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Messages - kierongreen

1
Pak128.Britain-Ex closed bug reports / Re: minor power/tractive effort number discrepencies for modern locomotives.
Well the early diesels were mostly unsuccessful, so to start with when they are introduced there should actually be little point in using them (imo). Electrics should start taking over on suburban services gradually from 1920's onwards but until the likes of 37, 47 and 55 come along there should be no huge reason to use diesel (unless you want to have the latest and greatest engine).
3
Pak128.Britain-Ex / Steel sleepers
Steel sleepers are used on the Stirling Alloa railway which takes fully laden coal trains, and also on the Airdrie-Bathgate line along which EMUs will run at up to 145km/h. Both are recent construction projects in Scotland.
9
Pak128.Britain-Ex / Re: Brake van requirements
Regarding the p****enger (and parcels vehicles). If you look at the first set of letters after mk1 you can see the type of coach - the following are all brakes:
bc = brake composite
bg = Brake Gangwayed
bso = Brake Second Open
(Not sure whether these are expanded in translations)

In addition the following wouldn't need brake vans:
dvt - Driving Van Trailer, thesehave a cab and are used when the train is being driven with the locomotive at the rear.
autocoach - used on rural branchlines as part of a push-pull service.

Not sure about maunsell-parcels, lms-2007 or guv, I'm pretty sure guv are used without brake vans though.
13
Pak128.Britain / Re: Realism VS gameplay: a couple of balance issues
Well it should be a slow progression as time goes on with platform length steadily increasing (up to a point of course). So sooner or later you will have to add tiles to stations. Ideally I'd want people to build a railway for the era they are playing in, then have to face the consequences and expense of upgrading as they continue with the game, not be able to build a railway which will see them from the 19th to 21st centuries without doing any work!
15
Pak128.Britain / Re: More city buildings
Regarding the latest renders - you seem to have shadows enabled in some form. While it's a nice effect rest of renders don't have it (and it doesn't work well with the simutrans engine which is why I didn't have them to begin with).
16
Larger Projects / Re: German in the code
I've certainly found language is a fairly minor obstacle when it comes to contributing to the code. For someone new to the code even knowing where abouts a particular change might have to be made could take several hours to work out due to the shear amount of code there, in comparison working out what a comment means (I only have rudimentary German, so might rely on google translate for some things) really doesn't take too long. The common variable and function names you pick up very, very quickly!
17
Pak128.Britain / Re: More city buildings
Quote from: Archon – on
Second take.

It looks maybe little more like school now but yard needs some details.
What do you think about those roof windows?
Second picture is first from that angle so there is still more work needed for it.
Wow, just wow :) I think it l looks perfect - though obviously ingame screenshot would be nice to check consistency but looks good to me!
19
Pak128.Britain / Re: More city buildings
Quote
Also I didn't get what you meant with setting all interiors black.
The surface for all windows should be set to render as pure black. This means the material should be set to V 0 and as shadeless.
20
Pak128 / Re: Metro - as tram or train?
Quote
there's another advantage of not putting it into 'train' category, you can get rid of the third rail electrification there, and move it also to light rail.
Certainly in the UK there's trains which travel for 70 miles and at speeds up to 100mph which use 3rd rail. They definitely don't fall into metro let alone tram or light rail category...
23
Larger Projects / Re: Simutrans in 3D
Quote from: Hajo – on
Why do stations need to become 3D models? I think 2D sprites like now would still work in a 3D landscape, given that the landscape isn't freely rotatable  and the stations are only build on flat ground.

Because once you have variable slopes it actually starts to become tricky to get perfectly level ground. You can try and code workarounds for this but it would get tricky (only practical way is to automatically level terrain when building stations, adjusting height of surrounding tiles when required, but this introduces problems too). Similarly for bridges it becomes less obvious whether there is enough height difference between two ways crossing.
24
Pak128.Britain / Re: More city buildings
Quote from: AP – on
Love the church!

Just wonder though - is reworking the parish/town/city hall on the cards any time soon? It looks so out of place amongst all the other buildings, and there are so many nice English precedents (1,2,3,4)
The current town hall is based on St. Albans Town Hall. I tried to work out a progression of images by which the building would be upgraded (the actual prototype is I think the 2nd last stage). Reasoning behind this is that Town Hall should be quickly recognisable, if town halls vary wildly between levels then it becomes more difficult to find it. That said I think there'd be a strong case for having a medieval style town hall and a modern style town hall in addition to the current one to cover different time periods. I'm sure the existing model could be improved as well.

Also, and I will repeat this again, Archon's buildings do not fit the rest of the pak buildings completely - that's not to say there's anything wrong with them design or detail wise (both of which are great) but something in the rendering setup makes them appear more blurry (compare the windows in the screenshot above - on wlindleys church, The Hood's farm, my town hall and pub they are all a lot sharper than on the buildings from Archon).
25
Larger Projects / Re: Simutrans in 3D
Quote from: mjhn – on
Prissi: My idea was to have a map that's tile based in 2-D, but with height not being fixed points. Existing buildings would be usable (with 3-D foundations) as they would be on flat squares as currently in simutrans. Trains would still work as the fact that the vehicles fail to line up on slopes would often be less visible than currently as the slopes would often be less steep. Track, trackobjects, stations, and bridges would need new graphics to follow the terrain (partly, as left to right would still be kept flat with some kind of foundation)
The current system has the advantage it is easy to see whether a tile is flat or if it is a slope. With variable slopes this becomes more difficult.

Yes you can reuse building graphics but all track has to become 3d (it's impractical to draw all the possible combinations). Likewise bridges and stations have to go 3d. Then it becomes tricky making graphics consistent between 2d and 3d parts of the game...
27
Pak128.Britain / Re: More city buildings
I really like the design of these buildings from Archon. However as The Hood already stated they look slightly more blurry than the existing buildings. There's not much in it, and maybe it's just my eyesight, but does seem like a difference to me...
28
Pak128.Britain / Re: Blender textures for pak128.Britain
plain-brick-improved and flemish-bond-improved were created by me and I release them under the artistic licence.

concrete-paving-small was I think modified by me from an original texture (though might have done it myself, we are talking about over 4 years ago now!), I think there would be sufficient modifications for it to be released in any case.

scratched_bricks_9271342 is from http://mayang.com/textures/Architectural/html/Brick/index.html - you are allowed to redistribute this as long as you give credit to www.mayang.com

the other ones I don't recall having anything to do with so I ****ume they were added more recently. Either that or my memory is failing me...
30
Pak128 / Re: Metro - as tram or train?
Similar viewpoint as The Hood - I think of trams depot as light rail, whether or not they are street running, trains are heavy rail of any speed. Having underground in train depot means that speed bonuses are more of a factor too.
31
Pak128.Britain / Re: More city buildings
It might not be a bad idea to copy one of the existing textures used. Keeping the set to a limited palette of textures gives a more consistent feel.

That said the building does look good!
32
Extension Requests / Re: NEW CLIMATES MODEL (was: The Equatorial Wind)
Even a latitude based offset to climate would require more tiles. Admittedly not as many as some other systems but still 4 * 7 * 2 potentially taking into account all the climate transitions and snow. Another problem is that the new map configuration window would become more confusing as you would have to set several latitude options.
33
Extension Requests / Re: NEW CLIMATES MODEL (was: The Equatorial Wind)
Any changes to the current model would require more tiles. The computer generated maps in the link do look nice. However I think technically it will be too tricky to implement. If you are going that far you might as well put a simple weather system in so that areas would get snow on and off through the winter, maybe have images for it raining and snowing, variable amounts of snow on the ground. It would all be great eye candy but really not much more than that.
34
Extension Requests / Re: NEW CLIMATES MODEL (was: The Equatorial Wind)
When I originally coded the texture tile system initially tiles were generated on the fly, however speed was not quick enough to use in game (it managed about 2 frames a second). That might have changed admittedly, however it would still be a major performance hit, and I'd imagine other things would have a priority in terms of cpu time than changing something which basically works fine...