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A note about tiles and sizes

Started by Spike, January 29, 2012, 10:49:05 PM

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Spike

Often there seems to be a struggle with size relations of distances buildings, roads and vehicles.

I had about this in mind when I was working on Simutrans:

- A map square is about 1x1km size, so that maps have a reasonable size overall
- A shown building is a representative of a quarter/block of several buildings
- Roads, rails, stations and vehicles are oversized, since those are the most important elements for a transport entrepreneur.
- Vehicle speed was chosen arbitrarily to play reasonably well in the range of 20 ... 200 km/h, maybe more.

If you change your mental model so that buildings are not "1 building" but "a city quarter" you can already resolve a lot of brain-knots when you try to make Simutrans more "realistic". You can also think of the streets shown in cities to be the cumulative street lanes of the city quarter, then they aren't even that much oversized anymore.

-> It's a game, not a model of reality.


An_dz

Quote from: Hajo on January 29, 2012, 10:49:05 PM
-> It's a game, not a model of reality.

Great sentence. I'm glad Nintendo remembered it when created Mario and Zelda.

Some related fun: Youtube vid (Portuguese, but there's EN, DE, ES subtitles)

sdog

Quote from: Hajo on January 29, 2012, 10:49:05 PM
-> It's a game, not a model of reality.

can't see how would exclude the other

Fabio

I won't argue about the different scales, but about the measure 1 tile = 1 km (at economic level).

Exp has a varying setting for tile-km ratio (default 250 m IIRC). We could discuss if we want it in Std as well. This is my proposal in this direction.

Urbanists consider as the maximum range of attraction of a station a radius of 300-400 m for busses and trams, 600-800 m for subway. Let's take the latter and round it up to 1 km.

We could link the tile size to station coverage. Station coverage radius IS 1 km, the tile size is calculated accordingly. e.g. station coverage =2 (default in Pak 128) would make 1 tile = 500 m (enough for a map representing a pretty big area), whereas coverage =3 would make 1 tile = 333 m, and so on.

This is just to fuel the discussion ;)

prissi

No worth discussion really: Simutrans never display anything implying 1tile=1km with the execption of the odometer of convois. So what would be the purpose of such setting?

And all vehicles are usually 1/2 tile long = 125m long buses? The reduction of games to reality does not work this way. (I recommend a look at the OpenTTD 32 bit patch to see what happens to scaled when models are incoporated.)

sdog

@fabio The platform length, that has to fit to train lengths, is the obstacle here, it quite increases the effective catchment area to many square kilometres.


prissi: "No worth discussion really: Simutrans never display anything implying 1tile=1km with the execption of the odometer of convois. So what would be the purpose of such setting?"
Isn't the odometer an important enough reason? Catchment area is another one. Population densities might be another one. Last but not least the kinetic of vehicles. There's quite a difference if the inclines are 10 m per 1 km as now, or 10 per 250 m. Allowing for steep gradients was afaik one of the reasons for james' move to a different scale in experimental.

For a simulation game to be playable it needs to have a plausible and consistent mapping of game dimensions to real life dimensions. Else intuition does not work. (Eg. it would be silly to have a plane route for something below 500 km, thus pak authors will balance planes with this in mind, players thinking the same and use it for medium to long distances too.)

"And all vehicles are usually 1/2 tile long = 125m long buses?" They are so obviously at a different scale, the visual scale, that players notice it immediately that they are just token. This might, similar to the two different time-scales, lead to confusion of new players, but would only be solvable with a detailed 3d environment.

Spike

Quote from: sdog on February 02, 2012, 08:53:42 PM
can't see how would exclude the other

The don't. But a game can take the freedom to leave out details, or even do unrealistic things if they make the game more interesting or easier to play. I wanted to say, that the "odd" scales which I've chosen make things (hopefully) easier for the player, even if they are unrealistic.

omikron

I agree with Hajo and prissi on this one. The visible scale does not need to represent the actual size of elements (see also here: http://forum.simutrans.com/index.php?topic=9077.0)

I see no need to change anything.

omikron