itch.io

If you've ever been frustrated by how aimless OpenTTD feels after you achieve effectively infinite money an hour or two into the game, then Distributrains was made for you. 

Distributrains is a game with a different incentive structure: First and foremost, there is no profit maximising. Instead, you are meant to help build a functioning society, while trying to achieve a victory condition of your choice. The victory is intended to be achieved in about two hours, so it can be a significantly faster game than OpenTTD (depending on how you play). Also, unlike in OpenTTD, it is possible to lose the game, e.g. by failing your contracts or running out of resources. In general, the difficulty is increased, especially in Challenge Mode.

In OpenTTD, most resources and supply chains don't really do anything other than make money (for instance, nothing is affected by whether the power plant is running or not), making them feel a bit hollow. In Distributrains, resources have real uses, and things are materially limited. For instance, combustion engines require fuel to run, rails are built using metal and lumber, landscaping requires explosives, etc. You can import these things, but this is expensive. Thus, you have to think about these things when deciding which industries to connect and how to use your resources.

The system of randomised cards and contracts push you towards focusing on different resources each run, while providing access to different tech, encouraging you to develop different strategies and playstyles. This is unlike in OpenTTD, where technology progresses linearly and newer is better.

The logistical challenges also have a different feel. Trains can only be built in the Train Core, forcing everything to be connected, trains tend to have more complex duties than in OpenTTD, often carrying several types of resources between multiple different stops, and there's a bit more micromanagement related to temporary contracts.

If none of that sounds interesting to you, you should probably not get this game.

The demo is up to date, yes. If you are trying to use a touch screen, graphics tablet, or some other absolute pointing device, the cursor will not work in fullscreen mode (they will work if you restart it in windowed mode). Otherwise I have no clue what's going on.

Thanks, this is very helpful. I will fix this in the next update.

Please check the logs and also send me the custom game preset you are using. Everything is in the user folder:

Open the game folder ("Distributrains"), then open the folder named "user", then open the folder with your user name.

The logs will be called out.txt, err.txt, and log.txt (not all will be present). Please send me their contents after causing a crash, before starting the game again, if possible. You can use a service like https://pastebin.com/ to upload the contents and post the link here.

The custom game presets are in the "conf" folder. If you haven't saved it to a preset slot, the file of interest will be "lastUsed.dat". You can use a service like https://wormhole.app/ to upload the file and post the link here.

Preparing the assets and code for localisation would require substantial development effort. It is not impossible but do not expect this any time soon.

You may use the music under the terms of the CC BY 4.0 license.

Mac will not be supported.

In theory 127 players, but I would not recommend more than about 5. Players can join or leave at any point during a game.

The multiplayer is cooperative, but there is no ingame chat so it is best played with friends using a separate communications tool. (There are also not many players so do expect to have to organise a group to get started.)

This is because you have enabled Electrified Rail (click the button with the electric symbol in the Railroad Construction window to disable it). I will add code to disable this button in the early tutorials.

Mainly, it just isn't generally true that we should always want trains to avoid longer paths to the same blocked track like in your idea. Given a layout like you have in your screenshot, it is entirely reasonable to *want* the second train to use the loop as a buffer if there is a blockage: If the second train is long, then taking the loop will free up track behind it, which might be important to avoiding jams in the rest of your network. I would not be content to add heuristics that take away opportunities like this.

I am, however, working on an option to modify how a train considers detours when it is stuck in traffic. I believe this will help for your playstyle.

I have never actually tried completing a run without signals, I would guess it's possible but probably difficult, heh

The signals are similar to path signals in OpenTTD, if you are familiar with that. (There is nothing like block signals.)

In Distributrains, trains work by reserving a path towards their destination. A train has to wait if the path it tries to reserve overlaps with the reservation of another train. If they see (the front side of) a signal while trying to reserve a path, then they stop reserving there. In essence, signals are used to shorten the path reservations to reduce conflicts.

There are two signal types: One-way Signals can never be passed from the back side, and Back-traversable Signals are ignored from the back side.

The rules are simple, and trains will never crash, but using signals optimally can be difficult. The game has a couple tutorials about this. Active path reservations are always drawn on the tracks, there is a pathfinding visualiser, and an option to draw signal direction arrows on the tracks.

Trains will consider longer detours the longer they are stuck. Sometimes the end result is they take a strictly worse loop because the alternative path they come up with ends up also being blocked, so they revert to the original path at some point. They do not remember the past or predict the future, all they want is to reserve path that will lead to the target. 

I can change the parameters to make them less eager to take longer detours, but I don't really want to place any hard limits as this will result in them failing to find actually viable alternative paths in many cases. It could perhaps be user configurable.

You can, however, remedy this in two ways. #1 is to fix your congestion issues so your trains do not get stuck and start thinking about nonsensical detours. #2 is to change your track layouts so that those nonsensical detours are just not available to them in the areas where congestion might occur.

I'm not sure if a locomotive use case tutorial belongs inside the game, but I'll look into it. In general, you want trains that are as cheap as possible to run, while having just enough traction and top speed to avoid causing congestion. To make a good choice you need to consider what the weight of the train will be, the speed of other trains on the line, and how often it has to climb a sloped tile.

When engines are combined, they only contribute to traction below their engine top speed, and the speed of the whole train is limited by the lowest max. safe speed. The typical use of combining engines is including a slower engine to help in climbing long slopes. A couple other uses would be including a weak/fast engine to increase the top speed on long flats, or combining electric and combustion engines for traversing partially electrified railways.

You are seeing high resolution icons because of your UI scale setting. If you want to see upscaled low resolution icons instead, you should delete the icons in the "hires" folder.

I checked using the current version of the itch.io app and I don't see any issues. To be clear, there is only one download, and it is marked as supporting both Windows and Linux:

It contains the following binaries:

• Distributrains32 - For 32-bit Linux (x86)
• Distributrains64 - For 64-bit Linux (amd64)
• Distributrains32.exe - For 32-bit Windows (x86)
• Distributrains64.exe - For 64-bit Windows (amd64)

If you are on a supported platform and the download doesn't show up then you might need to talk to itch.io support.

It does, but you need a power that would have been relatively powerful for the era. The computer I tested it on has an AMD Athlon 64 X2 CPU and an ATI Radeon HD 4670 GPU.

It will not come to android, sorry.

I have uploaded the files for you here https://oddwarg.com/Music/Distributrains%20OST/

I will probably put it on bandcamp in the future

I added a MWh/cycle tooltip in the train build menu, and will continue working on improvements. But for now I encourage you to see the added management effort as a cost of deforestation.

The tradeoff with the tree preservation setting is lower values are more productive but lead to deforestation. The deal is you can choose to manage the forest sustainably or thin it out and then move the camp.

Wind and sun are on the same scale in that a fully upgraded solar farm has about the same output as a fully upgraded wind farm if their weather numbers are the same. Without upgrades, a wind farm is about 50% better.

Rain is a different matter. Dams are meant to be used as batteries for other power plants. When only powered by rain, they can be good early game, but building only dams is generally a poor choice.

The KWh unit is calculated under the assumption that a cycle is a month. This means with 1 MWh you can run a 1 MW engine for roughly one real second. Maybe there's a better way to present this information, but it's just the amount of energy stored in the dam.

In map generation, wind is likely to be lower than sun and rain, while sun and rain are inversely correlated. You are meant to choose your power plants based on a several factors including the climate, your resources, the terrain, and what cards appear in the shop.

I will likely develop a demo version at some point, yes.

Thanks for the report! I don't know what possessed me to make this mistake, but it's fixed now.

It does not, sorry. The itch.io version comes with the game files and executables for 32- and 64-bit Windows and Linux. It has all the same features (except steam integration), will receive the same amount of support, and you can play multiplayer with Steam users.

The room that's bricked shut was meant to be the baths but I just couldn't find the right energy to do anything with it. Maybe one day.

There is no official species name and you should call it whatever you want. I've used the tag hippowoof at least once but that's just silly.

Anyway thank you for playing my game :)

You cannot open this door.

Incidentally the binary release works much better with the itch app on Linux.

If you want to, you can transfer your saves by copying the save directory from one game directory to the other. By default, the flatpak saves are at:

~/.var/app/com.oddwarg.SulphurNimbus/sulphurnimbus/save

and by default the itch app saves are at:

~/.config/itch/apps/sulphur-nimbus-hels-elixir/Sulphur Nimbus/save

where ~ is your home directory, as is normal. The directories starting with a period (.) are hidden in most file managers. You can likely toggle their visibility with the hotkey Ctrl-H.

If you downladed it without the itch app, then the save directory goes inside the game directory wherever you extracted the archive.

The work I did on the flatpak release is available here in case it is of interest to anyone

Your art is lovely, thank you :)

I am happy that you enjoyed my game.

https://oddwarg.itch.io/sulphur-nimbus-hels-elixir

I have raised the minimum price back to a nonzero value for the occasion, and will keep it that way for the duration of the bundle if the game is accepted. Please reject it if you feel this goes against the spirit of the project.

No problem, happy it helped

Hi,

The Discord window capture hook is known to cause a serious memory leak which will eventually crash the game regardless of settings. Unfortunately this is not something I can fix on my end, however you have a few options:

1. Change your Discord capture mode to Display Capture instead of Window Capture.

2. Use Discord for Google Chrome.

3. Use any other screen capture software, such as OBS.

Thanks for the report. I was not able to get this to happen normally, but it has nevertheless been fixed in the latest release.

I enjoyed this and found the art style inspiring.

I did have a problem where the game would not run because the RPG Maker 2003 RTP was not found. I had to set FullPackageFlag=1 in RPG_RT.ini to fix this.

The dGPU opt-in you are referring to is already implemented in the official release for 64-bit Windows.

Unfortunately, there is no way to enable this feature from pure Java code. To overcome this, the official release uses the Groan Autodeployer, which is an executable wrapper that is able to enable the switch in native code before starting the Java Virtual Machine. The Groan Autodeployer is available on my SourceForge profile if you want to set this up yourself. But, the documentation and configuration is not very user friendly and please understand I do not offer technical support for this.

There are other Java executable wrappers you can try which have better documentation. I have never seen one that has the dGPU opt-in, but they do play nicer with Nvidia Optimus (e.g. you can configure the executable separately in the Nvidia control panel, or if you have a somewhat recent driver you can right click on the executable to select the GPU).

Without creating a native executable I think the only way to use the dGPU is to set the java executable itself to use the dGPU in the Nvidia control panel. In my experience this will work if you select the correct version of the executable, but I understand it's not a very nice solution.

It's there for people who want an extra challenge. It contains some collectibles, but unless you are a completionist it is entirely optional and that is the idea.

This should be fixed in release 118, although I haven't had the opportunity to test it on an actual high-DPI Windows 10 computer.

Thanks, I was not aware anyone could join. Looks like I'm too late for them to add the game, but I asked them to add me to the collection of supporters.

It appears I am too late, but please add me to the list of supporters.

https://oddwarg.itch.io/sulphur-nimbus-hels-elixir

That's good, thanks for letting me know.

If you have the time, could you verify that the issue has not resurfaced in the latest version? (112)

Not exactly planning on making more games like this, but if the game ever gets something like a modding community maybe you'll get to see something like what you're imagining.

Me and ntfwc found a possible fix, if you could try this version http://oddwarg.com/Temp/jogl-all.jar and let me know the results that would be great.