About two years ago I was an active member of the Sid Meier’s Railroads!(SMR) modding community. I have never been much of a programmer, or any programmer at that. My one attempt at a map failed hard. The thing is though we had no shortage of maps. What we did have though was a mess and an initiative lead by snoopy to get multiple maps working at a time.
This mess was, in my opinion a result of out first attempts at maps. You see when Sid Meier’s Railroads was first released there was no SDK, that didn’t stop us and as such Dwax was the first to made a map based soley off of reverse enginering the games files. Ok so saying that makes it sound harder then it was, after all the game used primarly XML and hightmaps. The fact that the game shared an engine with Sid Meier’s cizilization and Oblivion also meant that there were a number of tools we could use for the models.
The problems mostly came from the conflicts between the XMLs. This was only compounded by the fact that Sid Meier’s Railroads istelf before the patches was bugy and had a nasty tendency to crash to desktop(CTD). Making it very hard to tell apart a mappers error or “normal” gmae crash. With that said thanks to efforts to standardize our use of the XMLs we were able to make maps work together some of the time.
By this point we had a wealth of maps but many of them would not work together, a big stumbling block for new users. This lead me to suggest Sid Meier’s Railroads!: Intercontinental(SMRI) with the goal of making a all in one map pack. All a user would need to do was install and play. I am actually surprised that Sid Meier’s Railroads Intercontinental got off the ground, really all the thanks goes to Atani and Snoopy who put work into the installer and maps and managed to get ~20 maps together. In the end we got it out in time for Sid Meier’s Railroads one year anniversary.
After that we got one minor patch out before we left it all alone. At the time it was my intenention to make a sequel. That just never happened though and now its nearly two years later and I say for sure that it will not, well atleast not by my hands anyway.
I guess I should these two bits of knowledge, there are two known bugs from what I can rememeber.
- Sid Meier’s Railroads must have been luanched at least once before you go to install Sid Meier’s Railroads!: Intercontinental. It works this way because Sid Meier’s Railroads!: Intercontinental must be installed to the “my games” Sid Meier’s Railroads directory which is only created once the game is luanched. This might create some conflict for users with none defualt home directories. To get around this simply copy the Sid Meier’s Railroads “my games” folder to where it would be in a defualt configuration, you should then be able to copy and overwrite the folder back to where Sid Meier’s Railroads expects it.
- The Egypt map has a bug that will cause you to crash to desktop. If I remember right and I likely don’t, this has to do with the XML for one of the goods.
So in closing I will make these points. That Sid Meier’s Railroads!: Intercontinental is still the easyiest way for a new player to get new maps that I know of. As well if anyone is interested in reusing the Sid Meier’s Railroads!: Intercontinental name for anything Sid Meier’s Railroads related they are welcome to it, just contact me for the Moddb profile and Atani for the website. You must though be serious about this, I still do have an afinity for SMRI.
Anyway thank you everyone who has played Sid Meier’s Railroads!: Intercontinental, thank you all the mappers who made this possible and thank you Atani and Snoopy. I really love the time I spent with you all on the forums, maybe I’ll see you guys again.
I have plan to repair SMR-I that is need more my time, but I will do it as soon as if possible
Aside from a few spelling mistakes and giving Dwax the prize of first mapper, sounds good. Dwax only supplied the web address to Mr Scott’s first map. Earthworm produced the first map that he named 4 Rivers Conversion. d53642 produced the next maps, which is where I got in by getting them to work correctly.
All but a few of the maps are now working smoothly tho they are SAMs, or Stand Alone Maps. This was concieved by Tijer and I as the GLOBALS were getting to big for computers to handle. Part of the work was to take Goods, Industries and TrainCars and make them what they were supposed to look like.
We now have ~250 mods, with a posibility of 1450 if you include the 1200 possible combinations for the Container Cars. And we still have more in the making.
Atani has a project on the table, and if it works out, there will be another big change on the books. Cross your fingers.
Was it really Scott? I just remember Dwax making a very basic map. I should really ask him.
Hi WarII
Thanks for all your work with SMRI. I here you with the problems with the mods conflicts. That is why I stuck with the stock or tweaked industries. I wanted to get into the modded industries but I ran out of time & inspiration. Hope to see you around and best wishes on your new endeavors.
Ken Main
Hey Guys,
I still look back on everything we accomplished in SMR well before we had the map editor out there, the way the community fed off of each other and how 2K games broke the team apart and left a broken game with Sids name on it. There have been some great people from the early days like Snoop55, Warll, Scott, Cerebus, DaF-Daddy and many more than I enjoyed working with.
I still think SMR could have been a great game if the memory leaks were fixed. I still come back to the forums to see how the community is doing and if any great step has been made to make the game stable and try them when people post ways they got the game running. Hooked members did more customer support for the game than 2K ever did, we can only thank them for letting Firaxis get the project off the ground. And I can thank them for letting me meet and become friends with Dan Magaha (aka Gackbeard) and SpringheldJack a beta tester for the game I met after I was added to the team and have remained friends with to this day as well.
And when I seen an old face in the beta forums for another game, I thought surely there was only one guy that put l’s in his Warll name and shot him a message. What were the chances Warll and I would meet again in another building game.