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Trouble with Clan Line Steamer .dat Compiling

Started by Drewthegreat87, December 19, 2017, 09:39:42 PM

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Drewthegreat87

Hello, recently I've been doing a bit of personal customization of various vehicles etc for the Standard pak version of Pak 128 Britain. I've been attempting to modify a Clan Line Steamer to create a mail only version. Trouble is, when I go to compile the .dat file and the image file (Using makeobj version 52 on Windows 7 64-bit), I receive the following error: Error:: No such file or directory, ERROR IN CLASS image_writer_t: cannot open ./../images/clan-line-steamer.png    I've done many different vehicles, ways, buildings etc in my pack personalization, but this is the first time that I've come across this error. I've run through the .dat file regarding the image name multiple times and I'm not seeing how it can be getting this error. The folder structure is set up how it should be and I'm confident I'm using makeobj correctly.

I've done a bit of research to see if there was another thread with how to over come this and in my research I found where this vehicle was originally added to the pack from some Pak 192 graphics. Would this be interfering with my ability to compile the file in some such way? I saw that an offset had to be applied to also "correct" the graphic for the pak 128 environment. I'm just rather confused at the moment. I've attached the .dat file to this post.

jamespetts

I suspect that the trouble is a simple error of having .. instead of . before /images in all of the image definitions.
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Drewthegreat87

James,

Good point! I missed that! Here's a sample line out of the image code from the .dat. I assume you're referring to the two periods before the slash...

EmptyImage[W]=../images/clan-line-steamer.1.4

I'll remove those and see what happens! If that's the fix, I'll feel better about it but rather embarrassed that I didn't catch that...

I'll try it and follow up! Thank you!

EDIT: Yep! That did the trick! Thank you for your prompt help, James! You'll probably be hearing from me in the Extended Sub Forum as I've been attempting my hand at the new Version of Simutrans Extended, but am having some, probably basic difficulties...

Thank you again! I very much appreciate it!

For anybody's information, my modifications to the Standard Version include porting over vehicles/liveries from the extended pak as well as fixing what I consider to be gaps in the vehicle time line (For example: the mail coach of 1750 ends in 1840 with no real "like for like" replacement until the parcel coach begins in 1880 (1883???, some where around that time). I pushed back the retire date of the mail coach to 1865 and moved the intro date of the parcel coach up to 1865 to fill that gap. I've also attempted at improving locomotive and truck power and tractive values to make them more useful in-game.

The Hood

Hi all, I'm still here in the background but still not really got time for Simutrans projects! I'd be interested to hear how you are getting on with your balancing changes/fixes - it was my last project (unfinished) before I got busier at work and became a dad meaning no time for managing the pakset any more. I am happy to share where I got up to (it's a mega-Excel sheet of data where I was attempting to calculate sensible power values and costs etc) but I never finished let alone tested it. How have you found the economic balancing? A lot of the dats, especially more recent, were just given placeholder values without even a slight attempt at balance.


If you or anyone else fancied taking on the baton of trying to get a well-balanced standard pakset up and running, it might even tempt me to try and find time to create more objects - if I'm honest I got so bogged down with balancing that I stopped seeing the point of creating new objects but if we could get that going again then it might be nice to produce the odd thing now and again.

Drewthegreat87

Apologies, I would have replied sooner, but I guess I missed seeing this comment (and the holidays hit etc). Congratulations on being a new dad! I have a two year old myself, so I have little time to do things myself, so I know how it goes. I mostly do my work on my lunch break at my work...but I'll give a quick summary of what I've worked on and the reasons for the work.

I've mainly been focusing on getting vehicles (rail/road) etc in a more usable state. I've found that there were a great deal ( and still are...) of locomotives that couldn't haul more than a few contemporary cars, freight or passenger, without suffering SEVERE performance loss in speed and tractive effort. I went through and, to use a term, buffed their power and tractive effort stats to allow them to haul heavier trains without too much of a performance loss. For example: many of the newer Midland locos would go red after adding maybe two or three passenger cars to the consist. How I play the game, I go for long platforms (Usually at least 6 to 8 tiles by the Mid to later 19th century and beyond), so that usually ends up being a 14 car train, give or take, by that period. Are my inputs realistic? Probably not, but it does allow far more variety of power assignments to routes/trains than I would have available otherwise. Many of the late game trucks (lorries) suffer the same problem and can't haul their full loading more than 20/30 kph. I'm not well versed in British trucking speeds, but I would assume that your lorries go much, much faster than what is about 15/20 mph (or whatever the kph lines up with...) even with a full load.

I just got done re-rating the trucks the other day, and eventually in my game, I'll get to use them. I'm currently plotting out some tweaking to vehicle timelines. I found that there was no suitable mail coach (horse hauled) from after 1840 until 1883 when the parcel coach becomes available. I made a point to extend both timelines where the mail coach ends in Jan. 1865 and the Parcel coach starts in Jan 1865. Again, I'm not sure of the prototypical dating for the vehicles ( though I would assume they're more generic than specific...), but I thought that a good compromise. I did the same by providing a mail only Clan Line steamer (hence this thread) and extending the cargo holds for the Clyde Steamer to 1912 when the ship itself goes obsolete (the holds ending in 1883...). I'm considering looking into finding out how hard/easy it would be to implement the mail load increases that Simutrans Extended offers on increasing mail count, but something tells me that that would mean tapping into the C++ somewhere and I only have minimal python experience, no C++.

I've brought in many trains that didn't have .dat files made for them from the Extended Github repository, so there are even more trains and liveries available than would otherwise come from the standard pak version. I didn't have proper figures, but approximated their stats based on contemporary examples. I know knowing that might eat some of you alive for realism and I get that, thus why these are personal modifications for myself and based on my playing style. I haven't even touched any of the economic figures/factors as I feel that would be a major undertaking...I mainly play the game to build networks and watch them grow/evolve over time, not so much a hardcore economic/transport simulator.

Additionally, some of my inspiration for making certain changes were that I liked a lot of what I saw in Simutrans Extended, but could never get it to work quite right, which I do want to post about when I get the chance to see if there's resolutions to the issues I'm experiencing (Most likely user error, I'm willing to admit, but still..). I decided to bring in as much of the different trains as I could find or edit a few to fill some gaps or add favorites (example: I took the BR Green A3 loco, tweaked the .png file a bit and made a new .dat file for a A1 Peppercorn Pacific which comes into services in 1948 to 1966). I also created a live stock wagon for post 1973 when the last original stock wagon retires. I know that isn't realistic as both the UK and USA stopped live stock hauling around the same time in the 1960s/70s, but I also felt like I didn't want to be trapped by real developments in freight traffic (and the nightmare of having to completely build a new network of trucks just to ship one goods type...)

I think the changes I've made are keeping within the spirit of what's going on, but as I said, they're just for me, but if interested, I'd be willing to share the pak I have for examination and whatnot.

Thank you!

jamespetts

I should be very interested in your feedback in relation to Extended; I should note that the economic balancing for this is not yet complete, which might or might not account for the issues that you report. The priority for 2018 is to balance the costs/prices, but that does involve implementing some significant new features first, and the whole process might take longer than a year.

Incidentally, you should be able to alter the mail generation rate in Standard just by modifying simuconf.tab and goods128.pak, I think - I cannot remember for certain now, but you should be able to have a look at simuconf.tab to see whether there are any mail generation rate settings in there.
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Want to help with development? See here for things to do for coding, and here for information on how to make graphics/objects.

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The Hood

The problems you are describing are exactly why the rebalancing needs to be done. I had a look over Christmas at what I managed to balance on my last attempt (unreleased) and it seems I had done quite a bit on the rail balancing (cost and power) before giving up. I've also been developing some tools to help with batch editing of dat files in excel. My plan is to roughly rebalance the whole set so that all vehicles have enough power to pull sensible loads at a sensible speed for them, and to make all vehicles economically viable to about the same extent, within the limitations of the standard code. I suspect the majority of standard players play as you do wanting to build networks rather than for economic simulation - extended is far better at that anyway so for the ultra-realists I think they are well-catered for with that version.

It would be interesting to see what numbers you came up with for your locos to compare against my new ones (don't forget it's gear*power that matters, the reason for both is to allow for historical power values but meaningful performance in game with varying gear values). I'd also like to know what dates you changed, and what new vehicles you added (dat and png would be good) as I may want to include these in future.

Once I've got the rough balancing OK in spreadsheet format (no promises when that would be - probably months!) I would like to get a testing release out - would you be happy to give that a go to check it works in game?

Finally mail - what are your reasons for wanting to increase mail generation numbers? I know extended has mail generation x10 but each unit of mail is effectively 1/10 of a standard unit. It's easy enough to change on a pakset level, so if there is an advantage to that I will do it in the rebalance.