Electric trains do not appear in the game

[sheldon_cooper]

hello! I've been downloading several addons electric trains and high-speed, especially in the Japanese site, but these trains do not appear in the game, even without using the timeline. What can I do to appear these trains?

[gauthier]

build catenary in the depot.

[DrSuperGood]

Contact the content authors. Since they should appear in the depot like all electric trains (if the way the depot is on has electrification).

[sheldon_cooper]

Why not think of it before !! How am a fool !! LOL 
I forgot to build electric line to the train depot.
now appeared all trains !!
You see, now I'm focusing on trains before, I did not was using much, so the gaffe. sorry.
thank you! 

[Markohs]

Sheldon, I think it happened to all simutrans players, including me, don't worry.

[gauthier]

Indeed, this feature is useless and nothing more than a beginner trap.

[Ters]

It's a trap at some point either way. Either they don't see the locomotives, or they get to assemble trains that won't leave the depot.

[DrSuperGood]

Indeed, this feature is useless and nothing more than a beginner trap.

It should show them in the depot but with a highlight tooltip of "requires electrification". The fact they are missing is confusing at times and I think I even struggled to find that out, possibly having to ask someone in chat.

[gauthier]

It's a trap at some point either way. Either they don't see the locomotives, or they get to assemble trains that won't leave the depot.

Sure, but at least, at this point, one knows the problem and can still sell the convoy with no money loss.

[Ters]

Sure, but at least, at this point, one knows the problem and can still sell the convoy with no money loss.

The "no route" message, because of missing electrification or otherwise, isn't known to be very helpful either. One would need a dedicated message pointing out that it't the depot that lacks electrification. But then why wait until the vehicles are bought before telling the player that something hasn't been done right? Maybe Simutrans could always show the electric vehicle tab, but just show "Depot not electrified" where the vehicles would be?

[DrSuperGood]

The "no route" message, because of missing electrification or otherwise, isn't known to be very helpful either. One would need a dedicated message pointing out that it't the depot that lacks electrification. But then why wait until the vehicles are bought before telling the player that something hasn't been done right? Maybe Simutrans could always show the electric vehicle tab, but just show "Depot not electrified" where the vehicles would be?

Detecting lack of route due to electrification is impossible however. The problem is that people could have one route electrified and the other route non-electrified that both lead to the same destination. This could be the case for a high speed passenger service (almost always electrified) and a freight service (mostly not electrified). Separate routes are used to avoid congestion. If they fail to electrify the one fully (skipping a single tile of maybe messing a signal up) then it would show no route.

It should hint to the user that it might be because of "lack of electrification". Even if it is a dumb mistake like an entire segment of track missing or signal in the wrong direction, it would not hurt new users knowing that it might be because of a lack of electrification if it involves an electric engine.

The "depot not electrified" is a good idea and what I mentioned earlier. The convoys should be either shaded out or a special colour that when hovered over says "depot not electrified". The hover over behaviour is standard for actions a user cannot take. For example in the commercial game StarCraft II when you hover over an ability you do not meet the requirements for it will show the requirements in the tooltip for hovering over the button.

[Ters]

The "depot not electrified" is a good idea and what I mentioned earlier. The convoys should be either shaded out or a special colour that when hovered over says "depot not electrified". The hover over behaviour is standard for actions a user cannot take. For example in the commercial game StarCraft II when you hover over an ability you do not meet the requirements for it will show the requirements in the tooltip for hovering over the button.

I don't think it's easy to change how the images look in Simutrans. The closest you can easily get is to use the colored bar below each image, which is already used to indicate buildability. In that case, having electric vehicles on it's own tab becomes a rather strange division.

[Leartin]

The closest you can easily get is to use the colored bar below each image, which is already used to indicate buildability. In that case, having electric vehicles on it's own tab becomes a rather strange division.

I think the colored bar is sufficient to tell the player that they can't build a vehicle. The problem as I see it is that there is a checkbox "show all", which does not show all.
To indicate that it's electricity that's missing, I suppose an additional little Icon next to/over each vehicle using electricity, possibly the same icon already used to indicate connection to a powerline. As a side effect, it's easier to distinguish vehicles in the locomotive tab.

The electric vehicles tab would indeed be obsolete, but you can't just remove it since you'd flood the other tabs. The optimal way would be to have custom tabs defined by the pakset, where each vehicle has an additional entry in its dat which tab it belongs to - with the current tabs sans electrification as fallback

[Lmallet]

Would it be useful for depots to always be electrified?

[Ters]

Would it be useful for depots to always be electrified?

In the end, I think not. You then get the impression that you can build a train and make a schedule for it, only to discover that you can't even get it out the door. Making it so that the depot is electrified if the track outside is could work from a user interface perspective, but a bit more difficult to code (higher risk of bugs). It's also a bit of a foreign concept in the game, and can make players question why stations don't behave the same, which are even harder to code right (some players may not want the entire station to be electrified). Roofed stations also make it difficult to spot missing electrification.