[Poll] Simutrans-Experimental survey

[jamespetts]

I should be very grateful if as many regular (and not so regular) Simutrans users could vote in this poll: it would give a most useful insight into people's preferences. If possible, I should be grateful if people could expand on their answers in this thread, especially those who vote that they do not use Simutrans-Experimental for techincal reasons or because it is not available on their platform.

Any other feedback relating to Simutrans-Experimental would be very much appreciated :-)

[Isaac Eiland-Hall]

"I have not tried Simutrans-Experimental because I am concerned about performance/other technical issues." -- you've got a great writeup of how to install it, but... I just haven't had the gumption to walk through it. I bet that's frustrating for you - it would be for me... :/  But at least I can say -- I haven't played much ANY simutrans, so.. it's not quite as bad as it sounds

[diegoviagens]

I use and like the trial version, but not me
very pleased that the change was in version 5.0 for
version 6.0.
did not like the way the version 6.0

[mwoodburn81]

I use and like the trial version, but not me
very pleased that the change was in version 5.0 for
version 6.0.
did not like the way the version 6.0

What changes did you not like in version  6.0?

[Soldim]

I have played with it, and like the new concepts a lot. Of course, if a fully compatible pakset would exist it would even be more realistic. I am following the development closely; and definitely do like the scaling ideas that are floating around. I intend to post in that thread shortly.

[jamespetts]

Isaac,

ahh, perhaps I should have added a new option to the poll, "I have not tried it, but would do so if there was a fully automated installer". I certainly plan on having a fully automated installer for all the main platforms once I have a fully compatible pakset and a stable version.

Diegoviagens,

I am having some trouble understanding what you mean, I am afraid. Are you saying that you do not like version 6.0? Or that you prefer it to 5.0? Can you try to explain a little more clearly...?

Soldim,

I am very glad that you like it. I am working on a fully compatible pakset, and shall look forward to your reply in the scaling thread :-) Welcome to the forum, incidentally... :-)

Generally: I see that there are two votes in the "performance and technical issues" section - can anyone elaborate? For those who voted that, what computer specifications do you have? What were the problems?

[KrazyJay]

I have tried Simutrans-Experimental, but will mostly or only use Simutrans-Standard until there is a fully-compatible pakset for Simutrans-Experimental.

I guess I would keep using Simutrans-Standard until pak128 and pak96comic are fully Experimentalized. For now, I feel not much in the need yet to change to Simutrans-Experimental because the paksets I prefer are not fully compatible yet. I really do support Simutrans-Experimental, keep up the good work, but I'll wait until it's done. Until then, Pak128.Britain will be a playground to keep testing.

[colonyan]

Hi, I did not vote since my case is like next.
I tried once, saw lot of potential. But right now I want to concentrate my work on graphics for ST.
I hope you have lot of success James!

[jamespetts]

Thank you, Colonyan :-) And best wishes for your graphics, too...

[diegoviagens]

I can not have understood when I see the right
topic of version 6.0, but what I understood was that the
scale was changed right, but only works with maps
large, and to create maps very very long delay
and consumes much memory, so I prefer the version
5.0.Quem if possible can you give me a little more
explanation of how the new scale where no more
it uses the rather more square km huh?

but still good work James, success, I think
normal that my concern with version 6.0, after all
everything that is new cause a little fear rsss

[jamespetts]

Diegoviagens,

ahh, I see what you mean. But the new scale feature with 6.0 can be customised: all that you have to do is change the "distance_per_tile" setting in simuconf.tab. If you set "distance_per_tile=100", the scale of Simutrans-Standard will be restored. You might want to try other figures, such as "distance_per_tile=80" or "distance_per_tile=50" if you want a compromise. The default is "distance_per_tile=25".

[Bernd Gabriel]

I mostly or exclusively use Simutrans-Experimental because I prefer the features that it provides.

Performance issues? I even can play my almost 400 simu years old 19 Century Test game with 1024x768 tiles and 7,000,000 inhabitants on my old 1x2,2 GHz Athlon WinXP PC with 1920x1200 screen. Ok, only 4-5 frames per second, while simutrans standard runs it with 7-8 frames, but I'm not a frame rate junkie. I always used to play simutrans at the frame rate limit.

[hApo]

I mostly use the standard version, because I want to play with normal pak128. When will be pak128-standard avaible for experimental? And I've tested experimental with p192 and p128-britain, I think, that if there will be more comptaible paksets, it could Simutrans 103 (or 104?)

[jamespetts]

To those who are interested in Simutrans-Experimental versions of Pak128 and Pak96.Comic - I do not know whether there are any plans to make either of those paksets Simutrans-Experimental compatible. Neither of those paksets is currently open-source (nor is Pak192.Comic, although there is a Simutrans-Experimental compatible proto-version of that), so whether they are made Simutrans-Experimental compatible is a matter for the authors of those sets. It is, perhaps, something to raise on the individual subforums dedicated to Pak128 and Pak96.Comic if there is sufficient demand.

I ought add, though, that there is a significant amount of work in balancing a set for Simutrans-Experimental: not only do a large number of values have to be added, but in many cases it is necessary to have additional vehicles or even industries. I am steadily working on a Simutrans-Experimental compatible version of Pak128.Britain (which is a lovely Pakset in its own right), but it might be that the authors of the other paksets will be cautious about making them Simutrans-Experimental compatible until there is sufficient demand.

Thank you everyone for your responses to this survey - they are most useful :-)

[prissi]

James, you should add a button: THe option are too long. I cannot understand them with my english and I forget topic 4 when reading topic 8. Seriously, polls should not reuire line wraps ...

[Fabio]

"I have not tried it, but would do so if I had enough time to play".

i really love the concepts of STE and i'm looking forward to testing it.

[Severous]

Hello James

I saw this poll and decided I wouldn't/couldn't answer it. I had passed it by.....until I saw your polite request for feedback in another part of the forum.

None of the poll options really describe my view.  Ive arrived at the conclusion that Simutrans is not the game I had hoped it would be.  Its not a game. Its a simulation (and many versions). Ive had a couple of good months getting to know it. Thanks to all who made it.   I dabble with my pak.German save less each day and don't feel inclined to start another map let alone another substantially different version.  Ive started playing others games.

Good luck with your version.

[jamespetts]

James, you should add a button: THe option are too long. I cannot understand them with my english and I forget topic 4 when reading topic 8. Seriously, polls should not reuire line wraps ...

Hmm, they don't on my monitor, but I wanted to make the questions sufficiently precise, as vague questions would yield less than helpful answers. Perhaps somebody could translate them into German and post a like poll on the German forums?

Edit: Severous, I am not sure that I understand why you consider a simulation and a game to be mutually exclusive: a simulation aimed solely at entertainment can be at once a simulation and a game. You might not find this particular game (in either its Standard or Experimental forms) enjoyable, but it cannot be said that it is less of a game because it is a simulation.

[Severous]

Re Simulation and Game difference. 

Its not a lack of enjoyment that makes the difference. (ive quite enjoyed my Simutrans)

Its the lack of goals and objectives.  We can constantly expand and tweak and optimise..but to what end?  I like a game to have a goal. For instance to build the route of the Flying Scotsman and run it at average speed of x..or develop the Rhur and move a million Steel in 20 years.  Where you have 'failed' if you don't achieve it in the specified time. Those sorts of things.

[jellyman]

I've quite enjoyed experimental for the enhancements in passenger satisfaction/revenue/routing etc.  I play it with pak 96 which I think is a great pak.  Tried it with 64 and 128 and it seems impossible to make a profit.  My current game is in standard and pak 64 because I wanted to try a very large map and that happened to be first combination I got to work.

[jamespetts]

Severous,

in that respect, Simutrans is no less a game than Sim City...

[tfosorcim]

"I have tried Simutrans-Experimental, but will mostly or only use Simutrans-Standard until there is a fully-compatible pakset for Simutrans-Experimental"

I hope that the game have normal pak128 fully-compatible pakset

[wipi35]

"I have tried Simutrans-Experimental, but will mostly or only use Simutrans-Standard until there is a fully-compatible pakset for Simutrans-Experimental"

There are some nice features but when I playing Exp. there were problems with the rotation option. When I tried to go back to Standard the game could not be opened anymore. So I will wait a little longer.

[jamespetts]

Wipi35,

thank you for the feedback :-) What version did you use that had the rotation problem? The rotation bugs were fixed quite a few versions ago. Simutrans-Experimental saved games will not be compatible with Simutrans-Standard, because the file format has to be different in order to store additional information. Simutrans-Standard could be made compatible with Simutrans-Experimental saved games (discarding the additioanl information), but so far, this has not happened, and it is out of my hands.

[Fabio]

james,

what about adding an additional export option for savegames, in order to export them in the ST-standard file format discarding the additional info?

[jamespetts]

I did try that at one time, but had difficulties in making it work.

[wipi35]

What version did you use that had the rotation problem? The rotation bugs were fixed quite a few versions ago.

Can't remember the version anymore but it occurred in march/april 2009. Main reason was to avoid automatic citygrowth.

[jamespetts]

Can't remember the version anymore but it occurred in march/april 2009. Main reason was to avoid automatic citygrowth.

Ahh, it's been fixed since then. Have another go - you might like it :-)

[Spike]

I'm interested in Simutrans-Experimental, but I haven't tried it. I still want to encourage development of this branch, because it gives players new options.

[Lmallet]

I am also in the "will use Simutrans-Standard until there is a fully-compatible pakset for Simutrans-Experimental" group.  I am a pak128 fan, but I will probably try pak128.Britain once it is fully compatible.

[neroden]

I like simutrans-experimental better.  I voted in the poll for "waiting for a fully compatible pakset", but that's not really true.

I'm waiting for a pakset which has been adjusted to be balanced for the new *revenue calculation* in simutrans-experimental, and works with the timeline on (I always play with the timeline on).  I can live happily without the pakset implementing any of the other features, but I decided I couldn't tolerate the economics which resulted from playing simutrans-experimental with a simutrans-standard pakset and only-slightly-tweaked config files. 

To be clear, the balancing of pak64 and pak128 isn't that great to start with; design-wise, I like pak128 best (the parking spaces rock), but the game balance is much, much too far off for my taste, so I play pak64, although it too has serious game balance problems.  (For example, in pak64 it's more profitable to transport oil by train than by tanker, which is usually unprofitable; the BR39 is dominant for transporting practically everything; and in most goods, lower-capacity wagons are much cheaper to operate per unit good than high-capacity wagons, which is very unrealistic and gives perverse incentives to run coal trains with the oldest possible cars). 

But the game balance manages to get even worse when the pakset is transferred to a different form of revenue calculation without significant modification, and it's just a little too unplayable for me.  :-(  I'd be happy with a pakset which was roughly economically balanced to work with simutrans-experimental revenue calculations, with the timeline on, even if it lacked any of the cool features. 

(Unfortunately even pak128.britain, which is very promising, isn't actually economically balanced for simutrans-experimental yet.  Plus it needs some ships, badly.  With rivers being created automatically in new maps, it's very important to be able to use them as a benefit instead of as an obstacle.  Also it's a realistic way to increase the profitability of "early years" games; ships and boats were consistently more profitable than land transport until the development of steam trains, and it's very fair to set the pakset up that way.)

[jamespetts]

Neorden,

thank you very much for your feedback. Although The Hood and I have been very busy with non-Simutrans things, we are both prioritising economic balancing and producing ships, etc. (respectively) to try to get a good pakset fully balanced for Simutrans-Experimental. It is very useful to have detailed information on the nature of the balancing issues - I am most grateful for your input.

[davidh]

I like the ideas behind Experimental and Pak issues don;t worry me too much becuase I'm a fan of Pak128.Britain.

What's drive me back to playing Standard instead of Experimental was the (perceived) issues with the games balance in Experimental 6. I.e. all the industries closing down in 1841/42 with nothing to replace them and the very large maintenance costs compared to revenue generating capability that made for huge financial losses.

I feel the Experimental is going the right way for Simutrans to evolve to a whole new level of sophistication; but I also feel it has some game play issues to resolve before it's a really playable game.

[jamespetts]

Davidh,

thank you very much for that feedback - most useful. I have been working recently on 7.0 specifically to address those issues (mostly the one relating to industries closing down - there is a whole new model for deciding when new industries should be built, including the possibility to have industries upgrading instead of closing down, although that needs pakset support not yet available in any pakset). The financial profitability should be addressed by rebalancing Pak128.Britain to work better with Simutrans-Experimental - the first experimental step would simply be increasing the goods revenues and seeing whether the problem is that Simutrans-Experimental is uniformly less profitable (in which case, that is a complete solution), or whether something more complicated is going on, which would require investigating.

[werl]

Mine is not there. I want to try it, but it won't start

[jamespetts]

Werl - Simutrans-Experimental won't start? Are you sure that you've downloaded all of the configuration files? If you've upgraded from a previous version, try deleting settings-experimental.xml.

[sdog]

when i had problems getting simutrans experimental to run (with linux), i could solve them by installing the full install of the latest nightly first, then copy binary and configuration files into it. 

the latest nightlies of pak128 requires a new directory with gui files wich is included in recent nightly builds of standard.

[jamespetts]

Sdog,

were you running Simutrans-Experimental with the latest nightlies of Pak128 when you had the problem?

[sdog]

yes (sorry, hurry, short reply)

[jamespetts]

The issue may, then, be with the Pak128 nightlies...

[VS]

I believe the new gui files are a) optional, b) part of program distribution, not pakset. So this should not be the cause of errors - at least with standard trunk it isn't as far as I can verify.

edit: Oops. It seems the skin files are optional on startup, but required once pakset is loaded and the game will enter normal interface. It does not matter where they come from, though, and normally that is left to program installation. Now I remember that they were removed from pak128 then.

edit2: It seems duplicated skin objects in simutrans/skins and simutrans/pakset do not cause problems with standard trunk.

[jamespetts]

VS,

thank you for the details. Can you give some more information on what files that I should include in future distributions of the complete version of Simutrans-Experimental?

[VS]

Standard has trunk/simutrans/skin/menu.WindowSkin.pak checked into svn...

[AvG]

I discovered Exp just a few days ago. (Left Simutrans more than 2 years ago)
Downed and made a few trials.
Prelim conclusions:
- Maintenance indeed way too high. Also in Standard. Newprice simple busstop 100 Cr Maintenance 36 Cr/Month.
  Starting a citynetwork with lots of stops and short distances is disaster.
  Therefore I divide (config) maintenance 1800 by 100.
- Question: Why more than one config.tab? Is the program using more than one? Which is the one for player-alterations?
- Nice surprise: The goods-catagories. Almost the same like I use. On top of your system I distinguish light and heavy
  crates in order to make the use of WideBody-vehicles attractive.

Alltogether Exp is IMHO very promising.

I want to implement my vehicles in Exp.
I copied a few in Exp and they work. But of course without the new interesting features.
I studied the new .dat instructions but found them rather misty.
Would is be possible to get a copy of some .dat-files of vehicles(road,track,water) and stops(road, track, water)??
That would be very helpfull!!

AvG

[jamespetts]

AvG,

thank you for your interest in Simutrans-Experimental. The issues to which you refer are being worked on, although slowly as my time is limited. The maintenance issue for stops can be addressed in the paksets (by changing the stop costs independently of level as is now possible in Experimental), but has not yet been implemented in Pak128.Britain-Ex. It is planned to implement that soon. The maintenance for depots should be addressed in Simutrans-Experimental 8.0 (planned next release but one), in which different types of depots will build different types of vehicles (biological, steam, diesel, etc.), and have different purchase/maintenance costs.

One change in the next version (an interim release, 7.2, due out very soon) that will improve 'bus networks is the reduction of the effect of comfort ratings for shorter journeys. Also in 7.2, diagonal way maintenance costs are properly scaled, resulting in an overall reduction in maintenance costs.

As for the simuconf.tab files, this is actually a change from Simutrans-Standard some time ago: the first simuconf.tab in the /Simutrans/config directory is one that applies to all paksets, and the second one, in the /Simutrans/[pakset]/config directory applies only to the specific pakset, and over-rides any settings in the general simuconf.tab.

As to the .dat files, Pak128.Britain-Ex is an open-source pakset, based on the open-source Pak128.Britain, with modifications for Simutrans-Experimental. The source files can be found here. More information on Simutrans-Experimental compatible paksets can be found here. If you would like any clarification of the instructions for modifying the .dat files, please let me know (perhaps by replying to the thread).

Please note that Pak128.Britain-Ex (and the standard Pak128.Britain) are not properly balanced yet. As I stated in another thread, I am in the process of obtaining real-world data to use in setting costs/revenues, etc., but the balancing at present is largely guesswork.

I shall be very interested to know more about your pakset as it progresses. Alternatively, you are free to work on and/or branch Pak128.Britain-Ex (or the standard version). Very best wishes!

[jamespetts]

AvG,

incidentally, there is a new release of Simutrans-Experimental available now, with a number of balancing enhancements, and also updates to PAk128.Britain-Ex.