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Consistency: Large ship cannel lowers speed of navigable large river ramp.

Started by DrSuperGood, July 16, 2018, 02:27:00 PM

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DrSuperGood

Was upgrading some of my lines and semi-accidently upgraded an elevation/ramp of large river to large ship canal. Both have same restrictions as far as vehicle capability.

The problem is that the locks that the large ship canal have installed actually slow down ships using the river. The natural, before installing locks, speed for the elevation/ramp is 40km/h. The large ship canal locks are just 2km/h. This means ships can more quickly traverse the river without upgrading it to large ship canal than after upgrading.

Now locks being slow is understandable, they just are in real life. However the bug here is not with the locks themselves, but rather that the locks were created to begin with. Since this river had no problem operating ship traffic without locks before, there should be no locks installed as they are not needed. Alternatively ships should not be allowed to travel up the river without first installing locks to allow them to do so. The current logic is counter intuitive as it is better to not canal the rivers than it is to canal them, which is the opposite of what the canal way tools will do since it will automatically "upgrade" the large river to large ship canal when dragging over it.

jamespetts

It is not really helpful to classify this as a bug, as it is clearly working as it was designed to work: any canal on any sloped tile is represented as a lock and has a speed restriction commensurate with a lock. Rather, the issue is that the basic mechanism of upgrading navigable rivers on tiles with canals thus creating locks is anomalous.

I can understand the issue - but rectifying this would require some quite substantial and fairly fundamental changes to the way in which canals work of a rather different order of magnitude than would be required for fixing a bug. It would also require some careful thought about precisely what is being represented by a navigable river on a sloped tile.
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DrSuperGood

Until someone makes better canal mechanics I would suggest making upgrading of navigable water ways to canals require use of a key modifier to prevent this from happening by mistake.

jamespetts

Quote from: DrSuperGood on July 16, 2018, 06:07:10 PM
Until someone makes better canal mechanics I would suggest making upgrading of navigable water ways to canals require use of a key modifier to prevent this from happening by mistake.

This is not simple: it only makes sense to do this on slopes, but then this introduces significant complexity. If this be done generally, canals would have an inconsistent interface with everything else, which would be extremely confusing to players.
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