Hi
When I create a new game I often get a few very large cities and many small. I do not really enjoy to make urban transport in large cities, so I was wondering if it was possible to force simutrans to generate city with a population more uniform. I tried various settings but I never got good results.
I'm using Exp8.2 - Pak britain
Now I'm using attached settings.
Giuseppe
Milko,
the next version (9.0) will have additional settings enabling one to select the number of larger cities generated, which you could set to zero if you choose.
What if the city generation algorithm reflected the passage of time "before the start of the game" perhaps along these lines:
- Set the year back 100 or maybe 300 years, according to a setting somewhere, perhaps "further back" when playing a "more modern" game -- perhaps reflecting the relation of "game start" to the oldest buildings in the pakset
- Create all towns very small to start, and let them grow with progressively newer buildings
- After selecting a town site, determine whether to actually build there based on a probability from the Growth Factor (see below) of the potential town site.
- With each town created, advance the Year, and continue to add towns with a probability based on "years remaining to game start" divided by "total towns desired", and in each year not adding a town, expand existing towns, also based on the Growth Factor.
- Industries would be added as time progresses as well. This means little towns which early-on get shops and factories (consumers and workers) , would tend to become larger cities, and attract more shops -- a feedback loop just like real life.
- Growth Factor bonuses would be:
- Proximity to where a river meets the ocean, and to lesser degree, the confluence of two rivers, oceans generally, and rivers generally
- Proximity to industries, particularly those with high passenger demand
That would solve the problem of cities having "too many new buildings" as well as make for a much more realistic map, would it not?
I think that something along these lines but much simpler has long been planned for Standard.
the new system in experimental 9.x works wonderfully -- if you take time to find good parameters.
And it's quite a long time on this system, for a medium sized map 0.5k x 2k and 250 towns, 100 rivers it took me about 10 minutes for map generation on a intel core2 system. (the number of rivers is quite important for the time too.)
perhaps we should start to collect some good parameters in another thread.
'max length' for rivers/intercity roads is important too.
And 10min is too long. Do you run debug or optimised version of binary?