I have noticed that a number of latter-day residential, commercial and industrial buildings of higher density have retirement dates of around 2000 or 2010, when there are not yet any replacements for them. This causes town growth after the year 2000 to be restricted to low density buildings only. I suggest commenting out the retirement dates on the buildings in res-80.dat and ind-80.dat. I notice that this has already been done in com-80.dat. I have already done this for Pak128.Britain-Ex, but I suggest that it be done for Standard, too.
Perhaps, to have a whole view of the problem you should create a
house spectrogram using the
pak128 toolbox (http://forum.simutrans.com/index.php?topic=1805.0), specially this script.
I know there are a number of problems, mainly because there are limited citybuildings at the minute. Drawing more is on the to-do list somewhere, and I was planning on using the spectrogram to help. I might comment those dates as a temporary measure, but there are other problems elsewhere and I don't want to waste too much time on something temporary.
Regarding the building of new cities, currently if you play with timeline on and start a game in 1930 you'll get huge cities entirely of bungalows.
While defining more houses/city buildings would make this less strange, "real" cities would have a mix of new and very old buildings.
Should I add an extension request that when Timeline is on, city-building should choose from all buildings whose start date is less than the current year, while ignoring the retirement date? That would give a 1930 game a mix of 'modern,' Victorian, and earlier buildings. I think it would give the appearance of "organically" grown cities.
Yes?
W Lindley,
The Hood already requested this some time back - Prissi responded by saying that it was under consideration for the future, but would have to be implemented along with some other feature to make it work in a more sophisticated way, the details of which I now forget.
See
http://forum.simutrans.com/index.php?topic=2651.0
Hopefully it is still in the pipeline and hasn't been forgotten.