options. I'm sure you can get some cool stuff done but it's as intuitive as minecraft redstone, something you have to watch a bunch of awful youtube tutorials to even begin to understand. I just hope they continue to develop the game after it's release via expansions or DLC or patches or what ever. It seems like such a good core to build more complexity upon.
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Aug 30, 2014 01:33
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Why pre-order? There is no gain, dudes.
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Aug 31, 2014 00:32
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Vahakyla posted:Why pre-order? 10% off 
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Aug 31, 2014 00:43
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Michaellaneous posted:10% off A dollar or two.
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Aug 31, 2014 00:44
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