Two Terraforming Features

[to_carry_the_heavy_load]

I've been playing Simutrans for about a year and a half now, and here are two features that I think would be extremely useful to my particular style of play. Hopefully other people will find these useful too!

Firstly, I would love to have an excavation/digging tool that would raise land by more than one tile at a time. Even with a refined mouse stroke, totally flattening large areas of land is tedious at best currently. I know simutrans claims to not be SimCity, but I think that game actually has a great model for this. You can terraform one tile, four tiles, sixteen tiles, or thirty-two tiles at a time. This would be immensely useful when creating large harbors, or even 2x2 paths for highways and roads. In simutrans, only one point is affected at a time! This means to lower one tile, you must perform 4 actions! Can you imagine on a laptop?

The second thing I'd love to see is multiple grades for inclines. If you think about the way rail and road is built, it makes sense. You have a gentle grade that cuts through peaks and valleys in hilly areas. My ideal would be 20%, 40%, 60%, 80% and 100% grades with 100% being a 45 degree angle and 0% being flat. Though I think if such a system were possible, just having two grades with one at 45 degrees and one at 22.5 degrees would be suitable (and a great improvement!). In theory, it wouldnt mess up the terrain too bad because you could just have the low grades round up or down to the nearest terrain, but I dont know how that applies to code.

A little background on my perspective! I'm a younger player (21) who likes to built realistic (and as close to scale as possible) models of US towns. I know that a lot of these features would fundamentally change the conservative nature from which simutrans is meant to be played, but perhaps a map-editing.pak could bring these features to life without altering the nature of play.

If these things are in simtrans experimental, please forgive me! I'm running windows8 and havent been able to get it running yet

[The Hood]

Double (or half) height inclines is already in the nightly and is due for official release imminently I believe. Your other suggestion sounds good from a user point of view, no idea how easy it would be to code.

[Ters]

One thing to try is to enable dragging for the raise and lower tile tools, although it takes a steady hand to use. Tools that can operate on differently sized chunks of terrain either leads to a more crowded toolbar or another hidden feature like signal spacing.

[to_carry_the_heavy_load]

Double (or half) height inclines is already in the nightly and is due for official release imminently I believe. Your other suggestion sounds good from a user point of view, no idea how easy it would be to code.

Splendid!

One thing to try is to enable dragging for the raise and lower tile tools, although it takes a steady hand to use. Tools that can operate on differently sized chunks of terrain either leads to a more crowded toolbar or another hidden feature like signal spacing.

Ah, thats a good tip since it would still cut the work drastically. Maybe in some unknown, comically far off future version of simutrans we will see this feature then?

[Spacethingy]

One thing to try is to enable dragging for the raise and lower tile tools, although it takes a steady hand to use.

That already is in the game:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=rqAxNdjQFYw

(...and good heavens, what the heck did Google do, forcing YouTube and G+ to mate? Ugh...)

[Ters]

That already is in the game:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=rqAxNdjQFYw

That's not the raise or lower tile tools, but the normal raise land tool. The raise/lower tile tools are part of the artificial slope tools, although they normally make no slope. (I can find no formal name for these tools in the game. Haven't checked if there are specific names in the code.)

[Roboron]

Apologies for necro-posting (I don't like opening duplicates), but recently we got a extension request pretty similar to this via Twitter.

I flattened the large areas of ground grid by grid while keeping ground objects as I enlarge my map...so tedious 😫

However, #Simutrans does not have tools to allow change landscape (flatten, raise, lower grounds) over a larger area without losing ground objects.

Ignoring the part about ground objects (it would be unrealistic to keep them if the terrain has been modified), a tool to drag-and-drop and flatten large areas of terrain would be a nice addition to Simutrans. Just like the change climate tool, but terraforming all the tiles to be the same height of the tile you originally clicked on.

[Yona-TYT]

For these cases the script tools were created, for me it would be fun to make one for this. 😄

[PJMack]

Recently in extended, a I created a PR with two new tools, on of which to flatten a path, as discussed in https://forum.simutrans.com/index.php/topic,21553.0.html.  Such code could be ported to standard and/or used as a basis for a flatten area function.  The diff for the PR can be found in https://github.com/jamespetts/simutrans-extended/pull/532/files (tool-tips were added in a later PR).