I love the 1990-ass design of Railroad Tycoon's save system.
not "which directory do you want to save your game?", but "which drive has your save game disk?"
You know, cause you'd put the game in drive A:, and if you were fancy, you'd save to a blank disk in drive B:
Too poor to have two drives? Gotta swap them to save, then swap back to keep playing.
now when you save your game, it saves two files: RR1.SVE and RR1.MAP.
(The 1 can be 0-5 depending on which slot you save into/if it's an autosave).
Now the obvious guess is that the game saves things like "how much money you have" and "where your trains are" in the .SVE, and the current state of the map in the .MAP file, since the game world dynamically changes over time.
now that's super interesting because PIC files are compressed!
And the game can SAVE them, not just load them! that's unusual for games of this age!
that's why it has to save the whole map when you make a save game: because your map is unique.
(and presumably re-generating it from the seed would take too long on some of the computers this game ran on)
Alice Averlong🏳️⚧️
curtmack