New Concepts!
I have trains moving on my virtual model rail network now. I have railcars being exchanged and being loaded at industries. Seems good, right? It is!
But I ran into an issue. In my testing, I have the ability to add railcars to whatever company I see fit. It is like a cheat code. But there was a little mix up in the coding. I had a Bulk Railcar Add feature, which would add a group of a user defined number oif railcars under the chosen company's name, starting at a user defined numbering scheme, and counting up.
So I went and said okay, I want some hopper cars to carry some coal. Maybe 25 of them, and let's start numbering them at 33500?
So that made 33500 hopper cars, with the numbering starting at 25. It looks like I got some input variables switched around. Oh well, easy fix.
What wasn't quite as easy of a fix was the intense issues that I ran into when those 33500 railcars, all ending up in a single railyard, began being sorted at that railyard. The program bogged down the system and I eventually had to stop all processes and delete all railcars to fix it. So this displayed to me that there is obviously a limitation. Which is good to understand, especially early on.
33500 railcars is only a small fraction of the total real railcars in the North American system. There are well over a million railcars out there roaming the tracks in real life. So, if 33500 could bog down the scripting, and this was intended to be a representation of the real network, then I have to rethink how things are done.
Original Concept:
The main plan was to have a web page based multiplayer rail network, all hosted on one of my web servers, and able to be played interactively by no more than 100 or so people.
Possible Secondary Concept:
I was thinking last night that it could be possible to use the base framework, mostly from the industry and materials standpoint, and use that as a basis for a standalone version of the game where a single player could work on their own network, locally on their own computer. It would use the industries, materials, and processes that are defined, but their track and rail system would be stored and operated locally.
The original concept could still work in conjuction with that also, and since there will be limited space for multiplayer, it might be a premium feature.
I am thinking that this will all need to be hosted on my own box, as I think it will need the processing power of a full server, and not just a virtual space in a shared server. I do have a couple WAMP servers running from my little server farm, but the infrastructure was never built out to such an extent to really support such an operation. I do intend on setting up a LAMP server anyhow, in order to handle the open-elevation hosting as apparently that doesn't work well on WAMP. So we shall see. I do know I am likely going to be getting another static IP soon, and a fiber connection, so that will better facilitate hosting.
UPDATE:
I was able to move things over to my existing server without much hastle. There are still a few things to figure out, but for the most part things seem happy. Since my local server is WAMP based, it is a little different from the Linux system I was used to running on, so things like CRON jobs are a little different now. I am working on setting those up when time permits. The CRON jobs are important for the project as they are what handle the progression of time and movement of trains and materials.
For those interested, i'll link to the public information portion:
Global Material stats: http://dev.railops.us/public/publicstats.php
Global Map: http://dev.railops.us/public/publicmap.php
Currently I am just using HTTP and not HTTPS. So it will be all like *** WARNING THIS SITE ISNT SECURE *** but.... it's just a basic website. It's not like it will be asking for any payment info or phone numbers. I plan on getting HTTPS set up soon enough.