Name of this topic is not fully exact.
My idea is that game would count years from 1 to unlimitied (limited to for example 5000) - but by pakset years counting would be set from 1930, for example.
So, as time would go, game would count years from 0 - but with each start of new year, to this number would be added number of year from pakset settings.
And intro and retire years of buildings and vehicles would be compared with this year - that is independent on game code.
Simply:
example 1:
game start year: 0
pakset start year: 1900
...
game year: 250
pakset year: 2150
example 2:
game start year: 0
pakset start year: 2495
...
game year: 105
pakset year: 2600
I think that with this creation of real future paksets would be allowed better.
I think it would be confusing two have different counts of years going around. Simutrans doesn't support dates beyond the year 5461 either way. That can relatively easily be changed to 357913941, or half of that if support for the stone age is to be added, without introducing two different calendars.
SO far this was no show stopper as less than 25 future vehicles have been made across all sets so far. Moreover, given the last 100 years, any guess of 1000 years in the future are as good as 1000000 years into the future.
My programming days are far behind, but I also don't see the advantage of starting at 0 vs. using an actual year. It complicates programming, and as Ters said, simply have to change the data type to increase the number of possible values.
This being said, one thing Vaclav's suggestion would enforce is a pak start date. We get the occasional "why are there no vehicles in 1750 for pak X", which could be avoided if pakset maintainers could declare a pak start date. It would be nice if it was enforced when "use timeline" is set (it doesn't really matter when you don't have it set). But this is probably possible regardless of the way the year is displayed.
I don't know if any other pak sets are like pak64, which have a few vehicles available since year 1. These vehicles can't do much until other stuff becomes available, but intentionally or not, it makes them available for add-ons extending the timeline. In essence, the pak set has two start dates: one for stand-alone play, and one marking from when add-ons can add stuff and yet make use of things from the core pak files.
Hello
I think that we must declare with Startyear in with Pakset ok it.