Around the map transport/new travel method

[MrJoshuaBids]

Few of my friends and I were just screwin about while working on a Metro project on a custom world, one asks “If they threw in the potential of adding another vehicle, what would you want it to be?” So we all gave a few suggestions each till someone mentioned a Locomotive on full tracks that traverses the length of the map, or maybe around the edges with it occasionally veering onto another to travel next to a city or through a mountain into another biome. You’d be able to build it from scratch(the train itself) while the tracks would already exist but in a basic state(wood), making them into metal would let the train travel quicker on them and deteriorate much slower. The overall travel time in a full loop would have to depend on whether it’s in Navez or put into the Custom World Generator. Just an idea, probably an awful one but it piqued us so I thought I’d share it. Obviously there’s a lot more to cover in details but I’m not gonna make a book about it. What’re y’all’s thoughts?

 

[4sheetzngeegles]

This is a totally personal observation on my part. Most of it is inspired by the plethora
of posts regarding vehicles, terrain, dev responses, and me custom modding the terrain
to the Nth level just to see the limits and results. That being written this is what I would
foresee as possibilities.

Worst case Z, trains constantly lost to bedrock, plummeting through holes in the terrain, making
it a death train for all of the passengers.

Why; vehicle speed vs world update speed. The terrain would need retrofitting and leveling, to
accommodate the pathing; Teragon would be a perfect fit, because it could be configured to cut paths
through the terrain, keeping the vehicle acceptably level. Compound it with Network latency and failure,
and it would become a nightmare on rails. Not only for players but for the Devs. A modder may be able
to kinda swing it, Maybe. I would remove as much topological objects within a 180 meter diameter of the
track, and keep the area as flat and plain as possible, basically making it a plain train, to reduce rendering
load.

When/If it would get close to a city, Fps may or may not drop to single digits, especially if there
is a lot of storage slots added to the vehicle, and the players are constantly interacting with that.

There is a mod with a mobile transport; The Nomad Mod.
You can probably install it and through observation regarding the effects, use the premise as a template.
So do I think it is possible, yes anything is, will it take some personal work absolutely. But if you can get
it to function, I would try it.

 

[SabinSnake PS5#1]

Few of my friends and I were just screwin about while working on a Metro project on a custom world, one asks “If they threw in the potential of adding another vehicle, what would you want it to be?” So we all gave a few suggestions each till someone mentioned a Locomotive on full tracks that traverses the length of the map, or maybe around the edges with it occasionally veering onto another to travel next to a city or through a mountain into another biome. You’d be able to build it from scratch(the train itself) while the tracks would already exist but in a basic state(wood), making them into metal would let the train travel quicker on them and deteriorate much slower. The overall travel time in a full loop would have to depend on whether it’s in Navez or put into the Custom World Generator. Just an idea, probably an awful one but it piqued us so I thought I’d share it. Obviously there’s a lot more to cover in details but I’m not gonna make a book about it. What’re y’all’s thoughts?

Yeah, that's one thing i've noticed that's missing, is train tracks and trains! I've never personally been to Arizona, but i'm pretty sure they have train service/transportation there, so you'd think TFP would of included it in the game.

 

[Riamus]

Trains are brought up every so often, and they would be nice to have. However, with the game being voxel and random, train tracks can be a challenge to make work well. The terrain can often go up and down sharply, making train tracks need extra smoothing around them compared to roads that don't have to be as smooth, and train tracks shouldn't be on terrain that is too steep. Yes, you can work around that, but it requires more work than roads and that makes it a question of whether it's worth dev time and map gen time.

The other issue is that roads are just individual blocks of asphalt placed together to make corners and straight areas. With train tracks, you need to use a variety of different track pieces in order to change how the tracks are placed. You'd need a mix of straight and corner pieces, both flat and at angles. That starts to get more complicated, again making it a question of whether it's worth the dev time and map gen time.

Besides, have you seen some of the roads in RWG? Imagine train tracks that are like some of those.

Train tracks in a town are much easier as tiles can be designed with them in mind so they don't have bad terrain to deal with. But most towns are too small for train tracks just within the town to make too much sense. That doesn't mean they couldn't still be there or that they are only placed in the largest towns.

So although they'd be nice to have, it just isn't very likely in vanilla beyond using a custom built map with custom track blocks.