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Depot simplification when only a few cehicles are available

Started by Flemmbrav, September 18, 2017, 06:07:18 PM

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Flemmbrav

Hi!
I just painted a GTW and a few cars without payload.
The cars and the GTW power packs appear in the "Lokomotive" tab, which is fine by itself. These cars do not have any payload, right?
But they can only be attached to a very few amount of vehicles, which they are crucial for.
When a new player would try to buy my GTW, he won't find the two different power packs. Same for the car without payload.

It currently does look like this:
https://i.imgur.com/KmNr5l3.png

So, what's my suggestion?
When there is enough space to have all the tabs open without a scrollbar, do so.
A smal mockup i did:


Ters

Just give all vehicles passengers payloads, but give the power cars zero capacity. That is how other EMUs/DMUs do it.

Flemmbrav

I know, right?
What taht would lead to is:
You see the diesel power unit in the "Passanger" tab, and the electric one hides in the "Electrics" tab. Taht's actually worse, since you don't see the other option at all, just a smal hint for it.

So I get what you're talking about, but I don't think that'ld solve it.
Same applies for that car without payload, since it's a car for cargo, it appears in the "Lokomotive" tab.

On the otther side, the proposed change would benefit smal / early depots quite a lot too.

Ters

All parts of a multiple unit should appear next to each other on the same tab. Most pak sets contain a lot more vehicles than shown above, and the depot windows is not that wide by default. If players can't see all parts, they are not likely to think of making the window wider. (The depot window has already become much wider than the other windows, which makes it harder to arrange with the other windows.)

Leartin

I think the base problem is that the automatic seperation of "locomotives" and "passenger trains" does not always make sense, especially when electricity comes along, due to powered cars with load. But powered cars with load almost always come in a restricted set - you usually can't use them as normal locomotives but only with a handful of specific cars, which in turn can only be used with that specific powered car. So if you want to build a "normal" pax train with seperated locomotive and cars, which usually allows to combine any locomotive with any non-set car, not only do you have to switch between tabs, but you also have to know which cars can and which can't be used - and constraints are not visible to the player.

Now, seperating "sets with powered cars" from normal cars is something entirely different, which would go into a "custom tab"-territory.

As for the suggestion, something that might be easier to program: What if it isn't two tabs in one depot window, but instead multiple instances of the same depots window? The upper part would show the same things, and no matter in which depot you add or remove cars, the other updates as well. But which tabs are open, which filter are active etc. could be different for each instance. An additional benefit (if that's actually easier to do) would be that each instance has it's own infobar, where information about a car is shown. If you could somehow "select" a train in the depot such that the info persists after the mouse moves away, you could also use this to directly compare two different locomotives/cars, or to select a locomotive in one depot and look for carts fitting it's stats, without ever buying anything.

Flemmbrav

@Tears we do that too.
The GTW is a EMU / DMU. You can build it as both. And with that, I'm not able to keep all cars of it in the same tab.

The size of the depot window there is actually our standard size for it. You can only make it smaller in vertical directions.
So even in the smallest size, there could be 3 times as much vehicles available, and it still would fit in the window.

@Leartin that's great tho.
Maybe I can add to that that if there are only two tabs with addable cars, these two tabs will be displayed?