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New map generated with huge cities

Started by macson_g, January 17, 2021, 09:34:35 AM

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macson_g

I just downloaded S-E for the first time. I'm trying to generate a new map, but it is always covered with huge cities, when using pack Britain.
The "Median Town Population" setting is at default 1600, yet the generated cities have the following populations:
- 0 (?)
- 6214
- 4484
- 11276
- 11482
- 12878
- 192264

The entire mam is covered with cities.

The 'Sweden' pak generates cities correctly, but generates no industries at all.

freddyhayward

Quote from: macson_g on January 17, 2021, 09:34:35 AM
I just downloaded S-E for the first time. I'm trying to generate a new map, but it is always covered with huge cities, when using pack Britain.
The "Median Town Population" setting is at default 1600, yet the generated cities have the following populations:
- 0 (?)
- 6214
- 4484
- 11276
- 11482
- 12878
- 192264

The entire mam is covered with cities.

The 'Sweden' pak generates cities correctly, but generates no industries at all.
Unfortunately this setting is broken. I usually have the number of big cities set to 0, the number of city clusters to 0 and the median town population to 800.

Ranran(retired)

Quote from: freddyhayward on January 17, 2021, 09:41:35 AMUnfortunately this setting is broken.
Since the world needs to create a population that exceeds the number of jobs, I think it may not be possible to meet the demands set by users.
So what I mean by the current specifications is that the world puts the highest priority on balancing work and population.

For example, if you set city to 0, you can see that no matter how many industries you set, the factory will never built. Because there are no people to work. I presume that the world is working to balance that way.
The specifications and their settings may be incompatible.
ひめしという日本人が開発者達の助言を無視して自分好みの機能をextendedに"強引に"実装し、
コードをぐちゃぐちゃにしてメンテナンスを困難にし(とりわけ道路と建物関連)、
挙句にバグを大量に埋め込み、それを知らんぷりして放置し(隠居するなどと言って)別のところに逃げ隠れて自分のフォーク(OTRP)は開発を続けている
その事実と彼の無責任さに日本人プレイヤーは目を向けるべき。らんらんはそれでやる気をなくした(´・ω・`)
他人の振り見て我が振り直せ。ひめしのようにならないために、らんらんが生み出したバグや問題は自分で修正しなくちゃね(´・ω・`)

dannyman

... so, try generating a map with less industry?

zook2

What's the map size? A small map can easily be covered with a few cities.

dannyman

#5
I have been getting nice results with these settings:
Map size: 384x384
Cities: 12
Big cities: 0
Median citizens: 400
Factories: 12
Tourists: 12
Timeline: 1750

The cities are chunkier squares and larger than the standard version, which is reasonable given that passengers WALK. At these cities, I get discreet cities that don't cover half the map.

Catasteroid

I imagine that this and other similar reports of difficulty with city regeneration are my fault; I erroneously assumed that when I made changes to the renovation behaviour and the code that reads the new values I added that controlled this new behaviour in the pak's cityrules.tab file the pak's cityrules.tab file would also be changed. That and I had overlooked a calculation error that lead to renovation not valuing residential demand properly.
When the game checks for these new values in the cityrules.tab files and doesn't find them (predictably as they're not there) then it falls back on hard-coded default values which are not sensible values, it pains me a great deal knowing that this egregious grip of mistakes of mine went unnoticed to me for nearly two years all the while having a deleterious effect on people's games.

In the meantime to remedy the bad default values please use the cityrules.tab file attached to this post. I'm terribly sorry for all this- I can't help but feel guilty about leaving my contributions in such a poor state and damaging people's game experiences. I'll be making a pull request/bug report post shortly and I hope the matter will be resolved shortly.

dannyman

#7
SOLUTION:
1) To fix the city populations, make sure you're using an Extended version of simuconf.tab, like https://raw.githubusercontent.com/jamespetts/simutrans-extended/master/simutrans/config/simuconf.tab
2) To make the cities less sprawly, download a revised cityrules.tab from Catasteroid, at https://forum.simutrans.com/index.php?action=dlattach;topic=18804.0;attach=28342 and place it in your pak's config/ directory.

Hopefully, #2 will soon be merged into the pak128.Britain-Ex nightly.


For #1: perhaps the developers may consider putting a "version" variable in the default simutrans-extended simuconf.tab, and warn the user if that variable hasn't been set, maybe they're playing with a standard simuconf.tab


Still, though, the results are very variable even with the same parameters, and at 1600 min city size my minimum city size tends towards 4,000+.

DISCUSSION:

On Linux, the installation implies "download simutrans standard, the simutrans-extended executable, and an Ex pak set." Buuuuut that means I was playing with standard simuconf.tab. I download an Ex simuconf.tab from https://raw.githubusercontent.com/jamespetts/simutrans-extended/master/simutrans/config/simuconf.tab and that makes a huuuge difference.


And a personal gripe, these cities are formed as perfect squares, not the irregular shapes I have been used to. While this makes station coverage super easy to work out, the feeling is unnatural. :/

Catasteroid

Is the "minimum_building_density" value in your cityrules.tab file set to 100? What date are you playing your game in?

dannyman

#9
Catasteroid:

In your cityrules.tab I find minimum_building_density = 60. Changing this has no appreciable impact.

My generation settings at present:

64kmx64km
16 cities
0 big cities
0 city clusters
600 median residents per city
1024 intercity road length
16 factories
16 tourists
1750 year

This generates a pretty decent map, imho. The median city size is ~ 1,000, ranging from 700 to 4,000. There can be a lot of variability between generations. Some maps still come out with huge sprawling cities, most tend to look not unlike Simutrans standard, but on a larger map, and SQUARE. :)


Further investigation: pak128.britain[1] appears to have your changes and cityrules.tab I linked from your other post appears to be older than current.

[1]: https://github.com/jamespetts/simutrans-pak128.britain/commits/master/config/cityrules.tab

Catasteroid

Ok hmm, you could set renovation_influence_type to 0 and renovation_distance_chance to 0 which may also help to encourage more renovation, I admit that I didn't test with every era's buildings so there may be issues when there isn't a large variety of buildings available. Generally you'll want to reduce renovation_percentage a bit, maybe by 3-5 per unit of roughness below 50, with minimum_building_density lower too. If you want you can go into the pak's simuconf.tab and set quick_city_growth to 1 and renovation_percentage to ~50 or 60 to use standard's city growth instead.

dannyman

Hrm, these settings don't seem to make any difference. I went and compared it with Standard... I ended up making a video.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f4hCDFC4Z-A

Catasteroid

#12
I should've asked this sooner- which version or build number/date are you using, and personally I'd suggest putting your Extended install into a separate folder so config files from standard aren't loaded, the renovation changes I made just don't work unless the executable is above a specific version number. If you haven't already download the latest nightly build Extended package from this link and then modify the cityrules.tab to experiment with it. Again I must apologise for the odd behaviour.

I will however, add that I'm fairly sure the cities being square was a thing before I contributed to the game.

TransportFanMar

Hi, this is my first post here.

Sorry for necroing, but I think this is better than creating a new topic.

When will the city sprawl be solved? I tried the fixes mentioned and installing the latest version, and had to change avg city size to 200 or 400 and the cities are then around 1000 population (highest <2000 sometimes.)

TransportFanMar

Do I really need to change settings from default? Even then city size differs too much.

EDIT: Sorry for making a 2nd post. Also, are big cities and city clusters broken?