Overview
I wanted to share some of the work I've been doing recently to bring more options to play on narrow-gauge railways. I'm mostly playing OpenTTD for pure gameplay purposes, trying to work with very large maps and large industry sets such as AXIS or FIRS Steeltown. I usually play with the 2cc Trains in NML trainset, as I enjoy discovering trains from over the world rather than trying to recreate the British, North-American or Japan system extensively. Now the problem is that 2ccNML does not ship with narrow-gauge locomotives... Or rather, it does, but does not set the railtype correctly. This means that if you play with U&ReRMM2 or rail sets that actually support narrow-gauge tracks, the narrow-gauge locomotives don't appear there.
I'm aware that some region-specific sets support the U&ReRMM2 narrow-gauge tracks more directly, but none of them are really adequate for playing with 2ccNML, often because the balancing is really different (quite often other sets are much cheaper than 2ccNML because they handle purchase and running costs differently).
Since Transportman's code is public on GitHub, I forked it to start fixing the narrow-gauge engines to have the correct railtype, and I also made some tiny fixes (such as patching some South West African locomotive flags to be Namibia instead of Angola). I started adding some narrow-gauge wagons, using some of the unused resources from andythenorth's Iron Horse.
After playing a bit, it became apparent that some periods were seriously lacking locomotives, so I started drawing some to add to the set. Note that I'm not a pixel-artist, but I'm learning as I go and I'm relatively happy with the results following the overall style of the set. Notably, I added a couple of early locomotives from the 1830s so that early starts are supported (although they're really weak, so good luck making a profit and forget about climbing slopes; this is someone realistic since e.g. the Stourbridge Lion in the US was never really used as it was too heavy, and operations returned to horses for a while). In total there are 9 new locomotives, mostly early or lightweight ones to be used for branch lines or closed railways between two local industries.
The goal is basically to add sufficient engines so that a game can be played using only narrow-gauge tracks, which is lacking at some periods for now. I also want to add some more generations of wagons (maybe not 5 like 2ccNML, but perhaps 3, as some modern railways are still using narrow-gauge with pretty modern rolling stock so this should be reflected in the wagons as well). I made some palette swaps for trains that exist both in standard- and narrow-gauge versions (for instance the EMD SW1200, which appears here as the narrow-gauge Chilean version from the SQM mining company).
Roster
Here's the current roster, can you spot which ones are new?
Track gauge & Constructor
I also added metadata to the locomotives in the purchase text, so you can see which ones are running on what track gauge. I may add a parameter switch to disable some of these like regions switches in the original 2ccNML. I also added the name of the constructor cause why not?
- example.png (69.21 KiB) Viewed 3031 times
License
I need to sort out the permissions before publishing it to BaNaNaS, but since the original and my fork are both GPL it should be relatively easy. The repository of the fork can be found on GitHub.
Hope you like it and I'm happy to hear some ideas or suggestions!
