I am a bit confused about how to know what boat/ship/ferry/barge may travel where. Playing pak128.Britain in the 1840:s there is a great variety of sailing ships (including a small wherry). On the canal horses, the depot clearly specifies MUST USE: Permissive 4 MAY USE: Prohibitive 2, but on the sailing ships there is no indication whatsoever. Looking at the rivers and canals themselves; the wide river has permissive 4 and no prohibitive, the river & canal has permissive 4 and prohibitive 2.
I think I have figured out how it works *smile*. Only boats explicitly set to MAY USE: Prohibitive 2 can travel the rivers and canals (which are prohibitive 2); boats set to MUST USE: Permissive 4 cannot travel over open water (which has neither permissive nor prohibitive rules). There is a logic to the system, and it seems to work as intended, BUT the gui needs to be a bit more helpful here I think...
One way would be to explicitly convert the constraints to which types of waterways they apply to; f ex instead of writing :MUST USE: Permissive 4 and MAY USE: Prohibitive 2 on the canal horses and nothing on the sailing ships, showing the following information both in depot and convoi detail windows:
*Can only use <list of waterways that share the permissive constraint of the boat>
*Can not use <list of waterway that the boat lacks permissive constraints for>
*May use <list of waterways that are have the prohibitive constraint of the boat>
*May not use <list of waterways that have prohibitive constraints that the boat does NOT have>
This would be calculated for ALL boats including the sailing ships..and open water should be included in the waterway lists where appropriate.
Goods categories use a separate translation item (CATG_01 etc). Perhaps a similar translation system for these constraints could be used? eg.: CONSTRAINT_PERMISSIVE_0 Then the whole constraint would get a single string name and not a list of ways, which could get very long easily.
Another additional option is to revert to only one kind of constraint and list all values for it everywhere ad nauseam, as it is with climates. This should be possible with a little head scratching and Boolean algebra ;) I think permissive is better, since it feels closer to human way of thinking: "can move on - open sea, rivers, canals".
Sanna,
ahh, the problem is that there may not be a Swedish translation of the constraint names. In the English translation, the constraints are given names that correlate with names of ways or way objects and generally make it clear what is happening. It can be quite confusing without named constraints.
The two constraints are waterway ("permissive 4") and small waterway ("prohibitive 2"). Waterway is a permissive constraint: it allows small boats that cannot safely travel over the sea to use rivers and canals ("waterways"). Small waterway is a prohibitive constraint. It prohibits large, ocean-going vessels from entering smaller rivers and canals into which they do not fit.
As I hope will be clear, everything makes sense with the translated names :-)
Hm, in that case my en.tab is messed up as well (which it well may be), since I did make a point of changing to using English in order to check that it was not a translation issue... I will need to re-download en.tab I guess, but I see MAY USE: Permissive 4 and its kin in the depot using English as well....
BUT whether or not this is a translation issue, I still think the information of what waterways have prohibitive constraints and therefore cannot be used by some boats needs to be given on the boats (in depot and convoi details) not only on the waterways themselves...
I will give follow up when I have had time to get a clean en.tab....
Sanna,
where did you get your en.tab from?
Quote from: jamespetts on June 15, 2010, 11:07:27 PM
Sanna,
where did you get your en.tab from?
Originally iirc from your github rep for britain-ex, but it had been corrupted by later attempt to update it towards Simutranslator std britain (since there is no britain-ex set at Simutranslator).
I have now restored the missing constraints section from your rep to the en.tab file (and added it to sv.tab more or less untranslated, since English makes more sense than the tag string) and I do see "Waterway" and "Small waterway" in game.
However, a lot of the extension request still holds. While the information IS there for boats that have explicit settings for the constraints, the information is lacking from boats that have these parameters unset, but still are affected by f ex prohibitive constraints on a waterway. Try f ex to make a wherry travel a canal... there is no information in the depot window that it will not be able to, and the error msg you get is simply "no route". If there are waterways that have prohibitive constraints that will make it impossible to use the boat in question on them, I would like to know that when buying/choosing the boat in the depot; in form of a "Cannot use...." information text.
Of course the same reasoning applies also to various types of constraints on track.