Re: Sprawl
Reply #8 –
There are a number of separate issues here, which I shall address separately.
Towns and building density
Knightly is too harsh on himself when he says that his patch is broken; I have not found any problems with it. The original code (and the code that still persists in Simutrans-Standard) contained a significant bug which meant that buildings were far more likely to be replaced with higher density buildings (either during natural growth or iteratively when towns were first built) than they should be according to the "renovation_percentage" setting. In other words, towns were far too concentrated: tiny connurbations with fewer than 1,000 citizens often had quite large buildings and not much else. That is not how towns work in reality: they will sooner grow out than up, and will usually only grow up when there is no more room to grow out, or there is already excessive sprawl. Knightly's patch fixed that, but at the cost of slightly slower map generation. The decision was taken for Simutrans-Standard that the performance difference was a reason for not incorporating Kinghtly's patch at all. After testing it, I found that, although map generation was slower, it was within acceptable bounds, and since a player needs only to generate a map once for many weeks or even months of playing, it was a price worth paying for more realistic cities. In case players of Simutrans-Experimental disagreed with me, I provided the option to disable the new system with the "quick_city_growth" option in simuconf.tab: set quick_city_growth=1 to revert to Simutrans-Standard's system.
The effect is that towns will be less concentrated than in Simutrans-Standard. Using the same (low) renovation_percentage as in Simutrans-Standard (the default, I think, is 12) will result in excessive sprawl. The next version of Pak128.Britain-Ex will include a revised cityrules.tab with a revised figure of 33. Even with the revised figure, cities will be less dense than in previous versions, and this is intentional: the density in Simutrans-Standard is too high. There will be far more interesting suburban p****enger transport if town densities are more realistic.
If anyone really prefers the excessive density of Simutrans-Standard, either set the renovation_percentage setting in cityrules.tab to a very high level (as other in this thread have already tried), or set quick_city_growth=1 in simuconf.tab.
Knightly - what are the bugs of which you are aware in this? It's rather a pity that you lost the latest version of your patch. You are quite welcome, of course, to push a fix to your Github repository, where I'll gladly incorporate it into the next release of Experimental :-)
Town population growth
Brambo, I have not had any other reports of this issue and not noticed it myself - can you elaborate on your observations that town population growth in Simutrans-Experimental 8.1 is higher than in 7.3? If you find the growth too high, however, you can adjust simuconf.tab settings for this, too:
growthfactor_villages = 400
growthfactor_cities = 200
growthfactor_capitals = 100
is the default: doubling the various numbers should halve city growth rates (and so forth). The next release of Pak128.Britain-Ex will feature higher growthfactor numbers, and therefore lower town growth.
Fields
I have isolated this to a bug that can be reproduced in Simutrans-Standard: see the bug report here. When a fix is released for Standard, I shall incorporate it into Experimental and expedite the release of the fix.
In the meantime, however, note that fields can be built over without changing to public player, except when a farm has the minimum number of fields already. Just as in real life, fields (in both -Standard and -Experimental) are dispensable to some degree. Note that you can also build power lines over fields without even destroying the field - just as in real life.
Absence of farms
You will get only power station related industries if you have a large number of large towns, start late in the game, set "electricity_percentage" in the new world dialogue to a high level and have few industry chains. This is because Simutrans will make sure that there are enough power stations (and ****ociated support industries) to cover the whole population (or whatever fraction is selected in "electricity_percent"): if few industry chains are selected in comparison to the population, there will only be room for power stations. I suspect that this is what is happening here.
Topic: Sprawl (Read 8054 times)
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