How To: Add New Locos to Your Needs List

Hellfire Version 3.3.8 includes three Inverness Class 08s which will not appear as required in your needs list unless you manually add them.

If you are not maintaining a career file, then adding the Class 08's is pretty straightforward; simply open up your needs list in your favorite text editor (such as Notepad) and add the following locos to the bottom of your list:

08568
08620
08738

Then save your changes and your needs list is ready to roll.

For those of you running careers, the procedure is a little more involved.

Create a new text file containing the above 3 locos (each loco must be on a new line) and save it somewhere handy.  Alternatively, I have created a file you can use here: http://www.railrover.co.uk/forum/index.php?action=dlattach;topic=875.0;attach=649

Start up Hellfire, and begin a game as normal.  When you get to the screen where you select your career file, select it, and then select Browse For Needs List. Note that you can do this even when you have selected a Career File.

Browse to the text file containing the new locos, and confirm that the path to the file is displayed in the box for Required Locos or Needs List File Name.

Select Start the Game and you should be presented with the following dialog box...

Answer Yes to the above question, and you should get the following...

Make sure you answer Yes to this second question, and the three new Class 08s will appear as required on your needs list.  Note that this differs from the previous post on editing Needs Lists.

How To: Use your own Images in Hellfire

The locomotive images supplied with Hellfire are, lets face it, pretty average.

They date back to when the game was first released, and Internet bandwidth was much less than it is now.  In order to save on file size, the images were black and white, and saved at a fairly low resolution (by today's standards).

I had been receiving requests to permit people to substitute their own images in the game, and this is now a possibility in Hellfire 3.

There are two ways of doing this.

The first way - best for handling small numbers of images - is to use the Image Manager built into Hellfire.  This allows you to select images to use in place of the generic locomotive class pictures, and also to use an image for individual locomotives.  The Image Manager is accessed from the Game Settings on the opening screen.

Select the Custom Images tab, and click Image Manager.

Select either Loco Types, or Locos from the left-hand list, then select the actual Loco Type or Loco from the middle list for which you use your own image.  Then simply drag and drop the file from a Windows folder, or your Desktop, into the blank space on the right-hand side.  The image should appear in the space.  Repeat as necessary.  When you have finished - click Save to save your image choices.  If you need to, you can click Undo to reset the images back to the point you last saved them.

The second option is best when you want to install a large number of images.  The images need to be named correctly, using just the loco number, so for example, if you want to use an image for 03162, your image must be called 03162.bmp/jpg/gif etc.

Using Windows Explorer, navigate to your My Documents folder and create a new sub folder called HellfireImages (if it doesn't already exist) and simply copy your images into there.  This technique does involve a lot of file renaming if you are using a collection of files you have sourced yourself, or you can take advantage of Ian Banks-Jones hard work and download a complete set of named, colour adjusted and cropped images.  Simply decompress and copy the images into HellfireImages to give yourself a complete set of loco images.  A link to the latest version of the images can be found in the forum at http://www.railrover.co.uk/forum/index.php?topic=673.0.  Owing to restrictions on copyright, I cannot distribute these images as part of the game, but they are allowed for your own personal use.

I hope you find this useful, and you enjoy Hellfire with your own images.