Passenger Issues in Modded Game

[Eusebio Ptolomeu]

I'm having a problem with passenger generation in my games . Basically, they rarely want to use my networks, and sometimes they use it for a month or so and suddenly stop out of nowhere. Whenever I check the stop status screen, the problem is always the same: "passengers can't find route to destination", that red circle with a white dash. I changed some values in the config file, so maybe they are the reason for this problem. I'll write the changes I made below:


-Meters per tile increased to 250m. I did this in order to allow the maps to represent a larger area, making the use of airplanes in the future viable. Pretty much all of the other changes I made was done around this one, in order to scale the game properly.

-I changed station coverage from 16 to 8. With 125m per tile, the station coverage was of 2km, so I kept this coverage radius taking into account the new size of tiles

-Population per level (and the other "per_level" that follows it) was multiplied by 4. Again, I did this in order to maintain the proportions once I doubled the size of the tile.

-I UNchecked random pedestrians and stop pedestrians. I thought they were a purely visual function with no effect on the simulation itself, so I did this in order to improve performance

Those were the changes I made in the simuconf.tab file. Is it possible some of these changes are related to the problem I'm having with passengers?

[zook2]

Do they stop completely or does it slow down to a trickle? Because with new lines I often see a rush of passengers until travel times are established and they find out how slow my network really is. At least I think this is what happens.

- Pedestrians are purely eye candy.

[Matthew]

I'm having a problem with passenger generation in my games . Basically, they rarely want to use my networks, and sometimes they use it for a month or so and suddenly stop out of nowhere. Whenever I check the stop status screen, the problem is always the same: "passengers can't find route to destination", that red circle with a white dash. I changed some values in the config file, so maybe they are the reason for this problem.

First of all: are you using pak128.Britain-Ex? That is the default pakset.

Also, are you changing the correct simuconf.tab? There are usually multiple simuconf.tab files and the game reads all of them, in the following order:

Code Select Expand

# simutrans/config/simuconf.tab
# ~/simutrans/simuconf.tab (in the user directory, if singleuser_install == 0 or not present, first only pak-file path will be read)
# simutrans/pakfilefolder/config/simuconf.tab
# ~/simutrans/simuconf.tab (read a second time)
If you are not sure about this, please ask.

-Meters per tile increased to 250m. I did this in order to allow the maps to represent a larger area, making the use of airplanes in the future viable. Pretty much all of the other changes I made was done around this one, in order to scale the game properly.

I have previously changed meters per tile and have not seen the effects you describe. But it affects almost everything in the game so it does mean that there are a lot of possible effects.

-I changed station coverage from 16 to 8. With 125m per tile, the station coverage was of 2km, so I kept this coverage radius taking into account the new size of tiles

James has said that "8-12 tiles is recommended for passengers". So this appears to be a sensible value.

-Population per level (and the other "per_level" that follows it) was multiplied by 4. Again, I did this in order to maintain the proportions once I doubled the size of the tile.

I think that the vast majority of building in pak128.Britain-Ex now have occupancy set by class, in which case this setting should be ignored. So I would not expect this is to have any big effect.

-I UNchecked random pedestrians and stop pedestrians. I thought they were a purely visual function with no effect on the simulation itself, so I did this in order to improve performance

Zook answered this.

Those were the changes I made in the simuconf.tab file. Is it possible some of these changes are related to the problem I'm having with passengers?

It's possible, but I can't think of anything obvious. As always, it would be helpful if you could share your save file and in your case your modded simuconf.tab. If the save file is too large to attach here, you can use the file server that Simutrans Germany have kindly created for this purpose.

[jamespetts]

You should note that changing the simuconf.tab file will not affect an existing saved game. You can change many of the settings that can be set in simuconf.tab in an existing saved game by using the advanced settings dialogue (the "i" shortcut key in Pak128.Britain-Ex), but some settings (such as meters per tile) cannot be changed in this way because they are so fundamental that data assuming the existing setting are embedded all over the dataset constituting the game and would be too difficult to change retrospectively after game creation.

[Matthew]

You should note that changing the simuconf.tab file will not affect an existing saved game. You can change many of the settings that can be set in simuconf.tab in an existing saved game by using the advanced settings dialogue (the "i" shortcut key in Pak128.Britain-Ex), but some settings (such as meters per tile) cannot be changed in this way because they are so fundamental that data assuming the existing setting are embedded all over the dataset constituting the game and would be too difficult to change retrospectively after game creation.

I didn't even think about this side of things. I knew that bits_per_month and meters_per_tile were embedded into savegames, but I wrongly assumed that they were exceptional. I presume that at least threads is read each time the game starts, because we have to change it in order to connect to Stephenson-Siemens.

It might be helpful to add a comment explaining this point in simuconf.tab. Is there any pattern to which settings are unalterably "embedded" in savegames and which are read from simuconf.tab on game start/loading savegames? I guess that I could trawl through settings_t::rdwr() and settings_extended_general_stats_t::read ticking them off one by one, but if you made these decisions using an unwritten rule, then it would be good to know your thinking, please.