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[Mega Project] pak128.Britain Balancing

Started by The Hood, January 25, 2016, 08:40:27 PM

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The Hood

Thanks for the feedback - it more or less tallies with what I'm thinking.

One thing I have found doing the balancing is that I can only get a consistent set of balance parameters across the full timeline if older goods trains get a lot longer than they are allowed (30-40 wagons of 8t or so). This is reasonable in that historical goods trains were easily this long (some were up to 60 apparently). The problem arises that Standard has a vehicle limit of 24 per convoy. Either we convince the coders to allow this to double, or I draw versions of the old wagons that are two wagons back-to-back but coded as a single "vehicle" for Simutrans purposes.

jamespetts

The former seems sensible, especially as this is very easy to change.
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kierongreen

It is an easy change to make however some dialogues might look strange.

The Hood

Quote from: kierongreen on April 10, 2016, 02:11:01 PM
It is an easy change to make however some dialogues might look strange.
I think this may have been raised as an objection last time I requested it. Jamespetts - how does it look in experimental (where I think it allows longer convoys?)

jamespetts

It looks fine, but this is because the depot dialogue is set to be extended automatically.
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kierongreen

Extended by allowing scrolling or just by making the window bigger?

jamespetts

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kierongreen

Hmm, scrolling really needs to be there to allow this to be viewed on older displays.

Also - will shorter goods trains with less powerful locomotives be possible TheHood?

Drewthegreat87

If it isn't too late, I would vote that all the equipment stays in, but if I may ask, if they are to be removed, could the removed assets be made into an "add-on" to the base pack so users can have any and all equipment they would want (as also stated earlier in the thread)? I'm a bit of an equipment hoarder. I've been adding many of the new assets and different liveries of existing equipment from Experimental into Standard so I can have even greater variety. I might be in the minority on that one, but I would really appreciate it if there was some way to keep all the existing equipment or at least the .png files and .dat files available for download and packing in makeobj.


On a side note, I know this isn't prototypical, but if in the game, you're one company, why not have it set up where all equipment corresponds to either player color (I understand that would require a massive graphics re-do...). That or have just one livery for all equipment (I know, heresy!)

Both of those ideas would involve some hefty graphics changes, so I know they wouldn't be practical, but still, they're considerations. 

The Hood

Quote from: kierongreen on April 10, 2016, 06:50:37 PM
Also - will shorter goods trains with less powerful locomotives be possible TheHood?

Not without serious anomalies - I've tried all sorts of hacks and the only one that works is the scheme I've got at present which is also the most similar to "realistic" length convoys. Mixed traffic locos need to work equally well with pax or freight; while modern carriages have similar capacities per vehicle to in the past, that's nowhere near the case e.g. for bulk transport. To get the accelerations about right (given different speeds of different cargoes too...) you get a particular weight of train the loco can pull for each cargo type. Having underpowered goods locos for shorter goods trains means mixed traffic locos become insanely good at freight and pathetic compared to even modest passenger locos, UNLESS you have a weird system where 1t of coal in game actually weighs 2t (!), but this then means that modern freight trains are only a couple of wagons long which looks odd. On my scheme the LMS 8F can turn a decent profit with 36x 12t wagons (432t) which takes up 8 tiles. It's long, but then if you want shorter trains you buy a 4F (16x 12t) or a 3F (12x 12t) instead and it's far more economical. For comparison a modern class 66 goes with 9x HTA (675t) and comes in at 7 tiles. I suppose you could just make EVERY train shorter, including passenger trains, but then you run into problems with the EMUs/DMUs as they are fixed length (unless you then start halving their capacities, and soon virtually nothing in the pak resembles realistic numbers anymore...). So to me its most intuitive to have the system I've got where you need long trains for heavy freights, which you either achieve with increasing the vehicle limit or you create "double vehicles". I know to some people 9 tile trains is excessive but pak128.Britain has always had a large scope and I seriously don't buy the 1 tile = 1km rule.The demo game has 8 tile stations and the only game I've played myself has stations 6 tiles as standard, and that's in 1900 before the bigger, more powerful trains come along.


Maybe there is a way of doing it that works better than the way I've found, but I've spent the best part of a month (or even more) on it, and got similar conclusions to when I last tried it 3 years ago. I don't want to put anyone off finding a better way, but you're a better pakset balancer than me if you can pull it off!

Quote from: Drewthegreat87 on April 10, 2016, 07:00:07 PM
On a side note, I know this isn't prototypical, but if in the game, you're one company, why not have it set up where all equipment corresponds to either player color (I understand that would require a massive graphics re-do...). That or have just one livery for all equipment (I know, heresy!)

Both of those ideas would involve some hefty graphics changes, so I know they wouldn't be practical, but still, they're considerations. 

I have occasionally toyed with the idea of a player colour set (probably a cut down version rather than the hundreds of vehicles we have at present) but it's a HUGE amount of work, and doesn't even work well with the blender workflow. I've decided against doing it myself as I prefer the realistic liveries aspect - I'm probably happiest in the pseudo-sandbox style. I just can't justify spending that much time on something I wouldn't get to use myself - sorry that's a bit selfish but then again I'm just an amateur... Most happy for someone else to go about producing them though!

kierongreen

Quote from: The Hood on April 10, 2016, 07:34:36 PM
On my scheme the LMS 8F can turn a decent profit with 36x 12t wagons (432t) which takes up 8 tiles. It's long, but then if you want shorter trains you buy a 4F (16x 12t) or a 3F (12x 12t) instead and it's far more economical. For comparison a modern class 66 goes with 9x HTA (675t) and comes in at 7 tiles.
7 or 8 tiles for long trains is fine! That fits in well with long (eg full length HST) passenger services. Would just be nice to ensure there are Class 20, and as you indicated 3 and 4F or equivalent to operate shorter services (maybe even shunters) :)

Vladki

Double freight waggons are already a part of pak128.cs, also to overcome the limit of 24 vehicles. If you want you can look at their sources at sf.svn

jamespetts

Quote from: kierongreen on April 10, 2016, 06:50:37 PM
Hmm, scrolling really needs to be there to allow this to be viewed on older displays.

Are there many people playing Simutrans on 1024x768 these days?
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Vladki

Once upon a time, there was a poll about screen sizes among players...

kierongreen

Even for users with higher resolution displays they might not want to use Simutrans fullscreen. Or they might have altered the scaling (see the 4k thread). I would say that all dialogues should be usable at somewhere in the region of 640x480 (some dialogues are a bit tight with that at the moment). Of course these days practically everyone will have significantly more space than that, which allows people to have multiple windows open in Simutrans. Or for windows which benefit from larger areas they could resize them to use more of the screen. However a window which has to be 1024x768 or bigger is really going to constrain what people can do.

HarrierST

Quote from: jamespetts on April 11, 2016, 11:10:37 AM
Are there many people playing Simutrans on 1024x768 these days?

Sorry can not play any higher. :-[

But ignore me - I can not play your game anyway.

Because, I am not a programmer and do not know how to update your changes.

Do not point me to threads - I have tried to read them - they are just black magic.

Pity as i liked the way you were going.   ::'(

kierongreen

QuoteBut ignore me - I can not play your game anyway.

Because, I am not a programmer and do not know how to update your changes.

Do not point me to threads - I have tried to read them - they are just black magic.
What is it in particular you are having difficulties with?

Isaac Eiland-Hall

Quote from: HarrierST on April 12, 2016, 02:05:41 AM
But ignore me - I can not play your game anyway.

I see prior posts where you cannot play Experimental, but are able to play Standard, so that shouldn't exclude you from this particular topic.

HarrierST

Quote from: kierongreen on April 12, 2016, 09:15:30 AM
What is it in particular you are having difficulties with?

I have an old system (XP), my system only supports  1024x768, efficiently.  I can run at a few higher resolutions, I tried 1280x1024, but when I exit a program it  is like a car crash (flashing - black screen then back to normal).  So after trying a few times I reverted back to  1024x768.

Quote from: Isaac.Eiland-Hall on April 12, 2016, 03:07:00 PM
I see prior posts where you cannot play Experimental, but are able to play Standard, so that shouldn't exclude you from this particular topic.

Sorry, I got confused and was thinking about Experimental.  :-[

kierongreen

Quote from: HarrierST on April 13, 2016, 01:06:24 AM
Sorry, I got confused and was thinking about Experimental.  :-[
Don't worry! Simutrans (standard) has quite a few players with older and/or less powerful systems and we try to make sure that it will keep running on these :) Hence comments about needing to ensure that Depot window is usable in smaller resolutions :)