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Messages - AP

3
Extension Requests / Re: Depots that consume resources
I like the idea, but i have a concern:
Given [depot requires coal to produce train] + [train required to take coal to depot]

...I don't see how one gets started. I mean, unless you use horses, and simulate the entire industrial revolution, how do you get to a position where you can run the map to begin with.

If it's less absolute (ie supply coal, maintenance goes down), it has a similar but lesser effect - if the first routes are not about coal, they could be overwhelmingly unprofitable, ditto the coal route until it "gets going".

Not forgetting that not all maps have all industries. Prescribing "fuel first" as a game strategy is realistic, but potentially not fun.

I would foresee a need for the function to not kick in until #convoys > a certain value, and then perhaps incrementally (or linearly).
5
Simutrans-Extended development / Re: [8.2] Going uphill seems a bit unrealistic.
Quote from: Bernd Gabriel – on
If there is a way to introduce a mix of half height and full height slopes, I'll support that.

We discussed this a while back (here), albeit full height and double height in that instance. Summary: it's technically possible, and was apparently included in (very) early versions of the game. There was some interest/enthusiasm, but as is often the way, this did not (so far as I know) translate into the idea being taken forward, due to a number of technical reasons I think.
7
Incorporated Patches and Solved Bug Reports / Re: Elevated way issue
I just tried, fairly methodically, to go down the list of buildings and try them on 4 rotations and see what was happening to each. Succinctly, almost every building, there is only one side onto which you can build. Which means you can never bridge "over" the building, since you can get onto the tile but not off.

There are a few exceptions. For instance:

KG_Com_1880_1 (3 storey Victorian terraced shops) works - it will allow the terrace to be spanned perpendicularly, but not in parallel with the building direction (ie NS but not EW where terrace runs EW), which makes sense {there is also a  clipping issue because as a 3storey bldg it's taller than the arch!)
KG_Com_1880_0 works exactly the same (looks the same too!)

JH_COM_00_16A works similarly which looks similarly weird because it's also taller than the elevated way viaduct.

A_Com_1880_01 (looks like a department store 5 storey) refuses to be spanned at all, because it's too tall i guess.

I went down the list ignoring timeline, as farm as JH_Com_00_16b and those 4 are the only ones which display "interesting "behaviour.

I have a savegame but it's telling me its a bit of a large file! All was done on latest versions of pak-gb and simutrans.
9
Simutrans-Extended development / Re: New city generation function.
Quote
city_repulse_factor  >>  "city isolation factor"
maybe then:
Water appeal >> "City river proximity factor"


With the clusters, if set to >0 , are you specifying the precise number of clusters, or a probability? Ie, if set to 2, on a 2000x2000 map, will you still only get 2 clusters same as on a 200x200 map? Or does it "scale"? I quite like the term "cluster" though, it explains itself well.


One other thing, I wonder if "settlement" would not be better than "city" as a term, since a village of 300 people is not exactly a city!
16
Simutrans Help Center / Re: Goods Handoff
Quote from: The Hood – on
And all 3 stations must be goods-enabled.

I believe only the recipient station needs to be goods-enabled, actually. Have just tested it with 2 p****enger platforms (doesn't work), and added a warehouse to the recipient platform (now it does). Although a warehouse is rather more useful where freight will accumulate (ie origin station)!
18
Incorporated Patches and Solved Bug Reports / Elevated way issue
Hi

Just discovered an issue with the elevated ways:

When building over an existing city, the elevated way will build over some buildings but not others. This occurs in the 1860s, when all houses etc are not-very-tall, and more strangely, it will allow the construction of an elevated way over a house tile from the front, but not from the back or sides (ie you can't join together more than about 2 tiles of elevated way over houses in a city).

I've got round the issue in -game by double-stacking my elevated ways, but that's both tedious and undesirable long term.

Thought I'd report it, anyhow.  :)
19
Simutrans Help Center / Re: Why do so many people want to go to Milton Keynes?
Quote from: The Hood – on
There isn't anything faster than the horse on roads/in cities because in the 19th century, that's all you had.  Electric trams only started appearing in the 1890s; for a few years before that steam trams filled a niche, but it was still mainly horses.  I'm not aware of anything that existed in those days that had a high capacity on the roads (correct me if I'm wrong).

It's a problem, this, in gameplay. Before the days of trams, stations had, in simutrans terms, much larger catchment areas, due to a proliferation of bicycles, horses-and-carriages, and people willing to walk longer distances. In your average town one station covered the entire settlement (often from half a mile down the road!), no need for underground railways etc to get people to the station.

However, there were some quite viable options much earlier:

1830-1865 Steam Buses
1870s - 1890s (and beyond) Cable street railways
{1890s - Steam + Elec trams}

To be realistic, introducing either of these needs a way-constraint, to city-roads-only for the bus (the turnpike trusts set the tolls too high due to perceived damage caused to the road surface, so they weren't used inter-city very much I believe). Also to (e.g.) cable-track-only for the cable railway. I think the latter in particular has potential, since it would need programming to disregard gradients (hills don't affect speed), and indeed would allow the creation of freight inclined planes as well, something else missing from the early game in pak-britain which would prove useful, since Victorian railways and locomotives dislike(d) hills.
20
Simutrans Help Center / Re: Building tunnels
Quote from: DaiStation – on
Gotcha. Seems pretty sick if you are building a road tunnel and at the other end of where the tunnel is there is... a road, but I can live with it.
I believe in that instance, if the road is correctly aligned for the exit (ie same as for an entrance), it will still build the tunnel. If it's wrongly aligned, then it won't.

Once you get going, you'll find building them in underground mode more reliable anyway. Note the tile co-ordinates in the bottom right corner, for calculating where your exit will appear.
21
Simutrans Help Center / Re: Why do so many people want to go to Milton Keynes?
From what you say, I understand that more people want to go from Preston to Milton Keynes, because there are more people in Preston. It's a bigger town, generates many p****engers, who then want to go somewhere that isn't Preston. Milton Keynes simply doesn't have enough residents to generate a similar return flow of p****engers.

My suggestion would be to extend the route beyond milton keynes, to somewhere else, ideally somewhere bigger, to generate more people who want to go to Preston (and MK). However, I certainly wouldn't recommend doing it with horse-and-carriages; build a railway.

--
Quote
if you are still in XIXth century, your only street vehicls are horse coaches, which in my experience are all too small
Pak.Britain is currently lacking a (fast) viable c19th urban m**** transport solution as Lord Vetinari has said - but that may not be your problem if the routes are as straightforward as suggested (though I agree, street-running trains-as-trams is the way forward if the town is large enough to sustain it, if not, use post boxes to extend station coverage and do one-stop-towns).
22
Simutrans Help Center / Re: Building tunnels
You have to draw track up the sloped tile from the lower horizontal tile, in order to be able to draw the tunnel mouth "over" that piece of track.

Ctrl click if you want JUST the mouth (ie not a straight tunnel). Then go into underground mode and use the tunnel tool to build tracks.

If you don't ctrl click, it will cut a tunnel all the way to the natural exit in a straight line. If the exit tile isn't correctly aligned, it won't build.
23
Simutrans Help Center / Re: inner city distribution
Re Multi, it's a yes:

On a collaborative game a while back, I set up a circular "inter-modal" freight railway around the entire map, with fast trains for fluids, bulk, planked, and crated goods moving between generic yards in the middle of no-where, and I then connected each yard into its local area freight network. It worked perfectly, the bulk train moved a mix of coal or sand or iron ore, depending on what space it had remaining in its wagons and what was waiting at the next station it arrived at.

The only thing I wonder about, however, is whether a train wagon (of which there were say 10) had to be itself either coal OR sand (can't but 2 in one wagon in real life!), and whether this would extend to a single road vehicle. But I suspect not (in either case) from what Daistation says.
24
Extension Requests / Re: River editor
There was talk a while back of incorporating rivers into the map-creator, in terms of supplying an image of rivers in the same way as a heightmap, but I don't think anything has yet come of it.
27
Simutrans Help Center / Re: Mixing delivery methods
Adjoining stations can be on any one of the 8 surrounding tiles (ie diagonals are good too). If the bridge in your picture is giving you trouble, you can use a "warehouse" or similar to fill the tile in between depots (but you pay for its maintainance!) - if you do this, you must build the dock, warehouse, then road yard, in that order (or in reverse), so as to "extend" it. If you build the two "stations" first, you just get two seperately named stations which doesn't work.

Not that it need concern you yet, but i believe there is a limit of 7 trans-shipments per route coded into the game. On longer networks this has to be borne in mind.
30
Pak128.Britain / Re: pax and mail addons to boats
Sorry for doublepost... but it's been 24h ...

Quote from: The Hood – on
it would be at least possible to have a system where you bought the boat as a "locomotive" and could "fit" it with up to 3 different cargo types to your specifications.  

I think this is very much worth exploring, because the demand is there, and it would balance, it's just like re-fitting the ship's 3 holds to suit the demand.

It could be that there are different sizes of ferry, say 25, 50, 75, 100 (larger ones later?), and cargo holds in multiples of 25. Say. So small cheap ferries carry 2, large expensive ones 4. To give some variety etc. There is even (!) scope to standardise this, across all ships, if the coding could be done - buy ship (clipper, 1750, carries 0 cargo, say) then decide what it carries (p****engers, coal, coal e.g.)

Quote
The only problem to consider then would be how to represent these graphically (probably best with some form of icon for each goods category),
Surely just an icon in the depot does the job,  each virtual "ship-trailer" having a different icon according to type?? Or is that insufficient in terms of feedback.

Quote
under this system different freight images for each cargo type could not be implemented.
- I don't follow this part, is that not what the above "graphic representation" is doing? If not in the depot, where else did you have in mind, what would that be for?
32
Pak128.Britain / Re: pax and mail addons to boats
Quote
i would interpret this as the desire as a workaround to simulate car-ferries that transport lorry that loaded those goods.
Yes!

Quote
The concept of a car ferry in transportational terms is worlds apart from a cargo ship transporting cars.

I didn't mean physically moving the city-cars or the lorries, I means as in lorry arrives one side, it's freight is "ferried across river", another lorry drives up to the other side to collect it. No bridge required. And without the need for a whole fleet of ferries, one for each possible type of good which might need to cross the river.

In the Victorian period, many well known uk river crossings (Severn, Humber, Tay) had railway-owned ferries linking pier stations, for years before anyone got around to building a much-more-expensive bridge or submarine tunnel. For wider stretches of water, and for 'young' companies, bridges are a serious undertaking. More recent examples are the English Channel and the waters around Denmark, or on a smaller scale, almost any island you care to choose.
33
Extension Requests / Re: idea: rail yard (multi-tile freight building)
Quote from: skreyola – on
I like the idea of depots that have to be as long as the trains they produce.
Emminently sensible, in fact I wonder why it isn't like that already!


Quote
I also like the idea of their becoming employment destinations (requiring a platform station nearby).
Absolutely, or how does the engine driver get to work?! Even further, it wouldn't be out of the question {though might be annoying} to have it require p****engers in order to be allowed to produce trains!
34
Pak128.Britain / Re: pax and mail addons to boats
{Feel free to split this to a separate thread if appropriate}

Is it possible to make a ship purchase the add-ons automatically? Like how an EMU purchases the middle and end cars all on the first click, they are compulsory.

I ask because, a while back, I bemoaned the lack of a general "ferry", that would transport whatever it was given, and I wonder if this could be a solution. I hadn't even realised the add-ons existed.

Could a ship be created that could thereby move 50p****+50mail+50bulk+50planks+etc, and so emulate cross-river rail ferries, and car-ferries too for that matter?
35
Extension Requests / Re: idea: rail yard (multi-tile freight building)
The "rail yard", as say a marshalling yard, is often seen in-game now, just as a freight station with parallel sidings, where goods are transshipped. I don't see a building with this role being useful.

I do however think something representative of a rail depot, for the storage of locomotives, carriage works, etc, would add realism, since these are not small pieces of infrastructure. Indeed, they often are economic forces in their own right.