Minimap ideas

[Ranran(retired)]

I have added the added translatable text to simutranslator.

Perhaps the scale should change labels accordingly. Otherwise I'm for the good/bad scale.

Do you think this can be done just by changing the translation?

One thing that we may want to consider is reversing the scale in some cases, since it seems unintiutive to have, for example, green showing slow speed limits and red showing high speed limits.

Track speed - slow track green, fast track red, ... no I'd put it the other way round.

Weight limit - higher = red.... I'm not really sure about this one... But I think it should be low = red, with mothballed ways being black, or deep red.

For these, I modified the code so that the color scale is reversed, and pushed to my github branch.
However, the problem is that we do color scale at 0-450km / h, so we see almost red or orange red except for high speed track. It is not very useful for this display as it is mostly red in the early periods.
So I wrote an expression that the evaluation changes gradually as the speed increases as based on the square of 450-speed. (´・ω・｀)

Any suggestions on how to do this would be appreciated.

Also not sure about attractions - bigger ones are red. (and bigger circle).

I think this is different from good / bad because it is demand, not congestion. One of the ideas is to fix it to a color that represents a passenger (pink).

Attractions layer - they should include monuments layer (and perhaps town halls and headquarters too).

Regarding Monument, I think that is true. And I think the same is true for the attractions list. Monuments are not included in the attractions list.
The issue is that get_ausflugsziele() does not contain a monument list. However, this is called in many places, so I think it's better for someone familiar with the code to make the changes.
And the same applies to standards. Monuments will not be displayed on the attraction list and minimap in standard.

About town halls and headquarters, I don't think are included here. Or distinguish by color. I think the attraction is a building that attracts many visitors.

Depots - Probably just special colors for each waytype, like for industries?

The color of the depot is originally such a specification.

[jamespetts]

Thank you all for your comments. I think that we do want if at all possible a red = bad, green = good scale. Where this is inconsistent with min/max, probably the best way to handle this is to swap the "min" and "max" labels on the scale. Just changing the tooltip/help text description is perhaps somewhat of a hack and is not an ideal solution. One might change the min/max text to various things such as "high" and "low" depending on the context.

As for speed and weight limits, may I suggest that the colour scale be based on the speed relative to the best way(s) currently available? If they be scaled based on current pakset data rather than an arbitrary hard-coded number, the colours will be more relevant to the current moment in the game.

Thank you again for your work on this.

[Ranran(retired)]

probably the best way to handle this is to swap the "min" and "max" labels on the scale. Just changing the tooltip/help text description is perhaps somewhat of a hack and is not an ideal solution. One might change the min/max text to various things such as "high" and "low" depending on the context.

The difficult problem is that these options can be shown at the same time.(´・ω・｀)



My question is, should the color scale of powerlines be reversed?
Currently 0% utilization is green and 100% is red. It is strange that the cut powerline is green.
Even if the color scale is reversed, is 100% utilization green, is that okay?

Regardless of them, I'm thinking of displaying the disconnected power line in the same dark violet as the mail_no_record.

As for speed and weight limits, may I suggest that the colour scale be based on the speed relative to the best way(s) currently available? If they be scaled based on current pakset data rather than an arbitrary hard-coded number, the colours will be more relevant to the current moment in the game.

I think it's a good solution.
Does it need to be waytype specific? Or does it share one maximum speed for all waytypes?

[Vladki]

As for speed and weight limits, may I suggest that the colour scale be based on the speed relative to the best way(s) currently available? If they be scaled based on current pakset data rather than an arbitrary hard-coded number, the colours will be more relevant to the current moment in the game.

I was thikning about the same. IMHO the best solution would be:
- independent scale for each waytype: e.g. canals would otherwise be all red. Also same green for motorway (130 km/h) and high speed track (>300 km/h) is IMHO good, while 130 km/h railway would be yellowish.
- dynamic scale according to timescale - currently fastest available way of given waytype would be green, degraded red, mothballed black.
- and if possible scale according to really existing ways, so that each has different colour, even if their speed limits are close to each other.
- same logic should be applied to weight limits.

Currently 0% utilization is green and 100% is red. It is strange that the cut powerline is green.
Even if the color scale is reversed, is 100% utilization green, is that okay?

100% utilization should be red. Also a line with no power source should be red. So a cut powerline will be - half green (part with powerplant) and half red (part with factory/town)

[jamespetts]

I agree with Vladki regarding the speeds and weights: there should be a different scale per waytype, or else canals will always be red and runways green and everything else yellow.

I agree with Ranran's suggestion to have a disconnected power line display in a separate colour (dark purple is a good choice); once that be done, green as 0% utilisation and red as 100% would make sense (although we seem not to limit the capacity of power lines at present; that may need to change one day, but that is not a high priority).

[Ranran(retired)]

degraded red, mothballed black.

I think degraded is status, not axis weight information. You can also check it with another button that shows the condition.
Although mothballed is displayed in red, I don't think it needs to be distinguished from the bridleway where only pedestrians can pass.

[jamespetts]

I think degraded is status, not axis weight information. You can also check it with another button that shows the condition.
Although mothballed is displayed in red, I don't think it needs to be distinguished from the bridleway where only pedestrians can pass.

There may be something to be said for having mothballed ways in the dark purple colour, although do not worry if this would take too long to implement.

[Mariculous]

A very short feedback of this feature:
The client crashed when I opened the minimap on bridgewater, but I couldn't reproduce it. The next time I connected worked just fine.

[Vladki]

Degraded - sure - one can see it with "wear". Degraded has reduced speed limit so it would be nice to see the color appropriate for the reduced speed limit in such case.
Mothballed - speed and weight limit =0, wear = 100 % so red in all 3 maps, that should work automatically, but it would be nice to show it in some off-scale darker color.

Check on current map:
Mothballed road: wear red, speed black, weight black ... OK no change needed.
Degraded road: wear red (OK), speed & weight same color as if new. For weight it is OK, for speed not. But low priority change.

Powerlines - it should be simple demand/supplies ratio. So utilisation could be even >100% (more demand than is supplied).
Anyway a special color could be used for powerlines that have either 0 supplies or 0 demand (or both), to indicate a possible problem. I don't see any other reasonable way to indicate "disconnected". But really you have to care only about zero supplies, to avoid division by zero.

Checking the new coverage feature - looks very good, But I would add one more thing - if a building is not covered, it should be red or some special colour to attract attention. Edit - I see that it is grey if I enable show buildings... So that is usable too. Edit2: I see that stops without service are not considered in coverage which is good Edit3: this is valid only for mail. Passenger stops show coverage even without any service, perhaps walking is counted as service. So this should change...

[Ranran(retired)]

Degraded has reduced speed limit so it would be nice to see the color appropriate for the reduced speed limit in such case.

Degraded road: wear red (OK), speed & weight same color as if new. For weight it is OK, for speed not.

Doesn't the degraded way reflect the speeddown? I haven't looked at that part in detail. (It takes time to reproduce a degraded road ...)

Mothballed - speed and weight limit =0, wear = 100 % so red in all 3 maps, that should work automatically, but it would be nice to show it in some off-scale darker color.

With speed limit weight limit and wear, mothballed way is colored purple in those option. But I wonder if it's harder to recognize than red. 

Also, the disconnected powerline is colored purple.
And the speed limit and weight limit have reversed the color scale.

Regarding the display of min/good vs max/bad label thing, I don't know what to do. We can view them at the same time as described above.

I threw a pull request with these changes. I would appreciate it if you could check it after incorporated. 

this is valid only for mail. Passenger stops show coverage even without any service, perhaps walking is counted as service. So this should change...

I think it might require additional coding to do that. You can see a short passenger bar when you build a new station, but you cannot see mail's one. That is the reason why coverage is not displayed without mail service. (Might passengers be involved in walking on foot?)

[Mariculous]

Imho many layers suffer from actually a quite huge range of values being mappen on a small amount of colors.
Often layers are like 90% green.

We can apply the above suggestions on weights and speed limits, but still it will be an issue to properly display the usual rail speeds properly, especially in periods of transition, which is where people are usually most interessted in detecting old infrastructure to set up upgrading.
There are only 10 color steps, of which some are quite hard to distinguish without a direct comparisation.
Currently, there are a tleast railway tracks of 50 km/h, 80 km/h, 120 km/h, 130 km/h, 145 km/h, 155 km/h, 160 km/h, 200 km/h, 225 km/h, 240 km/h, 300 km/h, 320 km/h around the map on stephenson-siemens.
That's already more than what we can differ using the current scale.

So my suggestion is a minimap setting where the player can influence the mapping.
For example, a min and max setting, where all values are clamped to the color scale is applied to that range.
That means, if we want to seek out for old 155 km/h tracks, to schedule replacement, we can set the range to something like min: 150, max:160,
so 150 and less will be red, 160 and greater will be green and 155 will be yellow.

I am aware, that different types of layers use different number ranges, thus specifying the range relative to the full range, rather than in absolute numbers might be sensible.

The issue of multiple layers might remain, but I am usually really interessted in the values of one of those layers a the same time, the other layers beinfg only of secondary importance, to better relate the primarily displayed data to what is going on there.

Passenger stops show coverage even without any service, perhaps walking is counted as service.

That's not an issue of the map but an issue of stop statistics and internal transfer times.
Internal transfer times are usually smaller than actually walking the same distance, thus passengers will walk to a stop "transfer" there, to walk to another stop and that's still counted as a successful journey.

You can try it out, simply placing an entirely unserved stop in a city. It will frequently report success nevertheless.
Alternatively, have a look at stephenson-siemens. For example Cheppike Manga High street ins entirely unserved. Still there are roughly 20 passengers on average using that stop successfully.

Note, that it has an internal transfer time of 0:54, but it takes 3:42 to walk to a diagonally adjacent tile.
That one is very difficult to circumvent as it's the result of graphics scale/economic scale. Walking times are calculated to economic scale, but transfer times are related to a fixed scale, which is roughly the graphics scale.

Edit: It happened again, after switching from a local stephenson-siemens save (my default save) to bridgewater.
See the attachment. The error doesn't make sense to me, however and I still don't know how to reliably reproduce. At least I got an idea.
Should I start a bugreport on its own?

[jamespetts]

Thank you for this: now incorporated. I wonder whether the scale issue might be dealt with by replacing "min" and "max" with "best" and "worst"? What are people's views on whether that would be clearer?

[Mariculous]

What are people's views on whether that would be clearer?

It will prevent contradictory confusion, in cases where clearly much is good and few is bad, but for some parameters, it's not intuitively clear if much is good or few is good.
E.g. traffic layer. From infrastructure maintainers pont of view, it's likely goof when many vehicles use his infrastructure. From operators point of view, it might be bad, as it gets more likely to delay there.

Further, density layers issues will remain. Green is good, so should city centers be green?
I'm not sure about that. It will distract from what we actually want to point out in that layer: "Look here! There are many potential passengers that you could attract by your service!
The suburbs... Well, they exist and you should serve them... Some day. But you definitely want to start in the city center!"

Thus, in any case description will be required for some parameters.

[jamespetts]

This is a complex problem indeed. Does anyone have any suggestions as to how to overcome it?

[Vladki]

Doesn't the degraded way reflect the speeddown? I haven't looked at that part in detail. (It takes time to reproduce a degraded road ...)

Maybe it does. Look on stephenson siemens game, there is degraded road (514,26) and degraded railway (623,15). But I;m not sure what was their original speed and color. (and they are green as low speed is green). So maybe we can consider this as solved.

Regarding the display of min/good vs max/bad label thing, I don't know what to do. We can view them at the same time as described above.

Maybe just change the label to: good/bad, or more explanatory (good, fast, cheap, unused, low density, new,... vs. bad, slow, expensive, overloaded, high density, old,...)

You can see a short passenger bar when you build a new station, but you cannot see mail's one. That is the reason why coverage is not displayed without mail service. (Might passengers be involved in walking on foot?)

I think it is the walking people. You can see them in connection list - walking to nearby stop is mixed with line services.