Sid Meier's Railroads! Simple! » Site News

Break for finals.

Warll — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 18:36:23 +0000

Over the past few days I have forced myself away from SMRSimple besause my fianls are coming up very soon. This is still in affect so there should be no updates untill after the 25th.

Map template

Warll — Tue, 12 Jun 2001 04:30:16 +0000

Map: MAPFILENAME SAM

Mapper: MAPPERSNAME

New feature, ratings

Warll — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 09:05:18 +0000

Along with the change from 7z to zip I also spent some time adding a ratings system.

The system is a three star plus, one . My reqonmandation for voting style goes like this:

A vote of 3 stars means a above average quality map
2 stars would be an average map
Below average is 1 star

Rate a map based on how much fun you had on it, on how well the map’s terrain was planned and painted, but beyond everything let your opinion guide you.

I would please ask that you do not rate a map down because of crashes, slow downs, or other major problems. If a map has a bug please leave a comment notifying of such, I will try and determine the problem and fix it, or if I am unable to I will forward it to someone who can.

These ratings should help newcomers as well as long term players in finding fun, new and or simply over looked maps.

So please vote, and do so knowing that you are helping others enjoy the SMR experience.

New file format

Warll — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 03:08:39 +0000

I have changed the compression used for the maps. Instead of using .7z now everything is compressed in .zip. While I love 7-zip, the best file compression program in existence, the use of .7z and the need for a user to have 7-zip installed acted as a deterrent to new players. So this afternoon I took a few hours and converted everything to zip. These files will be larger than their 7z counterparts but they are still small as far as downloads go.

Because I did some things automated some of the links may lead to non-existent files. If you encounter a 404 page anywhere on this site please leave a comment on the page that it was linked from, I will be sure to fix it right away.

New image gallery section

Warll — Wed, 30 Dec 2009 06:53:05 +0000

I’ve been meaning to do it for months now, and I finally got my act together and added it, a image gallery.

As with most things about the site it features the work from the Sid Meier’s Railroads community. Prior to this images were scattered throughout the Hooked On Railroads forum, now they have a central location to take nest.

The section is currently populated with images from my Sid Meiers railraods screenshot collection of which only a few were captured by myself. Sadly I cannot remember who was responcible for most individual photo, but I do know that quite a few of them are courtesy of Lowwell, Jancsika and Rodea.

The next thing on my to do list is go through and tag the screenshots, add descriptions and authors, or at least the authors I remember. If you know of an image’s author please tell me in the comments, my intention is not to withhold credit, I am sadly simply not perfect.

Most importantly, if you have an image that you would like to add to the gallery just post it here in the comments, I’ll add it pronto.

New logo

Warll — Sat, 17 Apr 2010 06:16:11 +0000

So what do you guys think of it?

For those interested it features the font “Railway” produced by the awesome league of movable type.

New rating system and comment moderation

Warll — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 09:41:39 +0000

I have changed the ratings system to stop abuse. No longer is it possible to down-vote everything and then three star your own maps. There is now only one way for a map’s rating to go now, and that is up. This should preserve the usefulness of the ratings and greatly increase the work-load of anyone trying to stuff the ballot.

Unfortunately all the legitimate votes were also lost. In the future if anyone does try and stuff the ballot I can reset the ratings only for that post so hopefully this situation will be not repeated.

I have also turned on comment moderation, this means for normal users is that your post may have to wait a few hours before your comment appears on the site.

Most importantly I want to say sorry to those who originally got behind the ratings, thank you for trying to make this site better and SMR maps more approachable. I hope you will be willing to vote your favorite maps again.

Ok!

Warll — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 22:25:32 +0000

Alright everything seems to be comming along well. All the site needs is more maps, images and if possible a GUI SAM installer/manager. If anyone wants the apility to post maps and news jsut email me at warll (AT) warll.com

Ok.

Warll — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 16:34:37 +0000

Ok so the site is up. Nest thing to do is start filling the map wiki. Still would like to know how large it will be when completed. Maybe I should add ads to cover hosting costs. I should also make better banners, these were jsut resized images I had in my railroads image folder. If anyone has any good images jsut email me: Warll@warll.com

Whoops, Sorry Chrome and IE users

Warll — Sat, 24 Apr 2010 17:28:06 +0000

It turns out that there was a bug in the HTML for the Shanghai map that left a div open when it should have been closed. Firefox compensated for this and the website looked fine. Since I normally do not visit the site in chrome, and I never open IE, I totally missed the bug. Said browsers though decided not to pretend that everything was ok and caused the sidebar to fly to the bottom of the page.

I have since fixed the bug. Kudos to Google Chrome team for including a Developer tool similar to Firebug, it saved me a lot of time. I should note that this is not a browser bug.