[I hope the topic fits here. It not: Admin, please move it. BTW: What about "network games" board?]
As some friends from the German community have started some tests with network games recently, I tried to pursuade potential sponsors to donate a server for this purpose. Today I received an interesting answer from a an experienced admin, working for an online game hoster. He does not want to see his name here.
Quote from: german
As long as there is no entity able to send tax deductable receipt [translaters note: a specific German problem] (and I don't expect a "normal" online game reach this status) it won't be possible to get donated services by the usual suspects (as in Hetzner Strato, UI [translators note: German hosting companies]).
It should be possible to host some thousands, as a minimum some hundred player on a piece of standard hardware - which means to finance some 50 to 100 EUR a month. A paypal account and a request for donations should work if people like that service.
At our company less than 10% of the players are paying small amounts a month - but ****uming 100 out of 5000 player are donating 1 EUR a month the break even would be reached. Having a look on the website I think nobody wants to include paymant features on it. But it will be difficult to find a sponsor for a service wich is a profitable business modell for him.
In my eyes, his arguments are valid. Nevertheless I will go ahead checking the options.
BTW: A coworker of mine, admin and Simutrans player, saw a server at a reasonable hoster by 30 EUR a month. Yes, extensible.
I am back from the matrix! It was exciting! All the graphics have an abnormal high resolution. Almost every object is always almost moving - except of thousands of cars which are parked or part of traffic jams. A huge blue lamp is lightening an even more huge blue hall. Planes are crossing this blue hall. You have to look up to see them, not down to the display.
Disadvantages:
- You are fixed to a certain place. You can't follow convois or jump across the world just with a click of your mouse. There is even no mouse! You are inside the game!
- Although I was told that this blue lamp is used to arise temperature, this feature absolutely buggy, especially in the last weeks. The blue of the hall turned into greyscaled structures. They are ugly. Poor artwork.
So I decided to get back to the real Simutrans world. I am happy to be home again.
Penny, an admin and programmer and me thought about that idea a while ago, but considered it as far too complicated. I fiddled around with some PHP code using Openstreetmap output, but it still needs a lot of hand made work to have usable results.
Anyway, this would an interesting project. I would really love to be able to convert "real world maps" to .ppm for to use them in Simutrans. For now, I do not see a realistic chance - but that might change in future.
It is no longer that dark outside, rain is getting warmer, the sun tries to proove its existance. Bars are starting their outdoor business, plants are painting themselves green. My Simutrans season is ending. "Real World[1]" offers even more nice $things.
I do support the entire idea and respect Frank's work wholehartely. OTOH, due to several experiences in this community I agree with Dirk Bucholz...
> I would like to have at least three superadmins and an > automatic daily back-up of the files and database. I > trust Frank but his server isn't controlled by the > community and we need a back-up if something > happens to Frank or the server.
...as well as Isaac...
> Also, since I do have two servers: For backups, it would > be perhaps good to back up to my secondary server?
...and itec
> One thing I would suggest is possibly moving the wiki > from simutrans-germany to the simutrans domain
As Frank is the "chief of content" somehow, a professionall admin should be the "chief of the server".
I can't load your game. I get an error message "invalid coordinate halt". Might it by possible that the stop has several levels and you deleted the exact station tile where you intend to let the busses stop? Or did you set a slope there?
What a nice story! ; - ) I failed to start your game. Depending on the age of the simutrans version, it refuses to start 128-834 or it refuses to load your game. Is there anything special in it?
First of all, I would like to praise the Exp Team! Many thanks for all that new ideas. I do consider most of them as improvements, some are causing problems and questions.
I agree with dutchman regarding the horse driven transport of goods. This is surely no fun (at least for me). Due to the high investment costs I ignore all goods transport until the 8 to traileres for trains are available around 1855. I would like to recommend a rebalancing of costs and revenues for early transport.
Just to quote dutchman: "4) I find the number of farms (sheep, grain, livestock, orchards) in comparison to their corresponding industries excessive (normally, something in the order of 15 sprawl up)."
I disagree. In my eyes this is an advantage of Experimental, for it is far more near to reality. Have you ever seen a farm with an own freight station for it is producing some hundreds of tons meat or grain a month? ; - ) Do you have breweries in the Netherlands which are using grain from just one farmer? ; - )
In my opinion the diversification of transport quantities between small units like farms and shops on the one hand and heavy industry like steel works on the other hand is an important step forward. I see a tendency to create an image of typical logistic problems in reality. Agricultural goods are produced by far more farmers than diaries, breweries, etc. Just a few trucks are serving almost all shops in a city daily. No need to build a track to a butcher! I love to simulate that!
Transporting low quantity of goods from farms to the next station by horse and trailer would be funny, if payable. In my eyes, it isn't.
Since a longer time I experienced crashes in SimExp by end of a month (but not in Standard). It needed a night to find out the reason: It seems that this happens when SimExp tries to delete a factory. I can't proof that, for just saving the game in the last minutes of a month and restarting again solves the problem in the second or third try. But it seems that there is always one factory (or parts of a chain) less when the game is running again. This has never been affecting connected factories, only those I ignored for a.m. reasons.
I do not like the heavy increase of costs for outdated vehicles. I love the possibility to let old vehicles run on lines of lower importance or low quantity of transport - like in Real Life[1]. For sure, it is configurable. But I would like to recommend to check the default value for not to frustrate beginners.
Anyway, pak128,britain and SimExp is my favorite combination for the moment! I will go on testing.
> I am ****uming that you have your operating system > configured to use German
Well, it depends. ;-) Debian itself has surely the normal english behaviour, the window manager (IceWM) uses German, where available. But for consistency I switched Simutrans to "english" before producing the crashes. So I am not sure whether your ****umption might be correct.
> it would be very helpful to have somebody to produce > a Simutrans-Experimental de.tab.
I had a look on it. Most texts seem very common to me, so I presume a translation is already existing. Is a query of the part available which has to be translated?
First of all, accept my praises for Simutrans experimental! ;-) Lots of really good ideas and concepts! Your work encouraged me to register here!
Crashes are reproducable here (Simutrans Nightly 2325 under Debian GNU/Linux). Just starting sim-exp 3.1, choosing _any_ pakset, opening a car depot and drawing the mouse (without clicking!) around the vehicles causes the crash. Choosing "show all" will increase the speed of crashing.
Two problems, which might be connected to the bug:
1. All vehicles are displayed with power and speed of "0".
2. Obviously the space to activate the display of informations about the vehicles is not fitting the space of the images. The top half of the images is not activating the info display, the lower does. Under the images the info display is triggered as well.
Even by avoiding to use cars the game crashed after some 5 - 20 minutes, but I wasn't able to isolate the reasons or reproduce it.
I am Rainer from Germany. I am a little bit active in the German Forum. For some time I was lurking here, but it seems to be high time to get active here as well. ;-)
What kept me from registering here ist the text to be accepted in the register form. WTH do I have to promise not to violate Federal US Law, which is more or less unkown to me and do not affect me? The rest of the text is going without saying. Can anyone of the admins be so kind to have a glance at that text? Do you really expect anyone from anywhere in the world to sign it?
Anyway, let us have even more fun with SImutrans! I do praise wholeheartely anyone to helps developing it!
Rainer
PS: I have to admit that lots of option in your backend are quite nice. I.E. the "Don't use graphical smileys" ;-)
![[NL]](/lang/nl.png)
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