This thread will be about the new window in Simutrans Extended, currently called the "Vehicle Manager".
I have previously mentioned it in other places, but I believe it never got its own thread, so here it is!
The thread is intended to be partly to show the progress and to get opinions on how it should function and what to have in the window.
The vehicle manager is a window where the player will be able to get information from, and perform actions to, multiple vehicles across all lines and convoys in one go. It will, for instance, be possible to select all 12 "Blue Pullman" -railway cars currently visible in the right hand window in the below picture, and manipulate all 12 cars in one go, for instance sending them to depot (which should result in the convoys with the selected cars go to depot, the 12 cars gets removed from the convoy, and the rest of the convoy departs again)
As of today the window looks like this:

Road vehicles:

I would like to adress some issues I have with the window and ask for some feedback on how to solve those:
1) Advanced SortingCurrently, there is a sorting combobox on top of each vehicle field. They are currently limited to just a number of sort options, but those will be extended to further options.
However, I am thinking of adding more sets of tabs to help with the sorting in the left hand vehicle field, for instance the same tab system as in the depot, which for road vehicles is:
| Buses | Trolleybuses | Trucks | Trailers |... and for rail:
| Passenger carriages | Electric units | Locomotives | Freight wagons |Pro's is that the player should immediatedly recognize the tabs from the depot. Con's is that it is not 100% accurate with some flaws on edge cases, and that also players might want to see vehicles from two groups simultaneously.
If not using the
depot window tab approach, one could instead have a set of comboboxes with display parameters and numberinputs (see my suggestion for the right hand window selection system below). It would be easier to finetune just exactly what you want to be displayed with the risk of it being very tedius and unintuitive.
I anticipate also that James will eventually implement some feature of "inseparatability" designed to handle multiple unit vehicles, say articulated busses or permanently attached cars, which cant disconnect outside the depot. The idea in the window is that it is supposed to be able to show the permanently attached unit as one entry, making it easy for the player to see how many such units (s)he has. That could also be sorted with tabs, alternatively just a button "separate articulated vehicls", to make each part of a multiple unit vehicle go into its own entry.
2) Right hand window selection system:It is very easy to select one or a few individual vehicles, and its even easier to select all vehicles, just by pressing the "select all" button. What is difficult, however, is to select
a bunch of vehicles, since you quickly loose track of which vehicle to select, and it is simply tedious to select multiple individual vehicles.
To explain why this might be an issue:
When you have, say 100 horses, and you want to select around 50 of them because those 50 should be upgraded to stronger horses, you need a way to quickly identify which 50 horses you need. With the existing sorting mechanism, you can easily sort
by age, but that will just make your desired horses the 50 topmost entries, not select them. For that, you would still have to click each horse for selection.
What I had imagined could work is some kind of display system, where the player can narrow down the amount of horses displayed in the list by having a combobox and a number input.
The combobox would have entries like "bought before year", "bought after year", "overhauled before year", "overhauled after year", "wear remain minimum", "wear remain maximum", " etcetc, and in the numberinput you can specify a value, say "1956" if it is a year value. One could have two or three rows of such comboboxes and numberinputs to help further narrow down the list.
Then in addition to that a new button that says "select visible" which will select all vehicles that is now visible in the list.
3) The information tab system:The tabs benieth the vehicle selection fields will be the place where the action takes place. I have now just created some tabs and called them something, but I am not sure with what grade of detail the tabs should be made to.
What I think is supposed to exist:
* An information field with similar information as the text information in the depot window. This information is largely picked up from
vehicle_desc_t. However, if any mail- or passenger vehicles are selected, the classes might have been reassigned, so that section will have to take that into consideration
* Additional information from
vehicle_desc_t about upgrade information, livery information etc that is currently not displayed in the depot.
* Information about the specific selected vehicle: Odometer, Bought year, Overhauled year, Upgraded year, Income, etcetc, simply all information that is ever available about individual vehicles. If more vehicles are selected, I would suggest this information is still visible, but is displayed in ranges, like "Bought year: 1840 - 1849".
* Actions that the player can perform on the vehicle. This would largely be buttons like: "send to depot", "upgrade", "change livery", "delete on layover" etc. Simply every action that is available to the player. The window should send the command to whatever convoy the vehicle is traveling in and tell the convoy what to do with the vehicle. In case with the "upgrade" command, the window would have to perform basicly all the same actions as the current "replacer tool" available from todays convoy windows does.
Now, if we try to put it into tabs, I think that these two tabs are pretty good:
| General information |- The "depot information"
| Upgrade |- This would hold some of the technical information that is important in regards to the health of the vehicle. That would be the odometer, the build year, when it was last overhauled, how much wear it has taken, as well as what vehicle(s) (if any) it can upgrade into, and the cost to do that.
The buttons for
upgrade,
overhaul and other similar functions would also live here.
Then I am unsure about the rest, but to throw some ideas for tabs:
| Echonomics |- Revenue for the vehicle, along with all other echonomic statistics that might exist, and possibly the
change livery button. For passenger- and mail vehicles, the classes would be reassignable from here too.
| Advanced |- A tab that holds "dangerous" buttons, like
delete,
send to depot and similar commands.
| Details |- A tab that is a combination of the previously mentioned
Echonomics and
Advanced tabs.
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This window has been my biggest project to date in coding for Simutrans Ex, and I would really appreciate feedback and suggestions on some of the topics mentioned above, and even on topics that I have not touched above. I would hate to have programmed a window that proved to be useless because I made some wrong assumptions along the way

The link to the progress of the window:
https://github.com/VictorErik/Simutrans-Experimental-Ves/tree/veh-managment-guiLink to a partly developed savegame to demonstrate its functions:
https://github.com/VictorErik/saved-games/blob/master/veh-managment-gui/Vehicle%20Management.sveYou need this menuconf.tab in order to have the button to open the window. Make a copy of the pakset and replace the menuconf in paksetdirectory\config with this one:
https://github.com/VictorErik/saved-games/blob/master/veh-managment-gui/menuconf.tab