Hello folks,
I'm sorry to say this, but I am very frustrated about this whole topic right now.
I wanted to create a new map with our new version of the pakset and I simply can't find a way to make the map look properly.
So how comes:
- We do have climates, that don't really work well as a basis for the game. As example: our desert climate. It works just fine for a low percentage of the map, but you just don't want half the map to be a desert. Yes, climate change is a thing, but it's not that bad yet.
Now what I would want to do with the desert climate is either to make it rare on the map, or to get rid of it entirely.
That's not a thing with the humidity model. To make it worse, in the humidity model, most parts of the map will be desert, because it's the warmest climate we have. This completely kills the whole humidity model for our pakset, because we can't keep it out of the climate model.
- The other model provided just randomly overlaps climates. Now while this is somewhat fine at first glance, the costs do not have the same climate as the land surrounding it, leaving weird state where the costs are one to two climates "higher" than the rest of the map.
- In plus, even if I end up with a somewhat okayish setting, that thing resets asap. With the hassle it is to create a proper map, I really do not want to fix the climates every single time. And that's also not something I want the users having to do.
Now, what do I want:
- Save the recent climate setting somewhere, so creating a new map doesn't mean me figuring the climates again.
- Let me save a proper setting on climates in the pakset config files. I don't want users to have the same frustrating experience as I do.
- Give me a chance to kick out climates from generating in the humidity model.
I know this post might seem a bit harsh on the poor people that figured out the new climate settings. I tried my best to not let my frustration leak through that much, but it really really is frustrating to not be able to "just play" the game, but rather having to spend hours figuring the new settings first.
The desert climate is not the warmest climate. It shares this with the tropical climate. However, the humidity is strongly affected by the winter snowline. This is a very important parameter for the humidity based climates, the higher the winter snowline, the more desert away from bodies of water. See this thread https://forum.simutrans.com/index.php/topic,20086.0.html especially the hand-drawn png image there.
Omitting climates from the humidity model is not very meaningful, since it is based on real climates. If there is a game world with other climates, the entire humidity/temperature\mapping would need to be customized, which is quite hard. One could, of course, add four parameters per climate to give the temperature and humidity bands, but then there can be easily temperature/humidity settings when these fall outside any climate, or there could be overlapping settings with two climates at the same settings, which is not easy to catch with so many climates.
The other model will only overlap climates if their start and end heights overlap. Otherwise, it produces the same climates as the old height based generator.
Saving the climate settings should be indeed done, and is already an extension request. It requires a bump of the savegame, to actually save it, so it should be saved in the next version.