Chronic Logic

See http://www.chroniclogic.com/cgi-bin/ikonboard/topic.cgi?forum=3&topic=39" target="_blank">180 degree turnaround now! for another way to turn the train.

Klei, if you want turns using Pontifex 10.19.01, you're going to have to do it my way or come up with a better method. My method is going above and beyond what Pontifex was supposed to be able to do; it's the hallmark of a great construction game if these things are possible. (BB is similar - flying engines are fun!)

You can sit in your corner and say: that's not the way I want to do it. Fine with me. Don't. Wait for a game that does what you want (if there'll ever be one). You'll be losing out on some fun you could be having right now, with this game. I expect with some refinement of this technique, levels that require the train to move sideways will appear soon.

If you ever edited a level, you also know that train tracks are just textures you paste on. Deck is similar - it's just a surface. This game has no rails, physically speaking. You can make a junction ("Weiche", where the track forks) with deck pieces, but the train will move straight. You have to use these surface angles and your ingenuity to effect these turns. If you don't have ingenuity, you shouldn't be playing this game.

Falkon, I thought that the train collides softly with the border of the level (usually only 8 units wide) and that makes it turn back. Must investigate wider levels...

1) Kudos to kvinge for pointing out that a text display before the level exists (how could I have forgot about the decription? Probably because Chronic doesn't use it yet.). This is an easy update for the next Pfx version: add "tutorial" descriptions to some levels.

2) I suggested 1,2,3 for demonstrating the following:
1: you making a non-horizontal deck, simple reinforcing
2: using the riverbottom anchor to build a tower, and from that hanging a cable-stayed bridge
3: cable-stayed with off-plane mid-air anchors
What is missing is an arch design, with the "riverbank" anchors for the arch.

I would not change any of the existing levels (except the descriptions, of course) because that would make comparing scores a pain in the butt. A tutorial map pack might be the way to go.

What Pfx would need for a tutorial: a text message display before each level.
Why not write up an illustrated walkthrough through complex levels 1-3 with expensive bridges on easy, just to show techniques? If you did, I'd put it on the web.

I did some experiments with www.pontifex.mendelsohn.de/tslope1.pxl - the file contains 7 different up slopes. It runs very slowly on my machine, I would appreciate if someone would run other  tests. The cables at the bottom can be used to determine how much of the train got up the slope, just line them up so you know you're not looking diagonally. I need the cables to hold the deck because anchor-to-anchor building is not allowed - for any type of material. If do timing, provide your times compared to a ground run in the same level - it would be best if you changed only 1-2 deck pieces between the comparison runs because these changes can affect the sim speed.

My result so far:
A 1-car-train can only get the engine up a 3x3y slope on the first go before sliding back. A 10-car train gets the engine and 8 cars up on hard (6.5 cars on easy), and it is still accelerating when it is (my imagination) passing the 1-car-train! This means the 10-car-train has a stronger engine, which is the explanation why short trains are not faster.
The strongest engine would be a 10-car engine on "hard"; if you could separate it from its cars, it should go very fast ;-)

In original BB, getting rid of the cars makes the engine accelerate to infinity... or close :-)

Yeah, I can just imagine how awesome that would be, given net lag and all:
one second you're HAVing along, the other (update coming in) on the other side of the bridge... magic teleport for free! ;-)

Not a good idea - placing supports at track height would incur huge savings in connecting structure, and you want to make that cheaper to buy, too :-)
Placing a support higher up makes all cables attached to it longer; by this, it gets more expensive to do this anyway.

The word is "pin joints" :-)

AFAIK hinges are not usually used in building bridge trusses :-)
A pin joint (such as on a bicycle chain) allows swinging in one direction and offers resistance to the other 2. It takes force in 2 directions, and resists movement along the axis of the pin, but can't take great force in that direction. On brantancan (see www.bridgebuilder-game.com -> links) you can see pictures of pin joints.

Since BB is 2D, you can't try rotating a beam in any other plane than the monitor plane, and applying force in the 3rd direction is out of the question, too, so pin joints is what I call them, though in 2D you can't tell them from hinges :-)

The xperimental Pfx bench (send mail to mailto:pfxbench@mendelsohn.de">pfxbench@mendelsohn.de for info) has a measure (result #2, zooming around) that is hardly CPU-bound (checked running the same laptop with 900/700 Mhz, geforce2go). Result#1 (rotating bridge) and #3 (test run) scaled proportional to CPU speed in this case.

(Edited by mendel at 3:40 pm on Oct. 24, 2001)

beaujob, going from high detail to low replaces each tube with a line, as far as I can tell. If that isn't enough to reduce polygon count, I don't know what is.

But... a 16x8 level has (at least?) 256 triangles of ground texture.... those big levels have even more ... must investigate this ... email mailto:pfxbench@mendelsohn.de">pfxbench@mendelsohn.de if you want to help with the experimental pfx bench ....

I commited an eror in my previous post because the score I referred to did not relate to a TNT2. I only have TNT2 scores for a P233 and K6-2/350 at this time, and the bench that is "constant" with the geforce2go is closely CPU-bound on these TNT2 scores, at these machine levels. This affirms Entroper's guess, but I'd like to have the 800Mhz TNT2 score for a more accurate analysis.

Speaking of fast, 10.19.01 is about 10% faster than 10.01.01 on my machine - unless I turn on "wireframe", which slows it down again.
Btw, setting detail to "low" and turning off lighting only helps by 15%.
My System? (don't laugh) P233, TNT2/M64, ELSA driver based off 12.0 detonator

Teach your houseelves to use the computer correctly... :-)
Could it be malware at work, a trojan, a bad thing from the 'net? I'll go and test my houseelves; were you in edit mode or in test mode? On second thought, saving out files points to it being edit mode...

(Edited by mendel at 3:34 pm on Nov. 2, 2001)