Hi everyone,
I am a quite new player of Simutrans (though I played OpenTTD a bit) and I'd like to thank all the community working on it. Cheers!
I played with Simutrans standard for a few hours and decided to try Simutrans-Experimental because I liked the description of the new features.
For information, I am playing with a 11.10 version of simutrans experimental (the last one compiled for linux 64bit I could find and labelled 2013-09-02-70edf9d, I'd love to see a newer one someday) and Pak128.Britain-Ex-0.9.1 (so the last one).
I am having troubles with Max axle load restrictions (I know I can deactivate this function or mitigate it through simutab.conf but that's not the point) :
There is a series of trailers introduced in January 1978 having an axle load of 15t (the "Standard Artic Trailer" for bulk goods, bulk fluids [petrol] and long goods) but I can't find a road to put drive on, even in 2900... The strongest road I can get are the Asphalt Road and Motorway with a 14t allowance.
Is this a problem with the pakset, with my version of Simutrans-exp or did I miss something?
And just a quick other question :
Why can the DAF CF Artic truck be attached to standard trailers only and the DAF XF Artic attached only to large trailers?
I must admit I have some troubles in determining (without directly trying) which truck can haul which trailer. Is there a way to see that in game without buying the truck to see which trailer can match?
Thank you for your post and welcome to the forums. Firstly, apologies that the Linux automatic builds are not working: I am not quite sure why the maintainer has not fixed them since last year. However, it is not too hard to compile Simutrans yourself on Linux - you just need to check out the Git repository (go to the directory where you want Simutrans, git init, git clone https://github.com/jamespetts/simutrans-experimental.git) and compile it with the "make", then find the executable in /builds/default and copy it over your existing executable; you might need to install libbz2-devel and libzip-dev before compiling it.
As to the 15t/14t issue - thank you for spotting that. The concrete road actually has a maximum axle load of 16t, but that becomes unavailable in the early 1990s. I have now reduced the maximum axle load of the standard articulated trailers to 14t. Until I release the next version, the large articulated trailers, with an extra axle, have an axle load of 14t, and should work for you.
I am not quite sure why the particular combinations of cab and trailer were chosen, as I did not produce the later era lorries; but you should not worry about purchasing something to test it: vehicles in Simutrans are bought on approval in that if they are sold again having never left the depot within the same month as they are bought, one can get a full refund.
Thank you James for these clear answers.