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Industry minimap & list gameplay issues.

Started by AP, August 30, 2017, 01:48:45 PM

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AP

It goes without saying that connecting industries is critical to gameplay in simutrans, especially Extended in the earlier years. But it seems a couple of things are really getting in the way of sensible gameplay, making things harder than they need to be.

The mini map shows icons for all the industries in the game and the cross-linking of these industries is displayed when the cursor hovers over each icon. However this feature only works well when zoomed far into the map; when zoomed further out (as is necessary to see the whole map and the other end of each link), it is almost impossible to get the cross links to display at all (requiring insane levels of mouse precision).This clearly makes the feature rather less useful than it could be.

Also, the mini map displays all industries which causes a great deal of visual clutter. Can the "show industry" minimap function be altered to function as a filter (at present it is a simple key of colours) so that the player can show only the relevant industries s/he's interested in, at any point in time.

Entirely separately, but closely related, is the industry list function. This displays a sortable list of every industry in the game, however it is also not possible to filter the industry list (unlike the list of vehicles, for example). Again if the ability to filter were added here this would greatly aid the player in finding the relevant information. This should ideally include filtering not only by industry type, but also by surplus supply or demand of a given commodity, or (for online play) by particular player serving / not serving/having a stop covering the industry.  E.g so as to allow filters like "find me something that needs wood that isn't already served by another player" or "show active factories fed by other players with surplus production not being taken away"

jamespetts

Thank you for your feedback. These features are currently the same as they are in Standard. I can see that there might well be some merit in refining the industry minimap settings along the lines that you suggest, but given the very limited amount of time that I have available for development in comparison to the number of things to be done, I am afraid that I cannot prioritise this at present over balance critical work.

I know that Ves has done quite a lot of work on the UI recently, however. He is currently working on the passenger and mail classes feature, but, if he were interested in working on this feature after he finishes the UI for the passenger and mail classes feature, I should have no objection to adding it.
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