OK, despite earlier technical muppetry, I can now present the first pak128.Britain boats - some horse-drawn barges. These are avaible 1750-1950, and at 20t capacity represent a real improvement on road and rail transport early in the game (as would be realistic). This should make that part of the game a bit more interesting!
They will be in the next release, but if you can't wait, I'm putting them in SVN now...
Incidentally, the second screenshot illustrates why simutrans needs to differentiate between canals/rivers and open water, unless horses really can walk on water :o
These look fantastic, and will definitely improve gameplay of pak128.Britain in the early years!
Incidentally, during testing of the barges I found the early industries to produce way too slowly for them to be economical. Seeing as jamespetts balanced the production of these before I did the barges, this will need to change, how did you do the balancing James? Have you got time to revisit it?
The Hood,
barges looking rather excellent! I cannot remember now exactly how I balanced the industries - I think that I sampled one or two by trial and error and did it heuristically. How much too slow are the early industries, exactly? And is 20t a realistic capacity (I don't know much about early canal barges, so I don't know whether the figure is correct or not)? If we can work out a factorial difference (e.g., industry type X needs to produce Y times faster), then that can be applied to the industries duly, although care must be taken not to make road transport of goods entirely pointless; there need to be some industries (farms, for instance, at the producing end, and individual shops at the consuming end) that deal in small enough quantities to make road the preferred option, whereas other industries (such as collieries, steelworks, etc.) would benefit from higher capacity transport.
I can't find any actual data, but by comparison with other types of barge, e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Pudding, I think 20t is about right. Anyone that can give a better value is welcome though. Generally speaking, canals should be the ideal method of transportation pre-railways, but should be expensive to build. This should mean road transport is used for connections off the trunk canal/river route.
Edit: looking at some others, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mersey_Flat suggests much larger tonnages could be carried...
Hm, in which case I shall have to look into the industry production rates. I shan't be able to do it immediately, though: I'm about to go on holiday until the week-end, and after that, I have to finish work on Simutrans-Experimental 7.0 before I can turn again to pakset work. Thank you for looking into that.
On the subject of boats I should also say I know very little... if anyone wants to suggest anything (preferably with pictures and stats) then please post here. We will need everything from canal barges of 1750 to supertankers of 2000... but only if it has been used in Britain please.
Well, that depends on whether you bought the standard horses, or the "miracle horses", right? ;-)
Ahh, you're confusing Pak128.Britain with Pak192.Fantasy... ;-)
a possible solution to this could be following:
make canal and open water different way types. not allowing ships to p**** canals and not allowing barges on open water. in open water canals can also be built (marked by buoyes), allowing barges to use exactly those ways. maybe a requirement to build them adjacent to the shore is possible.
A second addition to the pak128.Britain boats - the Norfolk wherry. Available in freight, mail, and p****enger versions from 1750-1920.
Very nice!
Here is the larger Thames Sailing Barge. It's intended for open waters and only the largest rivers, as despite the name, they were sea-going vessels as well as operating on the Thames, mostly plying coastal routes but were also known to cross the channel to Europe from time to time.
The awesomeness continues, I'm seriously looking forward to the next pak update.
Excellent!
I've been doing some more research into ship types for what I'm going to draw, and I'm pretty much there with sailing boats and p****enger liners. I'm having difficulty with freight ships from the beginning of the steamship onwards. So two questions really:
1) How much variety do people actually want for ships? I know in the other paks ship variety is significantly less than other modes and they tend to have longer periods of availability. Are people generally happy with that?
2) Does anyone have any suggestions/photos on what freight ships I should draw? Especially for the period 1850-1950?
I'm not sure how you want to play this pack with regards to the capacities of the ships
1) The introduction of canal tunnels, and the early introduction of them as a means of early industry grounding, will mean the players going for a long timeperiod games will probably have a lot of left over infrastructure. Giving it a bit of a leg up compared to rail, if you make it too competitive. The question is do you want to phase out the shipping as a means of bulk transport in favour of rail? Or do you go for the potentially tricky to implement high capacity and low cost shipping we have today, and attempt to represent the relative costs of first/last mile transportation as opposed to containerised oceanic shipping.
I'd guess if you were going for the first you play for a smaller range of ships with slow increases in capacity and speed, if your playing the latter you go for rather larger increases in volume's and probably larger range of shipping as a consequence.
2) I think some liberty ships might be a good idea here for the 1940's, I know they were American built to an adapted British design.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberty_ship
Some Good sailing clipppers would also be rather sexy, and rather key for a british Pak methinks
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cutty_Sark
How are you planning on restricting the shipping types for this Pak, given that there isn't really a nationality to modern shipping design?
I think the general plan is to drop out the lowest capacity ships like barges, wherries etc later in the game. There will be a few higher capacity barges and then your seagoing ships later on. I'm currently planning on including some pretty large international ships. As you say, they will end up looking fairly similar to ships from other paks, but fitting the pak128.Britain graphical style and pak-balance. Most (but not all) boats will end up being pretty generic designs - as far as I know most ships in the world are not part of "cl****es" in the same way trains, trams, buses and planes are, but given how much ships usually get used in the game I don't think that will be a problem. And of course if anyone is really upset about that plan, shout now, or draw your own later...
I'm a fan of the big international ship idea, I've always been a bit confused when I had to have 100's of ships to service even small crossings in game. Maybe after the Sail ships like clippers and fishing schooners which will obviously have a unique look, the pak should move to more generic cl****es of ship (they do exist) like panamax suezmax etc. with changes in colours to make identification easy, with years just progressing the capacity and speed. Also If the way restrictions of canal p****age could even be included for the canal going ships you could have the challange of balancing the ultralarge crude carriers that have to go round the coastal routes like the capes, against the panamax and suezmax type ships that could do canal shortcuts.
Canals in pak128.Britain are intended for narrowboat style boats. Ocean-going ship canals will have to be dug by altering the landscape (but in standard, there are no restrictions anyway, so you could drive a supertanker down a small canal no problem...)
Anyway, here's the list of planned sailing era boats:
- Humber Keel (coastal/inland)
- Dogger (fishing boat)
- Fifie (fishing boat)
- Brig (sea/ocean going, medium capacity)
- East Indiaman (ocean-going, high capacity; 1750-1830)
- Blackwall Frigate (ocean-going, high capacity; 1830-1890)
- Windjammer (ocean-going, high capacity; 1890-1940)
- Clipper (ocean-going, fast high capacity; 1830-1870)
About panamax, suezmax - that may be one solution. I wouldn't call those "cl****es" in the same way as a cl**** of trains though, they are more of a size limit, but it will probably do for our purposes.
I guess thats where a little ingame honesty will be required from me using way points to avoid the supertanker on aquaduct disparity.
I think thats a good set of ships, the fifie will look very good in the pak colours, though I'll admit I'm interested to see how you render the busy looking ships like the clipper and windjammer with many masts and rigging ingame, maybe a little adaption of the truth, reducing mast numbers or sail arrangements so they look cleaner. I'm not an artist though and I've been impressed with the work so far so I'll leave that to you. Do you have a plan for the non-sail powered cargo carriers?
No, hence my post at the top of this page asking for ideas :)
Ok well I shall offer some webpages of ideas that occur to me as I find them, I'll just re-edit this list to avoid board spamming.
Liberty ships as mentioned above:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberty_ship
Or the sucessor
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victory_ship
Refrigerated Cargo ship 1942-1963
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MV_Brisbane_Star
WW1 Wartime merchant shipping in dazzle paint might be fun like this american one sold to british.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Wilhelmina_%28ID-2168%29
or this
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SS_West_Nohno
or this
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_West_Ekonk_%28ID-3313%29
Apparently the earliest Container ships were converted versions of these WW2 Tankers
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T2_tanker
WW2 Oilers in series
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ranger_cl****_tanker
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wave_cl****_oiler
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surf_cl****_oiler
and onto...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leaf_cl****_tanker
Steam Fishing trawler
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lydia_Eva_%28steam_drifter%29
Diesel Fishing trawler
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arctic_Corsair
The post WW2 container ships and Tankers all look rather similar from what I can tell, but I'm not a merchant shipping buff, maybe thats when you use the panamax suezmax designations for what is otherwise a large number of unique but also very similar ships. Since you don't appear to get the large production runs of single design ships of the wars.
If you are feeling controversial you could consider whalers, since they were a huge industry in the past.
Thats just some food for thought with regards to what things might look like. Hope it helps :-D
BTW. you can solve the ussues with horse draw barges, but making them "electric" and privede the towing patch as electrification ... THen you can avoid barge with magical horses easily.
That would be extremely counter-intuitive to users for a horse to be "electric" rather than biological. In Experimental, way constraints are used.
That's an interesting idea prissi, but I think it might look a bit strange with the interaction of towpath graphics and rivers, aqueducts, tunnels, etc., and as jamespetts says, it is slightly counter-intuitive.
To be honest, I'm more concerned about magical supertankers that can squeeze down narrow canals. They drastically increase the capacity you can move per boat, so they make canals much more useful later on than they should be. And of course the fact that all simu-boats are magical because they can p**** straight through each other, effectively allowing infinite capacity on a canal/sea tile, or has that anomaly been fixed now?
Finally, thanks MacPau for your ideas. I'll see how it pans out when I get to that stage in the timeline...
@The hood: no this anomalie has not been fixed. And it is unlikely that this will be fixed in the near future.
Right further to my problems in getting these ships when drawn ready for the game. I have tried many thing but still cannot get it right. If someone is willing to take the 3d drawings when they are done and get them ready for the game i would be extremly happy. Just tell me what file extension to use and i'll get them converted and uploaded as I do them. The current file is .skp.
;D
I can import them into blender and generate a consistent style with the current images if you can get them to me in google earth (.kmz) or .dae format.
Hi mate Here is the first boat it is the narrowboat President as a .dae file and some data on the boat itself. You said you could render them and set it up for the game as I find it a problem to get right. If it all goes okay more boats to follow.
thanx
Awesome, I've managed to get it into blender and with a bit of re-scaling and adjusting the colours it fits right in! I've not had time to render it properly and get it in game yet though (hence no pictures), and I doubt I'll have that much time over the next week or so, but if you keep the models coming I can sort them out eventually.
PS I merged the topic as it follows on the discussion in this thread.
Managed to find a bit of time today to finish off the Humber Keel (a sailing barge descended from the Viking longboats apparently, maybe you can tell in the pictures?) and also I've got Druid's narrowboat into the game, re-scaled and with a few finishing touches like different cargo pictures so it fits with the other boats. Here's some screenies:
Right
I have uploaded 3 ships I created for pak britain as .dae into files.[ simutrans [dot] us (site down, do not visit) ] for the hood to render and place in game (as I can't seem to do that, so I'll stick to drawing them).
Boats so far with background information;
British cargo narrowboat for canals,
Clyde sea going p****enger/cargo paddle steamer,
Clan Line cargo steamer,
what other boats do we need and I'll get onto them.
:)
Thanks druid! I'll take a look at the cargo steamer and clyde steamer when I get chance (actually I started work on the clyde steamer but I didn't get much time so no pictures yet! But it looks good).
Here's one list I had come up with of older ships that need doing:
- Dogger (fishing boat)
- Fifie (fishing boat)
- Brig (sea/ocean going, medium capacity)
- East Indiaman (ocean-going, high capacity; 1750-1830)
- Blackwall Frigate (ocean-going, high capacity; 1830-1890)
- Windjammer (ocean-going, high capacity; 1890-1940)
- Clipper (ocean-going, fast high capacity; 1830-1870)
But feel free to look in the rest of this topic for ideas and draw whatever you want. The only limit is that it must have been used in Britain!
Thanks for helping with this!
PS at some stage can you send the model of the big tanker ship you drew and I can convert that too?
not a problem mate will do as soon as I can, but need some data to accompany it first.
For the purpose of windjammer: you can use the Flying-P-Liner if the graphics (pak128) is suitable to pak128.britain I made it long ago and it's now under free license. I think it is one of the only bigger sailing ships available in simutrans. And it was a hard piece of work.
Maybe it is a good idea to unite the shipping departments of the different paks, unless there are enough ships in every pak available. Shipping in 128 right now is impossible in earlier times.
But don't be chauvinist: the Flying-Ps were from a german shipping company.
JS,
Thanks for the offer. That's more or less what I want, it looks great, but I think to fit the pak128.Britain scale it would need to be bigger and also I'd need to tweak the colours. Colours I can do in the GIMP, but scale is tricker. The easiest solution would be if you made it in blender or another 3D program, and then I could re-render it to the same scale and colour settings as the rest of pak128.Britain. Does such a model exist or did you draw it pixel by pixel?
As for uniting the shipping departments, the main problem is consistency of scale and size. There will be more ships in pak128.Britain than current pak128, going right back to 1750 as you can see. Of course these are all open source so no reason why they can't be used in 128 if people want to adapt them!
As for them being German, we'll just have to keep that quiet! But then again, I think the design looks the same as what I want, I'm just after a generic windjammer.
It was hard work: that means pixel to pixel, in principle. I created some modules, like mast, shrouds..., to put them together time by time. But everything happened in the Gimp (the next time I will take another prog). So there is no easy scaling. I don't know the British rules of scaling, and I never rescaled something before. Did you rescaled a pixeled picture so far? Along with this work might come some slight easy modifications (e.g. color of hulk, height of last mast) to keep the British ship distinct from pak128. I can't estimate the amount of work, it might be easier to just draw a new one in a scalable programm. With new modules, for the next sailing ship getting easier painted. Drawing a sailing ship can be really painful, as there are only few straight lines or forms. But the result is much more satisfying.
The case of the two paks: I don't think we should mix the ships alltogether (this would be the beginning of the end of pak.britain), only the ships that are missing in one pak. Marked clearly as non-native, so hopefully someone will start to work on them sometime. Right now me, and I don't think no one else, knows the status of pak128 shipping. This will a future project.
Rescaling with pixels is a nightmare, and the results aren't great either. I don't think sailboats should be too much work in blender, as I've already got some small sailing boats (e.g. the humber keel and thames sailing barge), so I have some of the "components", which I can re-scale and copy until I have a new boat. But I will do some trials with your existing windjammer just to see what it is like, but I'd say it's more likely I'll draw a new one. Thanks for the offer though, and no offence to your graphics skills (it looks amazing, just in a pak128 way rather than a pak128.Britain way!).
Am a bit behind the times, as I've only just had broadband enabled in my new flat, but - lovely latest editions!
Just uploaded to files.[ simutrans [dot] us (site down, do not visit) ] a 1906 scottish Seine Nette fishing boat th "Success". Got information on build and that but could not find data on carrying capacity sorry. But at least thats another boat.
Cool. Don't worry if you can't find all the stats you need, I can just invent some that seem to fit for what we need.
I'm also hoping for some time to start converting some of these next week, but still there's plenty of potential for that time to get hijacked!
not to worry at least we are getting these ships built. Another one added a 1970 to present day Shell Handysize Tanker on files.[ simutrans [dot] us (site down, do not visit) ].
working on some other ones not in your list but used by uk between 1850 and 1945
It's been a while since anything new, so here's a quick preview of the clyde steamer (again another joint effort between druid and me).
Very lovely! And it's excellent to see new contributors working towards Pak128.Britain, too, especially with quality like that.
I decided the Clyde steamer was too small compared to the docks and buildings. Hopefully this one looks better, but I'd appreciate other people's thoughts...
Also below is the Clan Line cargo steamer, also by druid, using the Zeno "big ships" technique (it's 192x192).
The larger steamer does look better, I think. The new Clan Line steamer is also delightful - an excellent contribution! Are there any plans for ocean going sailing ships of earlier eras?
Yep currently working on some uk ships from 1700 to 1850. Hopefully have them done and sent off to the hood soon. Also I have a pirate ship if we want to include piracy.
8)
Awesome new graphics, you guys have gotten me fully converted to pak britain and creating a large new game from a blank map upwards. Any spoilers on the capacities and cargo's of the boats so I can plan my network a bit more fully?
@jamespetts - yes, a full boat timeline is intended, either by me or druid, but at the minute I'm just bringing druid's boats into the game as I get time.
@druid - cool, looking forward to the new batch of boats. The pirate ship definitely sounds like a great idea, but what would it transport? Maybe I could do a slightly random pirate add-on (bringing back "pieces of eight" from the "high seas" industry to a "smuggler's cove" on the land?)
@TheMacpau - capacities not yet determined fully - the small boats are around 20 crates of cargo, but the larger ones I need to work out what would balance well in the game. Quite large though.
Anyway, here's the seine netter type of fishing boats by druid. I've done two versions, one steam (first picture) and one diesel (second picture). These work with the new fishing chain (with a special fishing port building that acts as an intermediate industry between fishing ground and fishmonger - you can see the artwork for this in the first shot).
Thanks Hood, I'll leave space for some of the station addition buildings to act as smoothing for the large shipping surges. A capacitor in my circuit diagram.
Will the new stage in the Fishing require the creation of a new transportable product
Because:
Fish (Fishery-Fishing port)
followed by
Fish (Fishing port-Fishmonger)
seems rather odd, or are you thinking "raw fish" and "processed fish" or "fish fillets"
The new fishing chain will be:
fishing ground ---(Fresh Fish)--> Fishing port ----(fish)---> Fishmonger
Fresh fish is a unique goods type, only transportable by fishing boats. The idea is that this allows specialist fishing boats, and that other boats capable of carrying cooled goods (e.g. container vessels of cooled goods) cannot pick up from fishing grounds (fairly sensibly!). When I release this in v1.06, it may break existing saves with the old fishing chain.
So if I just leave out the fishing chain is an old save likely to work, or is it a more likely a total loss?
Looking very lovely! The Hood - you could make it work more or less (i.e., load without crashing, if not have a fully working transport network involving fish) by using compat.tab, I think.
I've done some tests - no crashes, but you may get funny behaviour with the fishing chain for saves <=v1.05 (this chain may be broken or fishing grounds still producing cooled goods). Nothing a bit of work with the map editor shouldn't be able to fix if you really want the new fishing chain working in old saves.
Thanks for the re****urance, I really don't want to have to re-do all my ground work :-)
One more - here's druid's handysize tanker.
@druid - can you give me a list of what you are planning to draw so I don't draw the same things?
Good work, Druid!
I've also adapted the handysize ship to produce container and bulk variants, as you can see in these screenshots.
Excellent work! Eagerly awaiting the next release and hoping it includes these!
Very nice :)
This ships looks nice and big. Is a ship only one tile?
Thanks for the feedback. The ship is only one tile but uses a graphical hack. The image tile size is 192x192 and is packed using makeobj pak192. I have used offsets to centre the images on the centre of a 128x128 tile. pak128 Still recognises the pak file and you get what you see in the screenshot. The only problem is when it is docked, it can sometimes look like it is over-riding the dock, but I prefer that to an obviously tiny scale ship compared to the dock.
The Hood,
good work! As to the hack - does one compile all boats with makeobj pak192? If not, it might be helpful to put those that are compiled in that way into a separate directory (perhaps subdirectory), to avoid confusion.
@jamespetts,
No, 192 dats and 128 dats are in separate directories as they require different makeobj parameters. You'll see when I upload them to sourceforge.
New boat added to [ simutrans [dot] us (site down, do not visit) ] It is the schooner "Nancy" . She was ocean going and commissioned: 1784. She was still in service until 1850 when she was sunk by a privateer. Used to carry spices, tea, Chinese jade and porcelain as well as jewellery.
Hope you like it.
And here she is in the game...
OK I've just compiled the Newest revisions and had a quick mess about, to see how things worked.
My first impression is that the graphics are great and the 192 graphic boats look suitably imposing when moving into port.
As I look further into the dat's they are obviously unbalanced atm and the prices and costs will be updated as people work out how much they need to be.
However the relative power of the Schooner when compared to the, 192 ships, looks ridiculous (80T sail boat at 200kw compared to 150kw for the 320T steam powered ones.)
Secondly I get an odd artifact, where the speed of some of the boats, seems to vary rather a lot under stable conditions ie. running on a canal. Furthermore the speed of the boats with this odd variation, but not the others, seems to change when I alter the game speed.
I'll post a save game if you can't replicate.
Sorry, I know the boats are completely unbalanced. I'll try and do something crude before the next official release, but I'm kind of leaving balancing till all ships and planes are done.
I understood that that was kind of the plan, (I'll just have to remember to buy my stock of boats for my game before the update then ;-D )
Could you replicate my boat speed anomaly, if I've explained it well enough?
Yes, I know what you mean and can replicate. In fact this is known to occur in various paksets with various different vehicle types, and is most pronounced with fast forward on. It's something to do with how the game calculates acceleration and how max speeds are implemented, but I can't find the link to the thread where it was discussed.
As for your plan of buying your boats before the upgrade, the upgrade is clever. It will hunt down your boats and change them too :o Of course you could always just mod the dats and build them yourself how you want them, which obviously isn't beyond you because you've already made the boat pak from sources anyway :P
But the game can't retro actively charge me an increased purchase price, unless the updates are much smarter than I thought :-D
I'll have a hunt for the thread...For the weird relative powers fo the Schooner and Huge capacity (loving the large capacity btw) boats maybe a fudge using the gearing to keep the ingame performance right while not making the sail boat more powerfull than the huge steamer.
Good work on the boats - excellent graphics! Lovely to see them added to the SVN. I notice, however, that the power on all of the larger boats is set to 150kW, which is a great deal too low for enormous ocean-going ships. If the power were set to realistic values (in the four figures), it would not be necessary to use such a large gear value.
Incidentally, might I suggest that somebody consider producing a p****enger-carrying canal boat, such as the Paddington Packet Boat (http://www.canalmuseum.org.uk/history/grandjun.htm)?
Last boat before xmas loaded onto [ simutrans [dot] us (site down, do not visit) ]. It is the Armistice a 14 gun East indiaman. Hope you enjoy. No more ships for a while as its now xmas season and I will be busy.
Lovely! And Merry Christmas to you!
I just discovered a major barge problem in simutrans-experimental....
(Apologies if this has already been fixed.... I'm running experimental 7.0 'bugfix' because the linux build for 7.1 isn't ready yet, and pak128.britain-ex 0.4, which has a few barges)
Barges are cleverly specified so that they must go on waterways and not on the open ocean.
Unfortunately, the shipyard must be built on the open ocean. Therefore it is impossible to get any barges moving.
;D
I think the fix for this is clear -- a barge shipyard which can be built on a canal. Does this require work in the core code of simutrans-experimental, or can it just be done?
Hmm, I thought that there was already such a shipyard. I seem to remember there being one when I tested it. Are you sure that there isn't a canal based boatyard?
Here's the East Indiaman in game with some extra details added... I think it's a really great model!
I think so, too :)
Very fine.
Had a great christmas picked up a virus and had to rebuild the computer, but now I'm back. Good to see my eastindiaman in the game. Is there any particular ship you would like me to work on next, as I need a new project.
:-X
It would be good to complete the sailing era, so we need:
- Dogger (fishing boat)
- Fifie (fishing boat)
- Brig (sea/ocean going, medium capacity)
- Blackwall Frigate (ocean-going, high capacity; 1830-1890)
- Windjammer (ocean-going, high capacity; 1890-1940)
- Clipper (ocean-going, fast high capacity; 1830-1870)
But if you have anything else you'd rather do, feel free.
I'm going to try and finish all the sailing boats for the next release. Here's the dogger (early sail fishing boat).
Excellent!
Completing the age of sail (unless anyone informs me I've omitted something major!):
-Fifie fishing boat (should be obvious)
-Schooner (small 3-mast boat in main picture, this is a new graphic for the schooner from a few posts back, which actually was a brig because it is square-rigged, so I have re-used that graphic as a brig)
-Blackwall Frigate (slightly larger, slower of the 2 large boats in the main screenshot)
-Clipper (smaller, faster boat in the main screenshot)
-Windjammer (final shot, 5 masts)
Very impressive indeed! It looks like a lot of research has gone into that, too. I see why you're keen on wind-based speed!
Just d/l the Clipper, Blackwall Frigate, et al from the svn repository.
If the Norfolk Wherry (25 crates goods, 20kW) costs 0.02c/km to operate, shouldn't the Humber Keel (50 crates, 30kW) cost say 0.03c, and certainly the Blackwall Frigate (600 crates, 300kW) takes much more manpower and maintenance yet it's still at 0.02c/km? And for a purchase price of just 4x the Wherry!
Nevertheless, despite those balancing issues, I love how the big ships carry p****engers and mail and cargo too! (I'm restarting my 1840 ocean-oriented game, mmm!) Now if we could eliminate the resulting phantom blank-squares on the p****enger tab of the shipyard menu...
As you've realised, not a lot of effort went into the balancing of these (a) because I prefer drawing new stuff to getting dat values right and (b) because I can't do a proper balance until I've done all the ships and set a speedbonus curve. At the minute I'm planning a major re-balancing of all game finance things once all ships and planes are finished. Before then, the more feedback the merrier!
About the depot - you can remove them by making sure "show all" is unchecked (or at least should be able to). Vehicles can only carry one cargo each, hence the need for ghost vehicles. Hopefully though the multiple cargos will make big ships work only on trunk routes.
impressive, to say the least.
Is there a reason all the boats in diesel-barge.dat have "engine_type=steam" ? The diesel Seine Netter has "engine_type=diesel" ...
There is a reason, but it's not a very good one...! Will fix tonight.
Time for something new. The PS Comet was the world's first commercially succesful steam ship and it operated on the Clyde from 1812.
Lovely!
This appears to have been fixed in the interim. (Given that there have been *huge* updates in pak128.Britain I'm not surprised!)
After a long wait, here's another. A 1820s era wooden paddle steamer sails into Walsall Dock.
Very nice! I love the flag - excellent touch!
Here's another (sorry for the slow progress, but it's about all I can manage at the minute). The first purpose-built trans-atlantic steamship, the SS Great Western of 1838.
Very impressive! Although, since when did Maidenhead have a dock? :-p
Definitely overdue for some development, but after a long time, here is the SS Great Britain (some uncanny parallels with the real-life equivalent here...). Hopefully it won't run aground in game and bankrupt me to resue it! And just for the pedants amongst us, it's seen departing from Bristol. (not Maidenhead or any other inland town!)
Excellent! Good to see the progress resume. I should do some more Simutrans related things, too...