A new version of the preview and testing version of the Simutrans-Experimental version of Pak128.Britain is now available:
download it us (site down, do not visit) ]/Pak128.Britain-Ex.zip]here (http://experimental.[%20simutrans%20[dot). This is a complete pakset and should be installed in its own directory. It is only compatible with Simutrans-Experimental (version 7.0 and higher) - the normal Pak128.Britain should be used with Simutrans-Standard.
This is a preliminary version meant for testing and evaluation, although it should balance better with Simutrans-Experimental than the standard Pak128.Britain. Not all of the Simutrans-Experimental features are implemented yet (although I am planning to implement them all in due course). There is a known issue with Simutrans-Experimental 7.0 and Pak128.Britain-Ex 0.3, in which games saved in an earlier version of Simutrans-Experimental will not load. For that reason (and in any event because of the rebalancing), it is recommended that players start a new game instead of continuing a previous one.
Here is a list of the features supported by this release of Pak128.Britain-Ex:
- Comfort
- Loading times
- Catering
- Upgrading (partial)
- Way constraints
- Reversing
- Tilting trains
- Overcrowding (only on a few vehicles so far - work in progress)
- Industry obsolescence
- Industry upgrading
See here (http://forum.simutrans.com/index.php?topic=2710.0) for a more detailed description of the work outstanding and so far completed, and also for information on how to get involved in contributing to the project and obtaining the sources.
Changes from 0.2 include:
- ADD: Lorries (complete set)
- CHANGE: Increase the power of horses
- CHANGE: Reduce the capacity of horse drawn trailers
- CHANGE: Correct images for night colours
- CHANGE: English translation text for "Industry" in the GUI options now more generic
- CHANGE: Rebalance road vehicle costs
- FIX: Introduction dates for boat yards, etc.
- CHANGE: Industry upgrading now supported.
- FIX: "Chance" was incorrectly used instead of "distributionweight" for industries
- CHANGE: Rebalanced the speed bonus
- ADD: Some boats
- CHANGE: Way constraints now set for waterways
- CHANGE: Passenger factor is 12 instead of 8.
- CHANGE: Increased the value of all goods by 1.5x
Any feedback on this pakset variant (especially relating to the gameplay balance) would be very much welcome.
Started a game in 1850. Balancing looks good so far, and the game is incredibly responsive (low CPU, yay!) Nitpicks:
- "Cart (mail)" intro date is 2827... a millennium too late.
- LMS Class 4F 0-6-0 lists as available in 1492?
And generally:
- Default roads between cities in the 1850 game are built with 80km/h Asphalt, which isn't available yet. Similarly you can build transformers and electric transmission lines, which weren't invented (in the real world) for awhile. None of these affect game play, they're just a little anachronistic.
- What does, "May use: Prohibitive 0" mean?
- After the "Mail coach" retires in 1840 and "Stage Wagon (mail)" in 1842, there's a long gap for reasonable mail road transport, but that's filled in nicely with the new railway carriages... which probably makes sense.
QuoteLMS Class 4F 0-6-0 lists as available in 1492?
Columbus discovered them in America? ;)
Riiiight.... I'm guessing that's supposed to be 1924 ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LMS_Fowler_Class_4F )
The intended intro year of the LMS 4F is actually 1911 (at least in standard), as per the standard pak128.Britain SVN. And as you guessed, the lack of decent mail vehicles from 1842 coincides with the intro of postal mail services on the railways, which is historical (mail coaches stopped abruptly as they couldn't compete with the railways).
Thank you very much everyone for spotting the errors - will look into fixing them when I get around to it (the ashphalt road error, however, is one that I am having trouble with - the settings are correct in the .dat file, but the problem still persists).
As to road mail vehicles, the trouble is that, with only rail vehicles, it is hard to collect mail in towns. Perhaps we need to extend the longevity of the basic mail wagon?
Mail collection in towns is also hampered by the pillar-box road stop not being introduced in 0.3 until ca. 1889. The prototype was introduced in 1852 ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pillar_box )
Before I go asking too many more questions, -- where's the SVN so I can peruse the .dat files directly?
Hi All,
After setting up Pak128.Britain-Ex 0.3, and another game in 1750, and singing praise of the great changes so far, here are some findings I have, in the hope that it helps.
- The Livestock Drover now teleports over considerable distance instead of walking (on long routes not always the entire length of the route though). In turn, this increased speed makes it very profitable.
- It may be a good idea to take a critical look at the running costs of the Stage Coach and the (piece/cooled goods) stage wagons. The former has a running cost of 2.00 compared to just a few cents for the other passengers cart, while the latter has a running cost of 0.80 compared to the 0.02 of the next piece goods cart (there is only one cooled goods cart), and also is difficult to make profitable for all but the most expensive goods.
- [Nitpicking]Both in version 0.3 as in 0.2, I occasionally spot a motorcycle in the 1750's road traffic.[/Nitpicking]
I hope this again helps.
Ah, looking at github -- lms-4f.dat on line 9 says:
iintro_year=1911
The default for intro_year is now 1492 (per the changelog).
I can confirm makeobj gives no warnings for syntax errors like this -- most frustrating.
Since intro_year has a inbuild default, how could MakeObj tell a misspelled iintro_year from a missing one (which should not trigger a error)?
You could output a warning for every missing attribute and you could output a warning for every unknown attribute.
Another minor finding.
The orchards do not seem to drop off cider to the stops if a route is created for it. I think the reason may be that the capacity limit of the industry is reached before the dropoff threshold (both are at 10 items). Raising the capacity limit to 11 should solve the problem if I'm right.
[Edit]: And an update on the earlier report on Livestock Drovers. It would seem they do indeed travel instead of teleport, however with unlimited speed. When another vehicle is on the same route, they instantly appear behind it and then appear further on as that vehicle vacates a section of road.
I hope this helps.
Wouldn't it make sense to have the "regular" and the "experimental" Britain paks in the same SVN? At least the .png files are the same, and ideally wouldn't the .dat files be the same as well? If not, I volunteer to write a Perl script to turn an "experimental" .dat file with the "extra" data back into a "plain" .dat suitable for the "regular" pak. And I could probably write a Perl script to automatically color-match standard Pak128 images to PakBritain's palette. All we need then is a Makefile with a little intelligence.
I would also like to normalize the directory structure (there is a bus/images but the .png files are interspersed in citycars/ with no citycars/images).
Who would need to sign off on my proposed reorganization?
You don't need a spezial editon for the regular set.
The regular makeobj ignores the experimental tags, so you can make the regular set from the SVN with experimental tags.
Unfortunately, the .dat files are not necessarily the same, as Simutrans-Experimental needs different balancing.
@wlindley,
I'm happy for you to standardise the folder structure if you wish, but that would require changing all of the dat files to reference images in the correct location. For historical reasons, some folders have image subfolders and some don't, and some have a mix! Not ideal, but given I know my way around it I have more interesting things to do than tidy it up. By all means if you send me new copies of all the standard .dats and a proposed tree structure I could change it, it's just not a priority for me, as I'm sure you'll understand!
About putting standard and experimental in one SVN, that was discussed some time ago, and as jamespetts says, cost and acceleration values are different/may need to be different in the future for the two paks. If you look carefully in the standard svn, there are some experimental entries in some dats which get ignored of course.
For pak128 I used this script to get a consistent form for all vehicles... Maybe not exactly what you want, but no harm done in sharing :)
Quote from: Dutchman on Rails on November 21, 2009, 10:15:12 AM
Another minor finding.
The orchards do not seem to drop off cider to the stops if a route is created for it. I think the reason may be that the capacity limit of the industry is reached before the dropoff threshold (both are at 10 items). Raising the capacity limit to 11 should solve the problem if I'm right.
[Edit]: And an update on the earlier report on Livestock Drovers. It would seem they do indeed travel instead of teleport, however with unlimited speed. When another vehicle is on the same route, they instantly appear behind it and then appear further on as that vehicle vacates a section of road.
I hope this helps.
Thank you for looking into this. I have updated the orchards now, so that they should have a capacity of 12 in the next version. The livestock drover problem is harder to track down, however, as it is, ultimately, a problem with the basic code, not with the pakset: the maximum speed is set to 6km/h in the .dat file, so it ought not behave in that way. If anyone can give any clues as to why it does, I should be most appreciative.
Hi James,
You're welcome. I enjoy the pakset very much, so it's my pleasure to play Guinea Pig for the 17th century... ;)
I found another vehicle that has the same issue as the livestock drover, the Single Shire Horse (locomotive), pulling 7 Food Trucks.
However, the Double Shire Horse (locomotive), also pulling 7 Food Trucks, only seems to have unlimited speed when the cars are empty, with 100% load, it's speed is normal.
What may help you is that the Livestock drover did not have unlimited speed when I was testing version 0.2 of the Pak.Britain_Ex. Whatever happened must have happened in between. IIRC I only updated from 0.2 to 0.3 on the PakSets, but I'm not entirely sure.
I currently use Simutrans 102.2 Exp. 7.0 with Pak.Britain_Ex. 0.3.
I hope all of this helps.
Dutchman on Rails,
thank you very much for your further testing. Do you know whether you get the same problems in Simutrans-Standard with the latest Simutrans-Standard version of Pak128.Britain? The reason that I ask is that I have not made any Simutrans-Experimental specific changes to those vehicles since the last release (and I have also noticed that the postal bicycle has the same issue, whereas it used to work correctly).
Hi James,
I've run a few tests with the latest version of Pak.Britain (v1.05) for you.
With Simutrans 102.2, there are no anomalies to report with any of the three vehicles (Livestock Drover, Single Shire Horse or Double Shire Horse).
With Simutrans 102.2 Experimental 7.0, the livestock drover has the same anomaly, however, the Single Shire Horse and the Double Shire Horse (each with 7 Food Trucks) only have unlimited speed when travelling from the slaughterhouse to the butcher fully loaded. On the return trip, the empty train behaves normally. I did not experiment with partial loads.
Finally, I've had several coaches and carts active in the late 1700's. One pattern I see so far in my ongoing game is that the Livestock Drover and Food Trucks in both paksets have a weight of 0t, while my other trailers and buses don't.
I hope this little test help.
Dutchman,
thank you very much for your comments. It seems that the issue is somehow related to a vehicle with a weight of zero. I have set all powered vehicles with a weight of zero to have a weight of 1 instead for the next version. Thank you for your help!
I look forward to trying out the next version.
In the meantime, I have another finding to report. This time on the sheep farm.
It's available load of wool fluctuates from -0/0 bags to 16,384/0 bags every second. The latter it does try to deliver to a loading point (I increased the capacity of one to about 2000 bags, which was instantly filled up). I suspect the reason is the capacity of the sheep farm being 0.
I hope this helps.
Quote from: Dutchman on Rails on December 07, 2009, 07:30:23 AM
I look forward to trying out the next version.
In the meantime, I have another finding to report. This time on the sheep farm.
It's available load of wool fluctuates from -0/0 bags to 16,384/0 bags every second. The latter it does try to deliver to a loading point (I increased the capacity of one to about 2000 bags, which was instantly filled up). I suspect the reason is the capacity of the sheep farm being 0.
I hope this helps.
actually, this only happens when you make a game with standard brit128, save it and then load it with experimental 0.3.
seems ok when the factory, upon creation has a low production value, but when they are given high production values, the numbers go crazy. 100 might be ok, but 1000 will make it go haywire.
it won't happen if you create a game with ex0.3. and play it with experimental. With this you can set it to 9999 without the numbers going crazy.
Hi AEO,
Sorry, but when I created the game, I didn't have Pak128.Britain standard installed...
Dutchman, thank you for the report. Can you upload your saved game so that I can see what the position is? Thank you very much.
Hi James,
Certainly.
http://simutrans-germany.com/files/upload/DoR Lichfield 1796-06.sve (http://simutrans-germany.com/files/upload/DoR%20Lichfield%201796-06.sve)
The reported anomaly is reproducable by the way.
Please don't hesitate to ask if you need something else.
Dutchman,
thank you very much for that. I have found the problem, which will be fixed in the next release. Am most grateful.
Hi James,
I´ve tested pak 128.Britain-Ex 0.3 and I have got a problem with train- and roadtunnels. They all have got weight limit of 0t, so no vehicle can pass them. Every time I get "Can´t find route".
I think that the weight limit should be set higher.
Greets
Rohal
Rohal,
thank you very much for your feedback! This has already been identified, and will be fixed in the next release. Thank you again for reporting the issue.