News:

Simutrans.com Portal
Our Simutrans site. You can find everything about Simutrans from here.

Some tweaks on my pak128.britain "ncn-devel" branch

Started by neroden, June 02, 2013, 06:50:02 AM

Previous topic - Next topic

0 Members and 1 Guest are viewing this topic.

neroden

- I found that there were some citybuildings which were present in standard but missing in experimental, and brought them over
- I made several tweaks to the clustering. 
-- The two 1750 terraces don't look good together (due to vastly different setbacks) and need to have separate clusters. 
-- Some of the new buildings needed clusters. 
-- Some semi-detached buildings should cluster together due to neatly matching setbacks.
-- A couple of buildings were in a cluster where they didn't go (one of the 30s shops does not go with the others)
- There were several buildings with bad names; these have been fixed.
- There were some redundant misnamed image files which have been removed.
- The unused version of outside.dat has its "name=" commented out to avoid accidentally building it.

You'll probably want to merge all of these Two more tweaks are included which you may not want to merge.
- The boat horse is converted, experimentally, to have high tractive effort and low power.  This is experimental, but if it works it should be an improvement.
- The Georgian mansion is made into a city attraction.  You don't have to do this if you don't want to.  However, with the paved entryway looking exactly like the sidewalk for the city, it looks good in the city and looks kind of stupid in the countryside.  Really we want it to be "in the suburbs" but with a road with a sidewalk leading up to it, but that's not actually an option yet.

kierongreen

The Georgian mansion was based on one from real life that would have been in the countryside surrounded by acres of farmland, forest and formal gardens.

jamespetts

Thank you very much for your work - that is most helpful. Will merge when I get home and get a chance. The only thing that I shall probably revert is, as Kieron suggests, the Georgian manor, which is based on a country building, not a town building.
Download Simutrans-Extended.

Want to help with development? See here for things to do for coding, and here for information on how to make graphics/objects.

Follow Simutrans-Extended on Facebook.

neroden

Quote from: kierongreen on June 02, 2013, 07:49:31 AM
The Georgian mansion was based on one from real life that would have been in the countryside surrounded by acres of farmland, forest and formal gardens.

I guess the problem, visually, is that in the game it is not surrounded by the acres of farmland, forest, and formal gardens.  Perhaps it would be worth making a version, with a lot more tiles, which includes some of the formal gardens around the building?  That would probably look a lot better in the countryside.  I'm not good at graphics, though.

(We can probably get farmland given approprate factory placement, and it does *sometimes* show up in a forest.)

For reference, I have now tried out the tractive-effort version of the boat horses.  So far, it seems to work quite nicely with tractive_effort set to 30; the boats will be slowed down by heavy loads of coal, but will reach top speed with other cargos.  Acceleration is poor (as it should be), and the boats are slowed down by hills/locks (as they should be).  So that was a definite success.   ;D

(Please note that the commits contain an addition/reversion to tractive_power, which was a false start on fixing a bug.  I'm running into a difficult crash bug, involving vehicles failing to move while saying "schedule changing".  I currently suspect that it is related to the replacer, as I have only been able to trigger it while replacing boats, so far.  But it could instead be related to ship movement or loading.)

kierongreen

A version of the mansion with surroundings would be huge unfortunately so difficult to serve with transport.

jamespetts

Thank you for your interesting experiment with tractive effort of horses; for reference, how fast does it go with a full load of coal? It should not be slowed much by this, as I think that even fully laden boats went no slower than walking pace (5km/h).

Thank you also for looking into other bugs, which is much appreciated: I shall have a chance to merge your fixes when I get home.
Download Simutrans-Extended.

Want to help with development? See here for things to do for coding, and here for information on how to make graphics/objects.

Follow Simutrans-Extended on Facebook.

neroden

Quote from: kierongreen on June 03, 2013, 10:08:32 PM
A version of the mansion with surroundings would be huge unfortunately so difficult to serve with transport.

First point:
We have two castles which are 5x4 in pak.128.britain already.  (I'm a little surprised that the giant castles are CITY attractions, actually.)  We also have two countryside abbeys which are 3x3 and 3x5 respectively.

We don't want all the surroundings, just enough to give the right impression
- 5x4 would give room for 1x2 squares of gardens on each side and the front, and 2x4 squares of gardens in the back.   
- Alternatively, 2x6 (for example) would give 2x2 formal gardens on each side of the mansion and nothing in the back, which could be served (in standard) by one road along the front or back. 
- Even a smaller layout such as 2x4 could place a 2x2 formal garden in the front or back and make the house look less lonely.

Second point:
In experimental, after I program the change to attraction access which I mentioned elsewhere, this will be even less of an issue.  My plan, which James Petts seems to approve of, is that people will be able to access the attraction from every side and get the same results, much like with factories, rather than treating each square as a separate building.  This will allow for *arbitrarily large* attraction artwork, since transport will only need to access it from any one side.  I could hurry up that change if it would give you an incentive.   ;)

Third point:
Of course if you simply don't feel like drawing new art, don't!

jamespetts

A Georgian mansion with some lovely grounds might be quite pleasant, and the pending change with respect to attraction access will remove problems associated with access to large attractions, but this is probably not the highest priority at present.
Download Simutrans-Extended.

Want to help with development? See here for things to do for coding, and here for information on how to make graphics/objects.

Follow Simutrans-Extended on Facebook.

neroden

Quote from: jamespetts on June 03, 2013, 11:16:41 PM
Thank you for your interesting experiment with tractive effort of horses; for reference, how fast does it go with a full load of coal? It should not be slowed much by this, as I think that even fully laden boats went no slower than walking pace (5km/h).
It's been a little hard to test due to the replacer bug which I mentioned.  :-)

I just checked: with a full load of stone, a full narrowboat will get up to full speed (7 km/h).  I haven't had a chance to test a barge canal boat yet (they're heavier, so they might run slower).

Basically, by having high tractive effort and low power:
- acceleration is a lot worse; it takes a while to get up to full speed.  It doesn't happen immediately, but after a few tiles.
- hills (locks) slow down the boats tremendously, to 4 km/h
I think both of those are good effects.  :-)  A lot of boats have these characteristics, so it's probably worth going through a number of the freight boats to drop power and raise tractive effort. 

jamespetts

That is very interesting, thank you for that. I was planning to implement specific code for reducing speed at hills/locks to a fixed level in any event, but this might be a useful proxy until I manage to do that.
Download Simutrans-Extended.

Want to help with development? See here for things to do for coding, and here for information on how to make graphics/objects.

Follow Simutrans-Extended on Facebook.

neroden

Quote from: jamespetts on June 04, 2013, 12:07:04 AM
That is very interesting, thank you for that. I was planning to implement specific code for reducing speed at hills/locks to a fixed level in any event, but this might be a useful proxy until I manage to do that.

This works quite effectively actually.  Although you may want to implement specific code for locks, this actually works REALLY well, and I'd suggest implementing it on all the boats right now.  They're mostly supposed to accelerate poorly but have a lot of pulling power, so "low power / high tractive effort" makes sense in any case.

jamespetts

Thank you for all this - I have now merged your latest changes into my Github repository.
Download Simutrans-Extended.

Want to help with development? See here for things to do for coding, and here for information on how to make graphics/objects.

Follow Simutrans-Extended on Facebook.