Vienna-Krakow-Budapest extended Server

[Mariculous]

Hey community,
After many years of hosting "under-the-radar" simutrans standard and extended servergames, both with a pure co-operative terretorial ruleset i.e. nobody is allowed to build on other players terretory without permision, I will host a new public simutrans-extended server, most likely a non-terretorial one.
In any case I am waiting for Isaac.Eiland-Hall to get his new server running befoe starting mine.
If he cannot host the current stephenson-siemens game on the new server, I will continue that map instead of hosting a new one.
In any case, suggestions made won't be lost. I will come back to these once stepehenson-siemens

Otherwise, as this should be a severgame for the simutrans community, I would like you to make suggestions, I will filter these and let you vote how the game should look like.
there are a few things I want to know from the community:
1. the pakset:
I considered pak128.britain-ex and pak256.jp-ex. Any further suggestions?

2. the ruleset:
I considered a very basic ruleset not restricting any competition apart from not allowing sabotaging other players.
However, if you have any further ideas or wishes, please let me know. A few examples following:
- rules when a player is considered gone, so players can ask the admin for access permissions and full or part takeovers of that players companies from that time on.
- tunnel and elevated way restrictions beyond technically implemented ones.
- city modification restrictions, deleting buildings and roads, altering slopes and anything else that a transport company would not simply be allowed to do in the real-world.
- In combination with the above, maybe an option to request public-service to build dual roads or make place for tracks within city borders, losing less inhabitants than in case of simply deleting  buildings.

3. The start era and time settings
e.g. start year, bits_per_month setting, game paused when nobody is connected or not?
My suggestion: start 1750 using bits_per_month=22 and don't pause when nobody is connected.

4. The map
The hardware will be restricted to 2 cores/4threads and 8GB ram for now.
Keep this in mind for suggestions.If it turns out to not fit into the limits in lategame, I can increase these, but it should be consensusly expected to run within the limits.
3.1 map size: I had something around 1024*2048 in mind.
3.2 cities: I had something around 40-60 in mind. What about the distribution? There are quite a lot settings... Simply use the default?
3.3 terrain: High mountains or flat lands? Lakes? Islands? Even an ocean in between two continents? Alternatively, suggest a heightmap.

5. An existing savegame
Alternatively to 3. and 4. suggest a savegame.

5. Any further special settings?

[Matthew]

Hey community,
After many years of hosting "under-the-radar" simutrans standard and extended servergames, both with a pure co-operative terretorial ruleset i.e. nobody is allowed to build on other players terretory without permision, I will host a new public simutrans-extended server, most likely a non-terretorial one.

Thank you for offering to contribute to the community in this way and for doing so in an inclusive way that reflects the Simutrans spirit.

I might like to join in the new game. I can see everyone having so much fun with multi-player online games. But the irreversibility and responsibility of playing online makes me anxious and I play Simutrans to escape from anxiety. I twice abandoned my Stephenson-Siemens company. So I will give some opinions to encourage this discussion, but you should plan around people who are definitely going to play, not me.

1. the pakset:
I considered pak128.britain-ex and pak256.jp-ex. Any further suggestions?

pak128-Britain-ex is much more complete. Pak256 is very beautiful but SLOW and eats memory. 

2. the ruleset:
I considered a very basic ruleset not restricting any competition apart from not allowing sabotaging other players.
However, if you have any further ideas or wishes, please let me know. A few examples following:
- rules when a player is considered gone, so players can ask the admin for access permissions and full or part takeovers of that players companies from that time on.
- tunnel and elevated way restrictions beyond technically implemented ones.
- city modification restrictions, deleting buildings and roads, altering slopes and anything else that a transport company would not simply be allowed to do in the real-world.
- In combination with the above, maybe an option to request public-service to build dual roads or make place for tracks within city borders, losing less inhabitants than in case of simply deleting  buildings.

3. The start era and time settings
e.g. start year, bits_per_month setting, game paused when nobody is connected or not?
My suggestion: start 1750 using bits_per_month=22 and don't pause when nobody is connected.

No opinion. But if your bits_per_month is anything other than 22, you will need to think about how to manage pakset compatibility.

4. The map
The hardware will be restricted to 2 cores/4threads and 8GB ram for now.
Keep this in mind for suggestions.If it turns out to not fit into the limits in lategame, I can increase these, but it should be consensusly expected to run within the limits.
3.1 map size: I had something around 1024*2048 in mind.
3.2 cities: I had something around 40-60 in mind. What about the distribution? There are quite a lot settings... Simply use the default?
3.3 terrain: High mountains or flat lands? Lakes? Islands? Even an ocean in between two continents? Alternatively, suggest a heightmap.

I only have 4GB RAM, so I would not be able to play in that case.

But I do have a suggestion if you are playing on pak128.Britain-Ex. I think the game should have a lot more industry than the default settings (maybe 5,000 industries on a 1024x2048 map). It's very difficult to make a profit with freight and if you only have (for example) less than a dozen newsagents on your whole map then players haven't a hope of running vehicles efficiently. It also means that the countryside looks much more realistic, as you have large amounts of farmland. I would also have more 'cities' too.

5. Any further special settings?

If you do decide to depart from the Bridgewater-Brunel defaults, here are some settings that I use in single-player and the reasons why you might consider them:
towns_adopt_player_roads = 0 # This allows players to keep private cars out of coach/bus stations, even if the city later swallows up the bus station, avoiding many traffic jams
allow_making_public = 1 # In theory, a counterbalance to the previous setting
way_height_clearance = 1 # Setting this to 2 often means that you have to wreak ridiculous levels of destruction in cities, in order to protect rivers that are very unlikely to see tall ships. The high bridges & viaducts are also devastating in the early railway era. Setting it to 2 in the 20th century is less of a problem.
max_diversion_tiles = 20 # This seems to be the sweet spot; you must build diversions, but you don't need to wreck half the city
max_city_size = 50000 # Most Simutrans 'cities' are really villages without enough people for a railway station, never mind an airport....

[Vladki]

What I have observed while running stephenson-siemens:

- need for more industries. Even if I added some industries as public player, they closed after some time. There were very few that were spawned automatically.
- allow longer diversions - it was quite often when I had to do some small adjustments as public player - e.g. level roads around crossroads to allow stops connected by corners.
- longer map, maybe even 512x4096 (and it does not have to be in powers of two), to make long-distance traffic more interesting. No ocean at this size, but a large lake would be OK.
- mountains - I think the level in stephenson-siemens was maybe too challenging in the beginning, but I think it was quite nice map. It would be nice to have a map with flat parts and hilly parts, but that is not possible with the default landscape generator.
- I'd like to try some real world map, like https://forum.simutrans.com/index.php/topic,19436.0.html, but that one is probably too big...
- pak: britain. I'd like a game with pak.CS, but it is not balanced and missing some important objects. pak.sweden is also very incomplete. I'm not sure about the playability of other extended paksets, maybe pak192.comic-ex ?
- game should be IMHO paused if nobody is playing.
- abandoned players - there is setting for unlocking abandoned players. That could be adjusted, and some rules put in place, what you can do with abandoned players. I'm not sure what they should be though. I have myself used those companies to experiment, or kept them alive as feeder networks for my main company... Sometimes I marked them as free to take over so that new players could have some head start instead of trying to find a niche without any traffic.

- In combination with the above, maybe an option to request public-service to build dual roads or make place for tracks within city borders, losing less inhabitants than in case of simply deleting  buildings.

I don't know how is it different if the houses are destroyed by public player or normal player?
Maybe rising the costs of house demolition 10x or 100x so that even rich players would have to think twice before destroying a house ?

[Mariculous]

More industries, check (would be nice to know which setting you startet stephenson-siemens with)
More diversions, check (although it was definitely not me asking public player for help with it )

Longer map: 512x4096 is too stretchy imho. Looking at stephenson-siemens and my previous 1280x1280 server game, I fear there would only be one, maybe two main lines from north to south depending on how the towns are placed.
However, after some testing, it seems the map size itself doesn't have a huge impact on memory, so we might try a compromise of ~1000x3000

"It would be nice to have a map with flat parts and hilly parts, but that is not possible with the default landscape generator."
"I'd like to try some real world map ... but that one is probably too big"
I don't know, how big is that map?
In any case, it seems even more challenging than stephenson-siemens whose terrain I liked pretty much tbh.
If anyone is experienced with creating heightmaps from real-world data, we could also try out a map with Lübeck in the north to Florenz in the South, Bern in the West, Pilsen in the East. Scaled to 400m/pixel, this would result in a map of roughly 1000x2800 with very challanging austria and switzerland but also very flat areas in the north and the Padan Plains in the south.
The scale might be an issue, Don't know if the valleys can be used properly in that case, we'd have to try it out.
If we only had hardware capable of 4000x12000 maps xD

- game should be IMHO paused if nobody is playing.
Well I was thinking about this as we had players from all around the world, so the server ran for more than12 hours on some days anyways. Time passing by constantly might be a better option than "wtf, I was not here for a week and suddenly it's 1990"

I'm also not sure if automatically unlocking abadonned players is a good idea or not. I'm really unsure about how to handle this. Simply unlocking players will lead to artificially keeping these dead and unlocked companies alive forever or taking over parts or the whole company as first-come-first-served just after the company got unlocked. I am not pretty satisfyed with both solutions tbh.
An option might be players registering interesst in the company as a whole or parts of it and selling these parts of the company by auction if multiple players registered interesst. However, this sounds pretty interessting but I am not quite sure how to properly administrate this. Raise and flatten land until you have paid the bid?

I don't know how is it different if the houses are destroyed by public player or normal player?
Imho, there are three problems with destroying houses currently:
1. As you have mentioned, it is much to inexpensive.
2. inhabitants will just disappear from the world when their house is removed.
3. Some operations will require much more destroying of city buildings than it would in the real world.
I would solve these the following way:
- Make destruction of buildings MUCH more expensive 100-500 times the current cost.
- Allow players to make a request for a new way or an upgrade within the city.
- Public service or players may decide if (re)moving the required houses is worth it or not.
- If it is, public service will move delete some of the houses and re-build them somewhere else. How many houses are moved depends on the type of way building:
  Adding a parallel roat or track to an existing one would often fit without removing much in the real world, so public service will do the clearance and re building.
  Building an entirely new track will be quite expensive in the real world, so public service will only remove a few houses and restore the number of inhabitants somewhere else, maybe even in another town nearby.
Building ways without making a request is also allowed, but public service will not subsidise this at all, so the player has to pay the full (very expensive) price for the built up grounds to their owners and public service won't grow the city to the previous level again (due to not knowing the number of inhabitants before the destruction)

"No opinion. But if your bits_per_month is anything other than 22, you will need to think about how to manage pakset compatibility."
Changes to bits_per_month is pretty uncritical. Simuspeed will be left unchanged. In relation to real-world time nothing will change. purchase costs, however will be properly adjusted.
That means, you will make 4x the profit per month but purchasing new stuff will also be 4x as expensive.

"I only have 4GB RAM, so I would not be able to play in that case."
I am sorry :/ However, I don't think a multiplayer map for thatt few memory can be set up. Simply launching an extended 64x64 map already consumes ~2800 MB of memory and your system also wants some memory. Loading current stephenson-siemens will already raise the memory to ~3350MB

A higher max_diversion_tiles  and max_city_size is a good option I think.
I don't think towns_adopt_player_roads and allow_making_public are a good idea for singleplayer maps but won't work well on multiplayer. Imho city roads should always be shared, no matter if the owner wants to share or not. In principle the same goes for upgraded intercity roads but there is sadly no option to share only these roads but not rails and airports with other players whilst still being the owner and thus getting paid the toll.

way_height_clearance=1 will indeed fight the mentioned issues but on the other hand it will also allow half-height bridges to be built above rails iirc.
I had solved this situation by abusing the public player, either building public half-height bridges above rivers in that case or remvoing the river, building the bridge and re-building the river underneath.

However, I would be interested in others opionions of the last three points.

[Phystam]

I can provide you a real terrain height map with 125m/tile scale (almost everywhere in the world!)
What kind of terrain do you want, islands, peninsula or continental?
If you have any idea, can you tell me it?

[Vladki]

The czech map I mentioned is 5400X3240

If I recall correctly, building houses as public player doesn't increase the number of inhabitants. You have to grow the city, which means random growth

[Ves]

I also would like the British pakset. Would be fun with a somewhat varied map, as is suggested, where there is both flatlands and hilly mountains. It should be a pain to build in the Swiss alp!

I think the map should not be paused when no one is online. This to have some predictions in real life of how far the game has reached. As long as it generates autosaves regularly in case anything bad happens.

[prissi]

Simutrans standard handles maps up to  3000x9000 even in the 32 bit version without problems (if the trees are switched off). So if you want huge maps, then maybe Standard might be better suited.

[makie]

If anyone is experienced with creating heightmaps from real-world data, we could also try out a map with Lübeck in the north to Florenz in the South, Bern in the West, Pilsen in the East. Scaled to 400m/pixel, this would result in a map of roughly 1000x2800 with very challanging austria and switzerland but also very flat areas in the north and the Padan Plains in the south.

Oh this is Germany 
You need for this country the typical houses and vehicle. 
they are in pak128.german 
You may want citys at right place and with the real name at your map.
You may want important factorys  at right place and with the real name at your map.
this ist the map of scenario "Deutschland" in pak128.german
You want a server for this
Oh it is just running: http://servers.simutrans.org/list?detail=makie.de:13353#makie.de:13353   
This Server will restart soon new with year 1800 an may end at year 2200
I just have to do some adjustments at the pak128.german version 1.3

In the future, I am planning a new map with really big mountains.
https://www.simutrans-forum.de/mybb/showthread.php?tid=8964

I know you not lucky with my offer because it is standart 
But I'm happy that I'm not the only one who wants something like this. 
The only way to get something is to do it, and so i did it.
https://www.simutrans-forum.de/mybb/showthread.php?tid=8701

[Mariculous]

The czech map I mentioned is 5400X3240

I fear that is indeed too much.

If I recall correctly, building houses as public player doesn't increase the number of inhabitants. You have to grow the city, which means random growth

That's exactly the plan, I don't want to spend hours of manually placing buildings.

I can provide you a real terrain height map with 125m/tile scale (almost everywhere in the world!)
What kind of terrain do you want, islands, peninsula or continental?

That's a nice offer, but I really don't know where to find what we are looking for in the real world at 125 m/tile scale.
I guess we are looking for a map that is both, flat and easy in some areas of the map and very hilly and challenging on other areas.
Rivers, lakes and a small ocean with an island would be nice but not neccessary.
Maybe Einhoven-Dortmund, Borkum-Bonn would be an option, but I am quite sure there are even better ones somewhere around the world.

Thanks for the offer Makie, but at least this time I'd like to stick with extended.
Maybe the next server will be pak128.geman in standard or maybe there will even be a minimal pak128.german port for extended, allowing us to use schedules, the much improved "shortest" path based pasenger routing and the improved vehicle physics. Imho, these three points are most annoying in standard as the first two make the game quite unpredictable, the last simply feeels wrong in standard.
There are many more nice features like the improved signalling system that somehow increase complexity and add some fun to the game, but these three are the core features extended has over standard imho.

The latest map is impresive btw.

[Phystam]

How about Kyushu or Hokkaido in Japan?
Or... New Britain/New Ireland in Papua New Guinea
New Zealand is also interesting.
I want to see how continental people construct railway networks in such a challenging island ^^

[Vladki]

How about Kyushu or Hokkaido in Japan?

Sounds good. Although the map would be larger than 3000x1000, large part would be ocean, so it should work well.

Or... New Britain/New Ireland in Papua New Guinea
New Zealand is also interesting.

Probably too big.

For a continental alternative, how about the area: Vienna - Budapest - Krakow ?

[Mariculous]

Kyushu might be an option, I don't think Hokkaido is a good idea.
Bear in mind terrain of both islands is quite challenging, likely even more challenging than the current stephenson-siemens save.
Vienna - Budapest - Krakow also might be an option but apart from the valley east of Bratislava it is also quite challenging.
Upper Rhine area might be another option. Roughly from Koblenz (de) to Basel (ch) and a few kilometers west of Mullhouse (fr) to a few kilometers east of Schaffhausen (ch)
The Rhine has a very huge valley in that area, which makes the start easy and should also allow for one or two high-speed lines from north to south later on, whilst the area outside of the valley is quite challenging.

In the end, I'd like to vote for the currently suggested areas. You can vote for as many as you like.
1. North of Germany to though the Swiss alp to the north of Italy: small scale map. Easy terrain in the North, becomes more challenging northwards with some easy terrain south of the alps again.
2. Netherlands to Rhein-Ruhr Area up to the North Sea: normal scale map with flat terrain in the north, hilly in the southeast, a little bit of coast in the North and many waterways. Fun fact: the German part of it was part of British occupation zone, so why no British vehicles?^^
3. Kyushu Island: normal scale map with very challanging terrain, water around the map borders, don't know about (navigable) rivers.
4. Vienna - Budapest - Krakow: challenging terrain with a huge valley for an easy start.
5. Upper Rhine Area: challenging terrain with a very long stretched valley around the Rhine.

[Phystam]

Kyushu

[Mariculous]

Seems really nice and challenging, but I am not quite sure if that impressive level of challenge is desired.

I interpret this as an upvote for Kyushu from you, but I would really prefer to wait for further votes first (we are waiting for the listserver anyways, so no need to hurry)

[Phystam]

Netherland:

Germany-Switzerland-North Italy:

Wien-Budapest-Krakow:

[Vladki]

Of course voting for what I proposed (wien-budapest-krakow). BTW wien-krakow was the first railway in austria-hungary - the Kaiser Ferdinand Nord Bahn. Anyway it is funny to see japanese names of european cities

[DrSuperGood]

As long as the map is reasonably flat it gets my vote. Nothing worse than having to terraform every tile because none of them are flat enough to build a consistent railway.

[Mariculous]

Stephenson-siemens is up again, so I will start a new map instead of hosting stephenson-siemens very soon.

We had a nice brainstorming on parameters. I made some decisions based on the feedback:

Pak128-Britain-Ex
bits_per_month = 24 (default is 22)
pause_server_no_clients = 0 (continously running, no pause)
max_diversion_tiles = 25 (default is 18)
cost_multiply_remove_haus=1000 (default is 500, stephenson-siemens save reports 62)
max_city_size = 50000 (I will try this out. If this results in too many inhabitants, I might play around with this and the distribution.)
roughly 50 cities

Public service will assist in the following if it is considered a good idea:
-building half-height bridges over rivers
-increasing bridge heights
-modifying city roads
-"moving" buildings to allow for parallel roads or tracks within built up areas
-"moving" buildings to allow for new tracks through cities

-When a player was not online for three weeks, the company will be offered for takeover. Other players can bid for that company.
-When a player was not online for four weeks, the company will be taken over by the highest bidder. If there were no bids placed, public player will assist in partial takeover.
-When a player was not online for 6 weeks or went bankrupt after being away for at least 4 weeks, the company will be deleted to make place for new players.

Please put a final vote for one of the following maps:
-Vienna-Budapest-Krakow
-Koblenz-Basel-Mullhouse-Schaffhausen

I honestly love the Kyushu map but I excluded it due to the requirement for a fairly flat map.

My vote goes for Koblenz-Basel-Mullhouse-Schaffhausen obviously.
I guess Vladkis vote goes for Vienna-Budapest-Krakow, so the other votes will decide.

[Mariculous]

The magic dice have fallen.
It will be Vienna-Budapest-Krakow

If anyone could create the required heightmap, that would be pretty appreciated.

[Phystam]

Is this ok? I made this map with accurate scale, and it has 2429x2621 size. You can download this here.

[Mariculous]

Danube does not seem to be generated in the heightmap data due to its very flat river bed compared to the surrounding mountains.
I'll try to fix that in gimp, hope it will work.

Apart from that, it's a really great heightmap, thanks for that one.

Edit: That data does not seem to be in the heightmap at all due to the height scale.
It will need some more effort to reconstruct. Could you export the same section in a much smaller height range? e.g. min level 50m, max level 200m?
That would be veeeeeeery helpful. Otherwise I will need to extract that from tangrams but I'm not quite sure how I can get a 1:1 scale out of that map.


Edit2: I guess I got the river data properly exported. Now it's time to extract the river from that high-detail data and merge it into the actual heightmap.

[Vladki]

Wow, I'm really looking forward to this. The current Stephenson Siemens game is not very playable at the moment due to congestion and desyncs.

[DrSuperGood]

and desyncs

Please report this. If that game is desyncing, then nothing is stopping any other future game desyncing. It is also small enough that finding the cause should be viable.

[Mariculous]

The heightmap is final now.
I am not completely satisfied with the rivers and mountain heights but that's a limitation of the heightmap import.
I made a trade of cutting very high mountains to get a little more height detail. Still the flat lands and mountains feel much too flat, but it's much better than in Phystams originally posted heightmap (thanks again for that map anyway, although I only used it to get the scale in the end)

Also due to heightmap restrictions, rivers only carry water in the lowest valleys.

The next steps will be filling those dryed out rivers manually.
After that, the last step will be placing ~10 towns manually at their real-world locations. I will reservate space for tracks and stations within those cities if they have a station in the city center in the real world.

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/699953627095367720/699953909250261032/ViennaBudapestKrakow.zip
(nice idea abusing discord as a filehost)

[Phystam]

Great!!!!!
Discord is the best file hosting service, easy and quick

[Mariculous]

It was planned to publicly start the server this evening or Saturday noon, but currently I am quite unsure about this time plan.

It was planned to manually place a few towns with their real-world population around ~1750, so I generated the map with a few less towns and without capitals. These towns (maybe apart from already in 1754 very huge grown Vienna) should get their real-world popolation around ~1750 ingame.

A bug currently prevents me from growing these newly placed towns. I could grow these completely manually but these towns won't adopt the manually placed buildings either, so I have no idea what further issues this could cause.

I fear we only have two options now:
1. Launch the server without these towns.
2. Launch the server with these empty towns and ignore them. When the bug is fixed, I will grow these towns later on.
3. Wait for another week and try to fix the bug before starting the server.

Any opinioins on this?

[Vladki]

I can't find the thread now, someone suggested to place a few industrial buildings by hand and then try growing again. Does that work?

[Ranran(retired)]

I can't find the thread now, someone suggested to place a few industrial buildings by hand and then try growing again.

Probably, it's me.

Next, create an industrial building there with the edit tool and increase the job.
After that the house was built correctly when using the grow city tool. 

I think these threads have duplicate content:
https://forum.simutrans.com/index.php/topic,18890.0.html
https://forum.simutrans.com/index.php/topic,19719.0.html

[Mariculous]

It didn't seem to work, however, there somehow is a very bad inhabitant to job ratio on the map.
For whatever the reason the map was generated with only 0.1 jobs per inhabtant.
That ratio could explain the issue and why spawning 40 clay pits din't help.

[Isaac Eiland-Hall]

For whatever the reason the map was generated with only 0.1 jobs per inhabtant.

Sounds like you need to enable Universal Basic Income in the settings in that case. 😉

[Vladki]

It didn't seem to work, however, there somehow is a very bad inhabitant to job ratio on the map.
For whatever the reason the map was generated with only 0.1 jobs per inhabtant.
That ratio could explain the issue and why spawning 40 clay pits din't help.

I meant city buildings of industrial type, not big factories with contract

[Vladki]

Freahk what is your status on running the Wienna-Budapest-Krakow map? If I manage to compile the server binary on Isaacs server, I'd like to run this game instead of Stephenson-Siemens. I also considered an option of running it for a while with unlocked public player so that people interested in the game could manually place towns, rivers, forests, or even industries to get it as close as possible to the real world, and when prepared, skip to cca 1800 and lock the public player.

[Matthew]

Freahk what is your status on running the Wienna-Budapest-Krakow map? If I manage to compile the server binary on Isaacs server, I'd like to run this game instead of Stephenson-Siemens. I also considered an option of running it for a while with unlocked public player so that people interested in the game could manually place towns, rivers, forests, or even industries to get it as close as possible to the real world, and when prepared, skip to cca 1800 and lock the public player.

This is a genius idea!

[Mariculous]

Back when BB started, I paused this idea, but it's still somehere on my HDD.
Not sure which year the game is in at the moment.
I suspect it's still stuck with never growing towns, but changing the cityrules might fix this.
I'll upload the current state somehere, just give me a day.