[Kropotkin]

This is by far the most amazing thing that I have ever seen in this site related to rail transportation man, awesome work!
 

I really hope that you manage to finish it man!

And sorry for the english, it's not my language!

[Doctor Soul]

This thread hasn't seen any activity from buddybud for a while now. I'm guessing he lost interest or real life is punishing him? Shame, I would love to see this much needed update to the appearance of the El-Rail get a release.

Very nice stuff indeed, Buddybud.

[j-dub]

Yeah, that was 2 years ago, nothing was said in 2011 at all. My guess is his life story conflicted, considering he was unable to disclose what happened to him. However with the amount of new network crossing the El-Rail has to go over today, I can't say I blame anyone for resigning. A lot can happen within two years times. I don't think will ever see anyone redo BB detail like that any time soon.

[buddybud]

My Sincere apologies for my absence
RL has been up and down over the years and frankly i find it shocking that 6 years has transpired since i first arrived at this wonderful site. I haven't done anything sc related in years except load it up on my new laptop a couple months back to see if it would work fine on a 64bit system.

I've been encouraged out of isolation by dedgren, which i appreciate kindly! As usual with my casual meanderings through these hallowed halls i find myself rather overwhelmed by the sheer magnitude of all the possibilities that this community has offered up and am also greatly humbled.

The good news is that most of the work i created for the elrail is backed up though in a horrible confusing mess. The last couple of updates where lost somehow.... i think. That being the buildings and the station. Though the pre-renders still exists...i think But all the track puzzle pieces, and textures still exist as far as i can tell.

I want to try to organize my backed up work which if successful will take a large amount of time. Recently i started learning java and started to mod for minecraft. But i quickly realized this was much more satisfying if i could somehow "get back into it". I can't say the number of times i've observed something in rl and thought.... "this would be awesome in sc4... I aught to try that".

Anyways as always the enthusiasm shown for an incomplete project that has gone nowhere in years is quite nice to see. I've got a lot to relearn and all kinds of new stuff to pick up, but who knows. I'm still surprised that the interest is still there for sc4...the BEST sandbox out there!

So in short i gotta see if i can wrap my head around this stuff again so can't commit to anything but winds seem favorable and  i am beckoned by those virtual waves.

Bud

[[Delta ²k5]]

Welcome back Buddy! Nice to see you are also still interested in SC4 even after years... and really nice to hear that you'll lead this project somehow to a release... I think, even if you've got only backups I really love those tracks... and SC4 leaks some nice, new, fresh el-rail models

[rooker1]

Welcome back BuddyBud, I am sooo happy you are back and I hope you'll be able to organize the El Rail stuff once again.

Robin

[dedgren]

Bud, you are way too kind.  I bet you would have found your way back over here on your own sooner or later.  SC4 seems to do that to people.

Great to see you back!


David

[JoeST]

It's great to see you back Bud, and I'm glad you still want to share your stuff with us

Thanks so much

Joe

[Rady]

Buddybud, you are among the most welcome returns of the year!!! I'm looking forward to all these marvellous el-rail pieces!

[banditp61]

YAY!!!!!!!!

[jmdude1]

2012 continues to be a great year!  as many others, its great to see buddybud popping in here again!

[buddybud]

Thanks everyone.
  I'm starting by finding and configuring all the tools and patches i need to get things going. Hopefully if that goes well i will try to organize the backups. I was close to a beta, but with that in mind it only covered the rushhour non NAMed version of sc4. So even with the existing work i'm not sure how useful it would be. Also if the station i designed in highdef, or the bridge, is not among the backups those would have to be redone which would take no less than a couple of weeks. In short if everything goes well, that is if the best case scenario plays out, we'd be looking at a month minimum to get back to where i was. Considering time restraints etc, i wouldn't expect much very quickly. But non the less your enthusiasm is a great help.

so
1. Installation and troubleshoot tools on new system...
2. organize backups and see if i'm missing anything...(pretty sure i'm not but not 100% sure)
3. get back in the swing of things so to speak 
4. somewhere in there i have to find out all the ins and outs of the last 2-3 yrs of others work and advancement of modding techniques and tools.
5. juggle this with r/l etc.

Those are all realistic goals but depending on the outcome of each will effect how quickly i can throw together any kind of release and i do fear the expectations will outpace any reality.

j-dub said
However with the amount of new network crossing the El-Rail has to go over today, I can't say I blame anyone for resigning

  Ya you're a 100% correct. It was a problem when i first started this and now doubt if i could ever catch up to all the potential NAM content. The good thing is that once the initial puzzle pieces are out they can easily be transformed for new networks(in most cases). Most is a matter of re-lotting t21 props. The big part is designing unique model pieces but the initial design should cover most further possibilities. The other thing is flipping and mirroring Puzzle pieces in some cases...

  But again that's a future problem since my last attempt didn't incorporate  NAM for the initial planned beta.(though going further back i did play with some NAM content) In short what i'm saying is the the vanilla puzzle pieces will serve as a template for NAM puzzle pieces. And as more pieces are completed less individual models have to be designed.

Anyways take care
Bud 

Edit

Update....

1. All the basic tools are in place... worked smoothly enough. 
2. My backup is more of a mess then i imagined! 
3. All textures, lots, dats, sc4models, and sc4desc are there up until my last update 
4. Missing the gmax files for the highrez content i did over the last bit ie the station and ramp. 

The good part is that the station was rendered as a modular unit so even though i lost the gmax models i can still use the rendered bits as they exist in the station pic on the last page. Without redoing anything in gmax i can make all kinds of different length stations with the existing pieces. I'm glad now i did it that way . Still a knuckle head move on my part.  Also the bridge exists in dat form so thats good. The ramp exists but is only half finished so that will have to be redone since the models are gone for that too and it only has the half completed building. Not so bad as i thought overall though.

So in short any additions to the station would need new models but i won't worry about that since i have the rendered bits for now. And besides that and the ramp, everything else seems to be intact as far as i can tell.

Now comes the hard part as it's still a complete mess and has to be sifted through etc. There's all kinds of junk and test bits etc floating around and i'm not to sure what a lot of the stuff is Now i just have to figure out how to use all the tools again to sort it all out.....

Bud

[Framly]

buddybud is back! Is that a dream?*please, don't wake me up* 

[Kitsune]

the fact those el-rail textures might see the light at the end of the tunnel is GREAT.

[j-dub]

OMG, your back in the flesh! In any event though, I am sure if you have a working prototype, people would be more then happy to appreciate your hard work, finally in game. NAM is always getting changed more and more, but the important thing is by you allowing that template, once this gets out, at least anyone else can do something with it.

[noahclem]

Really great to have you back buddybud!!  I wasn't yet active here when you last were but I'm certainly familiar with your excellent work and projects. I'll be watching closely to see how things continue and I hope you're enjoying your return to SC4!

[weixc812]

Yeah, it seems that we have more things to expect this year 

[io_bg]

Welcome back! You've certainly been missed (until now )! Good luck with organizing your backups!

[metarvo]

Welcome back, Bud!  We've just celebrated SC4's 9th birthday, and I'm pleased to see a big crowd for this momentous occasion.  It'll be nice to see what you have planned.

[buddybud]

Thanks again everyone!

So i combed the mangled backup and pulled the relevant files. I played around with what is there and kinda tried to familiarize myself with it again. The biggest problem is that i was doing so many things to so many pieces i'm really having trouble grasping it all again. But it''s coming back slowly.

As it stands I have the working beta minus the ramps i was working on. The only major issue i can see so far is the whole highrez texture dilemma. I can clearly see with the working model i had somehow cleaned up some textures but i'm unsure how i was doing it . Let me show you what i mean...



Hightest zoom looks great, zoom 5 is mediocre and other zooms i get mixed results. I Kinda think i know what i was doing to get the smooth textures rather then the choppy ones. Something to do with the s3dprop models but i've yet to really try to dig back into that.

Anyways aside from the above issue the other is compiling dats. As it stands, with most of the props etc already compiled theres like 100+ stray exemplar files and other models floating about in the plugin. I intended to seperate the texture files from the bulk of the plugin to allow people to choose between regular elrail textures or my highrez ones or someother custom ones if they exist... The one good thing is that combing through and compiling the dats should again help me to remember all the crap i was doing. Almost every aspect of the el has been altered and i'll need to really understand it all again before moving further.



Thats the cleaner of the two directories. The other has a lot of bips bops and derp to boot.

So in short compiling the dats and possibly fixing textures is all that needs to be done. Though this is a big job in it's self....more so since i kinda feel a bit lost with the whole thing.

Oh and and on i side note. Running sc4 on my notebook with hardware rendering is causing bleeding of props and models. This won't effect others but it's driving me crazy. I've found out how to adjust the .sgr files (but have yet to succeed) and other than that problem the game runs fine. But i've yet to be able to fix it. Running on software render works fine but i loose all my detailed shadows and stuff.....grrr  If anyone who understands how to properly edit the sgr file wants to pm me i would be very grateful.

Cheers