livery.tab

[Ranran(retired)]

I remembered seeing Phystam mentioning similar thing somewhere.
My request is slightly different, but I think it is essentially the same.

I think the settings about livery scheme currently in simuconf.tab should be separated as a separate configuration file, like privatecar.tab cityrules.tab and electricity.tab.
Because there are a number of parameters in simuconf.tab that are used for personal changes.
But now pakset authors edit simuconf when adding new liveries and changing definitions.
If the player tries to apply it and overwrites simuconf.tab, player will lose their edited settings. (´・ω・｀)

For example I have changed show_month (this is important for Asians) and allow_buying_obsolete_vehicles.
There are some other contents such as with_private_paks, which are often changed by individuals rather than by pakset.
The settings related to privatecar, cityrules and electricity are separated into separate files, so such problems do not occur.
Furthermore, the settings for the livery scheme are large and somconf.tab is bloated.


Is separation difficult?

[jamespetts]

I am not sure how difficult that this would be as I have not really looked into that. This is not a high priority for my own time at present, as I am focussing on bug fixes and balance issues.

The overwriting issue is more complex, since there will in any event often need to be frequent changes to simuconf.tab as Simutrans-Extended develops. Ideally, one would have a Git like merging system for players' individual changes, but I cannot think of any way of achieving that within the coding resources available to us at present.

However, I can see that there would be some merit in having a separate .tab file for liveries.

[Matthew]

I support this feature request, though of course it is up to each dev how they use their time.

As a workaround, would it help having a simutrans/addons/your_desired_pakset/config/simuconf.tab file with your personal settings? If you delete the livery schemes from that file then Simutrans should just read them from the pakset file, right? Or am I thinking of another game?

[jamespetts]

I think that this workaround would be just as much work as the originally requested feature; as an atempt to solve teh personal settings issue, this would get very complex; would a clean pakset start with two identical simuconf.tab files? If so, I can see players getting very confused about which to edit.

[Ves]

I would very much support a livery.tab!
Reasoning:
Whereas most of the other parameters in the simuconf.tab is mostly not too pakset specific (you could pretty much swap the simuconf files between different paksets without too much of an impact), the liveries are HEAVILY pakset dependent. If the (rather large, I might add) livery section does not correspond exactly to the pak-files, the livery feature is effectively disabled.