Train Speed

[James]

Is there any way of having the trains move at a roughly realistic speed? Even when you're using the early locomotives which are supposed to have a maximum speed of about 15mph, they fly around as if you've got the game in fast-forward. It's like watching a Benny Hill film.

As far as I can see I have the game speed on the slowest available setting (I can only find two speed settings - indicated by > or >> on the button at the top of the screen) but I may be missing something.

Thank you in advance for your help.

[James]

Sorry to bump my own post but if anyone knows the answer (even if the answer is ‘it’s impossible’!) I’d be grateful - just so I know I’m not missing something obvious. Thanks in advance.

[Maehlice]

And here I am thinking they love too slow. At least relative to the track lengths.

A train traveling 30 mph takes a week to go 200 miles.?.

[James]

A game of this kind will always work to a scale. Otherwise to play for 70 years in game time would take 70 years of your actual life, even if you played 24/7!

A train making a journey represents the operation of that route over a much longer period.

Given that that’s going to be the case regardless, it seems sensible for the visible movement of the trains on the map to look vaguely realistic, with scaling set up appropriately so that time still passes quickly enough for the player to make progress.

I’ve partially discovered the answer to my own question. I had the option for speed to vary depending on the level of zoom switched off, as it’s not something I want to happen. However, it appears when you do that, it runs the game at the speed it would run if you’re fully zoomed out, all the time (I’d assumed it did the opposite). Now when I zoom all the way in, the trains run at a reasonably sensible looking speed. Unfortunately when I zoom out it reverts back to them moving unrealistically fast, so only a partial solution.

[mart95777]

there is an option to turn off zoom changing game speed, in "Controls" - "game speed depending on zoom"

my grasshopper loco goes to like 28 km/h (17 mph), so it looks ok, but what they did to shay loco is ridiculous, I hope this will be modified to that shay is hauling uphill with steady speed, but is low on max speed.

[James]

Originally posted by mart95777:

there is an option to turn off zoom changing game speed, in "Controls" - "game speed depending on zoom"

my grasshopper loco goes to like 28 km/h (17 mph), so it looks ok, but what they did to shay loco is ridiculous, I hope this will be modified to that shay is hauling uphill with steady speed, but is low on max speed.

Thanks Mart. I tried turning it off but everything went at a crazy speed.

[mart95777]

lower game speed is ok, one day is like 10 seconds maybe. acceptable. I also enabled "automatic pauze" - always, so that watching reports and graphs do not make events escape me

[Patches]

Originally posted by James:

Is there any way of having the trains move at a roughly realistic speed? Even when you're using the early locomotives which are supposed to have a maximum speed of about 15mph, they fly around as if you've got the game in fast-forward. It's like watching a Benny Hill film.

As far as I can see I have the game speed on the slowest available setting (I can only find two speed settings - indicated by > or >> on the button at the top of the screen) but I may be missing something.

Thank you in advance for your help.

James, I said the same thing when the game first came out. That was the fastest 15mph I've ever seen. It could be the beans.

The good news is when you get the faster trains, they look closer to what you would expext.

enjoy
g

[peeka]

If you zoom out and the game speed increases, I assume the calendar date change increases too.

[Obstinate]

Realistic speeds are a thing that you might think you want until you realize it takes fast modern trains more than an hour to cross the distance between New York and DC.

[James]

But the map’s not to scale size, so that’s not going to happen in the game. The point is that the train should look realistic moving through the landscape. There’s no point in having everything speeding around looking like a film on fast-forward, because everything in the game is scaled anyway (as with any game of this kind), so simply set the scaling so that trains can appear to be moving at a realistic speed. Other games of this kind manage it.

[Tsubame ⭐]

Games of this type always have scaling issues.

No one wants to see vehicles taking literally a day or more to run between NYC and Chicago, for example, and take a full year in real life to complete a revenue year.

As for movement vs. scenary, it looks decent enough for me.

In fact, there are more complaints of the game being overall too slow.

[Frost]

As another poster mentioned: The only option and thing you can do to get the slowest possible:

"options -> controls -> GAME Speed Depending On Zoom" turn it ON.

What this does is when you zoom in near the trains, the GAME slows down to about half speed, which means the trains and the clock are going at half speed.

If that option is OFF, then it plays at normal speed when zoomed in and the trains, I agree, look too fast and make it seem silly.

[chaney]

For some context, from my RE guide, Scaling section:

There are a lot of questions about how big, how long, time, speed, etc. in the game. Some players are bothered by unrealistic or strange looking features and numerical values.

For a game like this, it is necessary to use MULTIPLE SCALES at the same time. This means that not everything can be "proper." The reasons are a mix of the look of things, practical play times, narrative intent, game balance, playability, etc.

The most obvious scale is time. For a pure simulation, you want game time and player wall-clock time to be the same 1:1. For most other types of game, you really want the time in game to run much faster, as in this game. Suppose one second of real time represents a day in-game. That's a scaling of 86,400:1. The scale will depend on how long the narrative/story time should take in-game, and how long in real time the game should take to play.

An example of mixed scales is the train/map scale. Suppose you build your on-map destinations "realistic" distances from each other. If you want a "large" map with something like a dozen cities and an interesting economy, you might end up with destinations something like hundreds of miles apart.

If you have two stations 200 miles apart, and trains at the same scale that are say 200 feet long, then the train will be 1/5280 as long as the stations are apart. Suppose you zoom to show 400 miles of map across your 17" monitor. The train is now about 0.0016" long. (A typical LCD monitor has about 100 pixels/inch, so the train is about 1/6 of a pixel.) You need to zoom in to a view of under 10 miles full screen for the train to be as big as a grain of sand. Most players would not find that to be an appealing visual experience, but would prefer something that looked more like a model train set. A reasonable design decision is to make the trains larger than map scale so they look nice and are visible to the player when looking at a decent section of map. Suppose you make the train that is realistically 400' long now something like 10 miles long on the map scale to get the desired look; it has been scaled up 132:1 compared with the map.

So now you have these beautiful giant trains moving around 132X larger than the landscape. You don't want the landscape to be ugly or look crazy at any zoom level, so you have to fudge it to make it look real when zoomed at train scale and still represent the desired topography at map scale.

If you make the train look like it is moving at the right speed to the player, you'll want it to move some number of car-lengths per wall clock second. Let's take our 10 mile long on the map train that "in reality" might be 400' long. A real steam train like that running along may take something like 14 seconds to pass. That would look nice, but now our in-game clock tells us that two WEEKS have passed ... but the train has only moved 400' at train scale or 140 miles at map scale ... neither of which are a realistic fit for two weeks running a train! We have run up against the problem of mixed scales making it impossible for everything to fit together at the same time and have "the math" work out.

For a game to be a good experience to play, the developer must compromise these scaling details, unless they are building a pure simulation where time and length scales are 1:1 across the board.

We want a pretty game that is balanced for challenge and real time, so we have to accept some of these compromises. Since we have a small number of trains taking a long time to do a single trip, you can think of each train as representing many trains operating at more realistic sizes and speeds. This ultimately has the effect of crowding the representative track, so that what might realistically be easily managed with little track, a few sidings, and small stations may require a lot more to be built in the game.

[James]

Originally posted by Tsubame ⭐:

Games of this type always have scaling issues.

No one wants to see vehicles taking literally a day or more to run between NYC and Chicago, for example, and take a full year in real life to complete a revenue year.

As for movement vs. scenary, it looks decent enough for me.

In fact, there are more complaints of the game being overall too slow.

Yes, I think what’s puzzling me is that there seems to be a perception that there’s some sort of conflict between having the game progress fast enough, but still having the trains appear to move at a realistic speed, there isn’t. You just scale the economy so that the trains make enough money per trip that you have the money to expand the network at a satisfying rate, even though they obviously won’t complete as many trips as they would in real life.

The visible speed of the train in the landscape and the speed the games progresses in terms of passage of time and speed of network development, are two completely separate things.

[James]

Originally posted by chaney:

For some context, from my RE guide, Scaling section:

There are a lot of questions about how big, how long, time, speed, etc. in the game. Some players are bothered by unrealistic or strange looking features and numerical values.

For a game like this, it is necessary to use MULTIPLE SCALES at the same time. This means that not everything can be "proper." The reasons are a mix of the look of things, practical play times, narrative intent, game balance, playability, etc.

The most obvious scale is time. For a pure simulation, you want game time and player wall-clock time to be the same 1:1. For most other types of game, you really want the time in game to run much faster, as in this game. Suppose one second of real time represents a day in-game. That's a scaling of 86,400:1. The scale will depend on how long the narrative/story time should take in-game, and how long in real time the game should take to play.

An example of mixed scales is the train/map scale. Suppose you build your on-map destinations "realistic" distances from each other. If you want a "large" map with something like a dozen cities and an interesting economy, you might end up with destinations something like hundreds of miles apart.

If you have two stations 200 miles apart, and trains at the same scale that are say 200 feet long, then the train will be 1/5280 as long as the stations are apart. Suppose you zoom to show 400 miles of map across your 17" monitor. The train is now about 0.0016" long. (A typical LCD monitor has about 100 pixels/inch, so the train is about 1/6 of a pixel.) You need to zoom in to a view of under 10 miles full screen for the train to be as big as a grain of sand. Most players would not find that to be an appealing visual experience, but would prefer something that looked more like a model train set. A reasonable design decision is to make the trains larger than map scale so they look nice and are visible to the player when looking at a decent section of map. Suppose you make the train that is realistically 400' long now something like 10 miles long on the map scale to get the desired look; it has been scaled up 132:1 compared with the map.

So now you have these beautiful giant trains moving around 132X larger than the landscape. You don't want the landscape to be ugly or look crazy at any zoom level, so you have to fudge it to make it look real when zoomed at train scale and still represent the desired topography at map scale.

If you make the train look like it is moving at the right speed to the player, you'll want it to move some number of car-lengths per wall clock second. Let's take our 10 mile long on the map train that "in reality" might be 400' long. A real steam train like that running along may take something like 14 seconds to pass. That would look nice, but now our in-game clock tells us that two WEEKS have passed ... but the train has only moved 400' at train scale or 140 miles at map scale ... neither of which are a realistic fit for two weeks running a train! We have run up against the problem of mixed scales making it impossible for everything to fit together at the same time and have "the math" work out.

For a game to be a good experience to play, the developer must compromise these scaling details, unless they are building a pure simulation where time and length scales are 1:1 across the board.

We want a pretty game that is balanced for challenge and real time, so we have to accept some of these compromises. Since we have a small number of trains taking a long time to do a single trip, you can think of each train as representing many trains operating at more realistic sizes and speeds. This ultimately has the effect of crowding the representative track, so that what might realistically be easily managed with little track, a few sidings, and small stations may require a lot more to be built in the game.

This is interesting because it suggests the developers understood the concept of what they needed to do, but then got it wrong and ended up with trains appearing to move much too quickly,