British Industry Set

[jamespetts]

I should buy glasses... and not the drinking kind. I thought these were jumping fish :(

Probably subconsciously indicated by the ones in Pak128?

[The Hood]

VS, you have been working a lot on standard 128 for a while - in any case I only realised the other day that the standard Pak128 ones were jumping fish and not seagulls!

That said, the "seagulls" are not really more than a couple of pixels, so hardly very artistic eh?

I'm hoping to get a release together this evening, but I will need to do some testing on the dat files for the industries first.  Watch this space!

[The Hood]

OK, can't release the sources tonight  - for some reason when testing the last addition to the pak the game freezes when distributing industries in the game creation phase.  Has anyone come across this behaviour before?

[VS]

Freezes during map creation can mean many many things. Try setting various parameters in simuconf to more benevolent values - eg. minimal industry distance can lead to lockups, or nearly so; intercity roads can be also demanding if you set too high...

[The Hood]

It seems to be due to the car factory or car dealership - it only seems to freeze if these are in the pak and only then sometimes (succesful maps don't have the car factory or dealership, hence why I think it's them...).

Can you spot a problem with the dats?

[VS]

Try stripping trailing whitespace. Dealership has empty retire year.

[The Hood]

The bad news: I don't think that was the problem - I've done a few tests and it still freezes with or without the car dealership.

The good news: I think it may be related to the ratio of cities : industries on the map.  I have got the whole thing to work with a high city : industry ratio (i.e. number of cities at least half the number of industries).  Not sure why this should cause a problem in industry generation (it is that - I checked using debug tool), but maybe because this set has a lot of "City" based industries.

Because of that, I've decided to release the set on Open Source licence:
http://simutrans.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/simutrans/pakBritain.128/

-If you want the pak ready-made, look in the pak/ subdirectory - you will need to replace current industry set with BritIndustry.pak and current good.all.pak with BritGoods.pak (although BritGoods.pak should allow you to use existing goods and industries still).
-If you want to play with the sources, they are in the industry/ and goods/ subdirectories (fairly obviously).

Happy playing!

Obviously it's still a beta (the productivities etc are completely unbalanced), but I think it's best for other people to try it and see what they think.  Please get back with comments.  Also please let me know if you get the same problem I did about getting stuck on map generation.

[jamespetts]

Ahh, thank you for releasing those :-) It is good that people will now have access to your wonderful work on industries. I shall very much look forward to the release of the rest of the PakBritain sources.