Can we get trains to signal when they start moving, approaching a gate, and approaching a player?

Pls.

I just fired up Unity and generated a scene with 2.5 million vertices and 1.5 million polygons in 3000 draw calls, and it ran at 70 fps on my AMD R9 280 on Linux. It could run a lot more polygons than that since evidently CPU was bottlenecking the GPU with the absolutely obscene number of draw calls...

Shouldn't you be more concerned with things like small wooden chests' ability to store 80 locomotives or wagons? Or player's ability to carry on him even more stuff than that?

No, you see, the sprites are actually rendered as 3d quadrilateral polygons. For each sprite, there are 4 vertices and 2 triangles, all in 3d. The "2d mode" is achieved by discarding one of coordinates by defaulting it to 0 everywhere, disabling depth testing and enabling render blending. ...

No need to be condescending. While 2d can be made to represent game world very nicely, 3d is "superior" because it's default for the real world, and 2d representation of 3d world is only an approximation with plenty of limitations. This particular game is made in a way that it would be mor...

Then don't bother, just use photoshop to recolor existing graphics. You can slap some icons on top of it too, with "screen" blend mode or something, if you feel like doing something fancy.

You just described non-axis aligned grid. In axis aligned grid, X maps to X and Y maps to Y. In non-axis aligned grid, they depend on one another via some formula. Also, this game doesn't actually uses oblique projection, it uses regular axonometric orthogonal projection, hence objects are verticall...

It would also require rewriting an engine a bit to support non-axis-aligned grid. So might as well go with isometric projection which looks much nicer.

I think the fastest route is to bounce off sats, that way you only have 1 or 2 points for the signal to pass through. Obviously a longer path, but much simpler. Except satellite connection is known for having absolute worst lag of all, it may be hard to believe but it lags even harder than dial-up ...

Eh whatever, man. Unanswered questions have no expiration date.

Only models that show up on the screen are rendered, so no. The question was about memory management, because with large resolution animated sprites it's quickly getting out of hand. Not only you are limited with how many textures can GPU store at a time, you're also limited with how often you can s...

The main issue is the performance. If everything was 3d, we would have 20 000+ 3d objects on screen instead of 20 000 sprites, i doubt it is possible to have it these days. The other way around would be to allow the zoomout levels drastically, but I personally hate it. Pretty sure you can though. I...

I just drag power supply line from nearby huge solar farm, and put laser turret blueprints closer and closer to the base. Robots quickly deploy laser turrets and constantly repair them, which in turn quickly destroy everything in vicinity - rinse and repeat. I then come back and deconstruct turrets ...