Hi,
Just have a question, does Simutrans supports a loaded view for the stations / stations extensions, like the loaded view of the vehicles. It might be cool to see some passengers waiting at te train station, the car parks could be full or empty, the freight quais full of stuff.
I know that Simutrans don't actually have any station like that. I just ask if Simutrans can support it, then I might create/adapt some stations by drawing a loaded view.
Simutrans doesn't support loading graphics for stations, only for vehicles. That shouldn't put you off from creating them - I'm certain there are many players who'd welcome additional graphical choices and place them by hand, good graphics will always find their use.
Talking about this in the sense of an extension request:
Showing how loaded a station is graphically makes sense intuitively. It would be nice if you could look at a station and get visual feedback whether it's full or empty or something in between, and which goods are waiting in the station, especially since the colored bars usually don't tell much (The colors are not utilized enough in the UI to really link them with the goods, and in most paksets there are too many goods to distinguish them by color anyway)
Station storage space is very abstract. Any station extension just increases the storage number, and than that many more of each item can exist in the station. That is, a coal bunker with a value "10" could not store more than 10 tons of coal, but it can store 10 tons of coal, 10 tons of iron ore, 10 cubic meter of oil, 10 pallets of electronics, 10 cows and sometimes 10 passengers at the same time.
If the coal bunker has 10 cows in it, should it show a bunker full of coal, or should it show an empty bunker? Not so intuitive all of a sudden.
Of course, the loading status could be abstract as well. A station extension could have a specific good assigned to it and shows how much of the stations capacity is used by that good, specifically. That would mean you can have a coal bunker, an oil tank and a cow pen, each costing the same and adding 10 units of storage, but with 10 tons of coal and 30 cubic meter of oil in the station, the coal bunker shows "some goods", the oil tank shows "full" and the cow pen is empty.
Or the station capacity would have to be less abstract, with each station extension only accepting a specific class of goods and all goods of a type counting towards the same capacity.
Yup, I think that we should not structurally change the system of the station extension. For the repartition of goods, I think that if a station with coal bunkers is full of cows, the coal bunkers should be empty, but Simutrans can't make the difference between the actual stations extensions type in Pak128, right ? So, let's admit that we drawn a coal bunker with an empty and a full view, if we don't want to categorize the station extensions, and we don't want avoid to a cow to get stocked in this coal bunker, we can't avoid Simutrans to display the full view of the coal bunker when it's in reality full of cows ?
I hope you understand me, english is not my native language ;)
There was an extension request for that, and it is not a very difficult code change. So if there are enough graphics, maybe someone will program that. Make a graphic and put it to the extension request.
That system would indeed have a coal bunker full of cows.
Quote from: prissi on November 18, 2020, 05:02:30 AM
That system would indeed have a coal bunker full of cows.
A coal bunker full of cows, but with a coal bunker full of coal graphics ?
I probably could fistly draw some graphics for the passenger stations and station extensions, and then, let's see ;)