1 unstable release
0.1.0 | Jan 11, 2021 |
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#562 in Configuration
25KB
377 lines
rt3conf
The rt3conf program is an unofficial tool for configuring Railroad Tycoon 3. With it you can run the game at modern screen resolutions that are not possible to select in the settings. It can also be used to turn off settings that crash the game to the point where you cannot open the game to undo the setting.
Railroad Tycoon is trademarked by Take-Two Interactive Software, Inc., and this software is not affiliated with them in any way.
Usage
Open a terminal (cmd.exe on Windows) and navigate to where you want the
engine.cfg
file to be generated. Enter the following and press enter to get a
configuration file with resolution set to 800 x 600 and hardware texture and
lighting turned off:
C:\path-you-choose>rt3conf
Note that hardware texture and lighting is turned off by default because it can cause a crash on newer machines with Nvidia graphics cards.
The engine.cfg
file should then be copied to where Railroad Tycoon 3 stores
the configuration files, e.g.
C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\Railroad Tycoon 3\Data\Configuration
for Steam and
C:\Program Files (x86)\GOG Galaxy\Games\Railroad Tycoon 3\Data\Configuration
for GOG.
You can even generate a configuration file with resolutions that cannot be chosen in the settings. For example, enter the following to generate a configuration file with the screen resolution of 1920 x 1200:
C:\path-you-choose>rt3conf -x 1920 -y 1200
Note that the settings will say 640 x 480. It is often possible to verify that your monitor is running at the correct resolution by pressing one of the buttons on your monitor.
You can see all the available options by using the -h
or --help
option.
Installation
You can download rt3conf from the Release page.
The easiest way to use the executable is to place it in the same folder as where
you want the engine.cfg
file generated. Otherwise you have to put it somewhere
that is in your PATH
environment variable.
You can alternatively enter cargo install rt3conf
in the terminal if you have
the Rust programming language installed. Then the
executable is placed in a directory that is part of the PATH
environment
variable, and you can run it from any directory.
Building
If you want to build rt3conf
from the source code then you first need to
install the Rust programming language. Then
download the source code from GitHub or clone it with git. Finally open a
terminal and use the cargo
build command to build the source code:
c:\src\rt3conf>cargo build --release
The binary is placed in the directory target/release
.
You can get Cargo to build and install the binary in a single step with the
install
command, for example:
c:\src\rt3conf>cargo install --path .
The rt3conf binary is now added to the PATH
and can be executed from anywhere.
Reverse Engineering Fields
The configuration files contain fields that control the configuration settings. The configuration files are binary so there is no explanation of what each field does. The function of each field was reversed engineered by changing a setting in the game and then observing the changes to the files. I used wxHexEditor to find the changes. It has a feature to compare the contents of two binary files.
There are two configuration files engine.cfg
and game.cfg
. I have only
implemented the settings in the engine.cfg
but may also add game.cfg
at some
point. I have private notes about which settings are stored in game.cfg
so I
would know not to look for them in engine.cfg
.
There is clearly some data in engine.cfg
that is not accessible from the
game's settings. I suspect most of these settings were used by the developers
and not meant for the users. The unaccessible settings are referred to as
fieldx
in the code (where x
is a number). It should be possible to reverse
engineer these last fields by changing a value at a time and opening the game
to see the effect. Another option is to attach a debugger, watch the memory
for reads and look at what happens in the disassembly.
Dependencies
~1.9–2.7MB
~44K SLoC