Starting a new game - no skyscrapers?

[bpm860]

Hi all, I'm new to Simutrans experimental using pak128 (been playing pak128-standard for a couple months now), and I have tried starting a few new games with a large map and about ~20 cities, but I keep noticing that the large cities never have any dense urban areas... they're all made up of low-density residential homes and businesses with no high-rise buildings or apartment complexes.  Is there a setting I can use to set population density for city centers?  Or must every city start out fairly low density and then build up a "downtown" after the game has been going for a while?  Thanks!

[zook2]

In which year did you start? I don't know the pakset either, but larger buildings shouldn't appear before, hmmm, 1920? In other words, "downtown" has to grow over time, yes.

One way to promote higher density might be to build rail lines or other obstacles around the city that the city cannot "grow over".

[mwoodburn81]

Have you seen this thread here:

No downtown core.

[bpm860]

Ah, that's perfect! Thanks!

My default pak128 value was "renovation_percentage = 12" but after changing it to "85" everything is much better 

[inkelyad]

There is two more obscure and almost useless parameters in experimental.
'renovations_count' (default 1) -- how many buildings will be renovated in one step
and 'renovations_try' (default 3) -- how hard we want to find them

You can play with that.
But remember -- they are not stored in savegame=>changing default values is not network-safe.

[jamespetts]

Hmm, that's interesting. We need to store those values if changing from defaults can cause network troubles. I shall have to add code to save them if the Experimental version > 10.

[inkelyad]

Hmm, that's interesting. We need to store those values if changing from defaults can cause network troubles. I shall have to add code to save them if the Experimental version > 10.

As usual, they need to be same for all players. If all use same pack, it is not a problem.

[jamespetts]

The standard is always for these settings to be saved with the saved game, as "the same pak" may or may not have been tinkered with.