Under Construction graphics: Useful for Gameplay?

[wlindley]

Is there any gameplay value to the "under construction" graphics? I find them mildly bothersome when remodeling cities.
If a building-under-construction kept its "unfinished" status for six months, that would affect passenger generation; but the effect is so short that it's difficult to imagine it's anything beyond eye-candy.
I would like to write a patch that replaces the 64-bit "time of building construction, in game ticks" value in the savefiles with a year-and-month date of construction, and possibly other values including a bitfield that could have ffags like "Building is historic" (which might preclude automatic game replacement, or raise the cost of player demolition).  It would be nice to see "Built January 1841" in a building's infobox, wouldn't it?

[jamespetts]

I should very much like to see buildings being under construction for a realistic length of time in the future, so the graphics should definitely stay.

As to the values for the building time construction, since Simutrans-Extended uses a 64-bit value and does not roll over ticks, we can always deduce the building's age in years and months from the ticks, so it is unnecessary to change this value or add a separate year and month value. I do want to add a display to show the year and month built, however; if you would like to do this, this would be most welcome.

[Vladki]

I agree that it would be more challenging if the building takes some more time to finish. If so, it should be configurable in dat files. A mobile house, or wooden bungalow is much faster than a stone house or skyscraper. If this applies to player buidings, it would add interesting decision making - build a small (temporary) wooden station building that can be built fast, and start the service early, and then build bigger station later...

Also the fact that ways are immediately usable is quite unrealistic. But that is much more complicated, building a 1-tile (125 m) of road/track does not take too much time. But usually the roads are built tile by tile. You cannot get enough workers to work on the whole length at once. So it would need some limit on how many way-tiles per month can be finished. This limit should grow in time to reflect the technology advancements (or be again specified for each way). You could "build" the whole track at once as is now, but it will be in "planned state" and gradually get finished according to the allowed build rate. Also removing way that is in planned state should give full refund.

[jamespetts]

These are all good ideas, but would be a major project for the future.

[wlindley]

OK I have added code so that buildings and factories display a line like "Built in: March 1751"

The difficulty is that when stepping forward a year,  karte_t::step_year() in simworld.cc does not increment the karte_t::ticks value (the old code to do so is commented out), so my calculation of ticks to year/month gets thrown off. 

[jamespetts]

OK I have added code so that buildings and factories display a line like "Built in: March 1751"

The difficulty is that when stepping forward a year,  karte_t::step_year() in simworld.cc does not increment the karte_t::ticks value (the old code to do so is commented out), so my calculation of ticks to year/month gets thrown off. 

Thank you - that is very helpful!

[jamespetts]

Now incorporated. Would you be able to update Simutranslator to allow the translation of the new "built in" text to other languages? I should be most grateful.

[Ranran(retired)]

Would you be able to update Simutranslator to allow the translation of the new "built in" text to other languages? I should be most grateful.

I missed that this was added, but I noticed it in a report by Milko. It is currently registered with simutranslator.