Connect powerlines with electric lines of rail, road and tram

[ankit.karan99]

Hi everyone,
I really enjoying simutrans, but have several questions.

1. how can I connect power lines with electric lines of road, rail and tram?

Edited : 2. profits of monorail foundation and how to build?

3. Font of Notification bar (at bottom) and size of close button is too small, how to increase ?

Thanks in advance...

[chris-tier]

Hi!

• you mean so that the catenary has electricity? You don't need to connect the catenary to the power grid.
• what exactly is your issue? Is it available? (as in: has it been invented in the timeline)

[DrSuperGood]

1. how can I connect power lines with electric lines of road, rail and tram?

You cannot. Overhead lines and electrification are not suitable for high power point to point networks. They are instead intended only to power trains. Due to the level at which power is modeled in simutrans you do not need to concern yourself with supplying them.

Edited : 2. profits of monorail foundation and how to build?

Depends on pakset you are using. In pak64 they are reasonably profitable as long as you have enough passengers connected in a network and use the appropriate speed engines for your time period. In pak128 there are balance issues involving them so you may rather consider an underground loop.

3. Font of Notification bar (at bottom) and size of close button is too small, how to increase ?

Must be a DPI issue. Due to the way graphics are produced in simutrans they do not scale too well with DPI. At high DPI the icons should be enlarged so that they remain a similar physical size however I am not sure if Simutrans does this as that would require filtering operations and/or DPI awareness for UI icons.

[Ters]

At high DPI the icons should be enlarged so that they remain a similar physical size however I am not sure if Simutrans does this as that would require filtering operations and/or DPI awareness for UI icons.

Windows used to do this for us, but I killed that to make the mouse work properly.

[prissi]

The font thing is halfway through. The problem is that the usual way (freetype) is not very well itegrated into windows. So this is known, but help is still a month of coding away (whenever it will come).

[dannyman]

I suspect the requirement to connect electrified lines to grid may now become a feature request in Experimental.

[DrSuperGood]

I suspect the requirement to connect electrified lines to grid may now become a feature request in Experimental.

The problem is with how accurately you want the feature. In real life one does not simply hook up overhead lines to a transformer. Firstly each connection point has a limited range due to impedance losses associated with overhead lines. Secondly one has to balance the phase usage across the network to avoid extremely large penalty charges. Thirdly you need to make sure to limit the number of engines starting at any given time to avoid spike consumption charges. There are also hand-over "dead" sections to consider where you change from one transformer to another since they are not in phase (connecting two overhead transformers on the same circuit will cause a massive short circuit, the sort where one of the transformers will explode and probably kill someone).

Game play wise in multiplayer there is also the possible issue of trolls purposely overloading power networks to mess with other people electric trains.

All this detracts from building and maintaining lines. I think the current model is probably the best from the gameplay perspective.

[Ters]

Game play wise in multiplayer there is also the possible issue of trolls purposely overloading power networks to mess with other people electric trains.

Especially if the trains delivering fuel to the power station is one of those electric trains. This chicken-and-egg scenario can be a source of grief even in single player.

[DrSuperGood]

Another argument one could make is that if one models delivering power to overhead lines, then one should also model delivering fuel to diesel/steam convoys.

[Ters]

Another argument one could make is that if one models delivering power to overhead lines, then one should also model delivering fuel to diesel/steam convoys.

Indeed.

[Isaac Eiland-Hall]

It sounds fun to be able to connect electricity/fuel to the network, and it might well be — but there would still have to be fuel and electricity automatically available, because you'd otherwise have a chicken/egg problem.

And then, if you're able to choose to connect fuel/electricity to your network, why would you if it wouldn't make things cheaper; but at the same time, that makes game balancing that much harder.

So it sounds like a fun idea, but there are a lot of problems to solve. And then find a developer who's willing to put in a huge amount of work, and sell the idea to the rest of the devs.

[DrSuperGood]

Before such a fuel model could be added a sensible industry model would be needed, where factories do more than just spew out and eat up freight.

If anyone ever wants to try it here are just some random thoughts. There should be a base amount of free fuel produced so that early games do not need to worry about it, only when lots of transport is happening does it become a concern and you will need to help with fuel production. The amount available should probably scale with demand, so as long as people help supply the industries for fuel that appear they will have no problems. Due to the simulation nature of Simutrans it is probably not a good idea to simulate engines having to stop/go refuel as that would introduce un-fun game mechanics, rather simulating fuel from a global level maybe with some distribution outlets needed nearby where lines run or at one of the stops of a line.

[Leartin]

Except that within the many ways players play, ignoring factories alltogether and going for pax only is quite common.

A much simpler way would be to boost the power of electric vehicles if the electrification is connected to the electric grid. The boost/penalty would be pakset dependant with a standard value of 0=no effect at all.
The pakset could define two values, one is a boolean to check whether it's a boost if electrification is added or a penalty if it is not. The other is the percentage by which the power changes, based on the normal values for the vehicle. So 0 means no change, but 100 means minimal movement for penalties and twice the power for boosts.

This does not exactly solve the chicken-egg-problem, but it puts it out of the hand of the game engine to the pak developers, and being a setting in the config, it could be easily changed by players themselves. If it's just a minor boost/penalty, say 10%, it could even be ignored completely by the player. Also, this has nothing to do with reality at all, but since we currently expect electricity to come from nowhere, I'd argue that's not exactly a problem.

[DrSuperGood]

Except one cannot simply do this for electrification and then ignore fuel. It would be incomplete mechanics then.

[Leartin]

Maybe so, but still better than requiring the pakset to include multiple industries - a source for coal as well as some use for it, a source for oil, a refinery and use for gas and diesel so it spawns, and let's not forget that many paksets use horses in early years, fueled by hay? What would a hay industry chain look like? You would have to include that as well, otherwise it's just as incomplete. A bit too complex for standard I'd say.

[Ters]

How was the hay fuel market? Considering hay is more generally more readily available, literally by the road side even, than coal, diesel or high-power electricity, it might not be strange to leave it out, just like oxygen for diesel, and oxygen and water for steam.

[Octavius]

DC electrification (tram, trolleybus, some railways) has in real life feeding stations at short intervals, fed from the mid-voltage electricity grid. This mid-voltage grid is not simulated in Simutrans in any other way than the feature that all industries in a city get power once you supply power to a transformer in that city. AC electrification gets power directly from the high-voltage grid, transformed down and with some clever switching and sometimes frequency conversion. This high-voltage grid is simulated in Simutrans, although much simplified.

Furthermore, real power grids are smarter than the one in Simutrans. Real power stations don't switch on when they get fuel delivered to quickly burn all of it and then switch off again, waiting for the next delivery. They often have multiple units (count the chimneys) and if they don't get enough fuel to run all of them continuously, they switch some off, supplying less power, but always at least some. (More accurately, it's driven by demand, not fuel supply.) If power stations can't match the demand, some consumers will get cut off, keeping the most important consumers (including the railways) powered on.

So although it might be fun to need electricity generation for electric trains, the grid has to become somewhat smarter first. Whether that is feasible is a different matter.

As for supplying oil to get things moving: that might be interesting for airports. Aircraft are big consumers of jet fuel, often consuming more fuel than the mass of their payload. Airports receive more jet fuel than passengers. There is no chicken-and-egg problem as oil isn't moved around by air (although see this).

[DrSuperGood]

This mid-voltage grid is not simulated in Simutrans in any other way than the feature that all industries in a city get power once you supply power to a transformer in that city.

That is an experimental only feature. In Simutrans standard you need to feed each industry separately with power lines.

There is no chicken-and-egg problem as oil isn't moved around by air

Oil products (fuels, etc) is flown in to many unreachable locations where truck or ship transport is not possible. Most obvious is the arctic research stations and bases around which are frozen in most of the year and need fuel for heating/electricity. Additionally live refuling is performed on military jet aircraft but that has nothing to do with Simutrans.

[jamespetts]

Requiring some sort of electricity generation to be connected to electric transport is something that I have considered for Experimental, but provisionally rejected as being excessively complex both to implement and use.

[dannyman]

For smaller maps (maybe scenario-specific) it could be sufficient to modify running costs for a particular power source based on whether the consumers of the chain were getting supplied.  Like the various bonuses work for industry.  If the chain is not present: default values, but if the chain is present, the running costs are increased until the industry is happy.

Something like steam == coal merchant, petrol == gas station, electrics == power plants, biologic == baker, &c  (the paper boy probably takes different fuel than horse ... and that 1.5c - 2.5c / km will make all the difference ..)

If you wanted to do same for larger maps, you might say if the line comes within so many tiles of a happy factory you get more of less running cost bonus.