Topic: Lets Play?

[The13thRonin]

Would someone be interested in doing a text or video Lets Play on Simutrans Extended Pak.128.Britain that showcase different factors of how to play the game (for example different station types, how to do convoy spacing, how to get started with a profitable company, etc)?

I'd do one myself but I understand probably 10% of what's going on at any given time. I really love the Standard Simutrans game and would like to learn more.

I have already seen jamespetts excellent videos but I was thinking it might be useful to have a full Lets Play to see how everything fits together so to speak?

[jamespetts]

I do plan to do more video tutorials in due course, but they are quite time consuming, and there is currently a lot of higher priority work that I need to do in getting the game ready to be balanced fully.

However, I should definitely encourage anyone else to produce videos if so inclined: the more videos about Simutrans-Extended, the better!

[DrSuperGood]

Problem is there is no real pakset balance. It is hard to play when either you cannot ever make money, or you make far too much money just by doing one thing there is no point using the rest of the features. Let us not forget all the bugs!

To put it in perspective, I played the server 2 days ago (using nightly build) for a few minutes and encountered at least 1 nonsense bug. When I withdrew a hovercraft milk run for more profitable vans it somehow gave the destination dairy a negative in transit amount. I am guessing that goods that are internally being transferred and are removed due to no route get removed twice, as that is the only logical reason how it could come at a negative in transit amount.

[jamespetts]

Problem is there is no real pakset balance. It is hard to play when either you cannot ever make money, or you make far too much money just by doing one thing there is no point using the rest of the features.

The work that I am undertaking at present, providing for mail and passenger classes, as well as researching how those should be calibrated (as discussed here) is aimed at providing proper balance for revenue so that proper balance for cost (and therefore proper balance overall) can be achieved. Beyond the passenger and mail classes work, the maintenance features discussed here and inflation are the two critical features necessary before balancing can be started in earnest.

Any assistance that anyone can give with implementing those features would be greatly welcomed.

Let us not forget all the bugs!

To put it in perspective, I played the server 2 days ago (using nightly build) for a few minutes and encountered at least 1 nonsense bug. When I withdrew a hovercraft milk run for more profitable vans it somehow gave the destination dairy a negative in transit amount. I am guessing that goods that are internally being transferred and are removed due to no route get removed twice, as that is the only logical reason how it could come at a negative in transit amount.

It would really be helpful if you could report these when you encounter them, as it makes a big difference to my ability to find and fix them. I had fixed a bug of similar description to this in the recent past, and I was not aware that it still occurred; can you let me know which specific hovercraft that you withdrew so that I can try to reproduce that on my local copy of the game to try to fix this?

[DrSuperGood]

It would really be helpful if you could report these when you encounter them, as it makes a big difference to my ability to find and fix them. I had fixed a bug of similar description to this in the recent past, and I was not aware that it still occurred; can you let me know which specific hovercraft that you withdrew so that I can try to reproduce that on my local copy of the game to try to fix this?

It was something like Milk-1. On the server game it was a line of about 20 odd hovercrafts that was losing several hundred thousand every month.

I hit withdraw and built a road between the stops. I then added mink vans of sorts to a new road line that ran between the stops and started convoys. When trying to understand how consumption was working I checked the dairy and it had negative in transit amount. (blah / -X (blah) / blah).

[jamespetts]

Thank you for the details. Looking at this, it appears to be a legacy issue: the in transit number was incorrectly too low on loading the game (probably caused by an earlier error); when withdrawing all the convoys, the cargo at the cattle farm stop is discarded, and this correctly reduces the in transit number by the amount actually waiting at that stop, which is in excess of the in-transit number, causing a negative number to appear at the diary. Hopefully, this should not arise in future.

Edit: Looking at this in more detail, I notice that I had enabled CACHE_TRANSIT to prevent network desyncs, as re-calculating the in-transit percentage did not take account of transferring goods. I have now modified the code so that re-calculating the in-transit percentage does take account of goods transferring. I have tested this, and it appears to be network safe.

This means that the in-transit percentage will be recalculated when the game is loaded, and will therefore avoid anomalies in older saved games, which should solve this issue.

Thank you very much for reporting this.