Please allow me to post as a draft. This was written a long time ago. And it is incomplete. Therefore, the whole intention may not be conveyed.
Thank you for your thought.
It seems very difficult to explain in short in non-native language. (´・ω・｀)
Please be aware that there are many examples in consideration of the possibility of misleading.
If it's too much work to add icons to the bar,
Please imagine. How large is the width of the top panel above the station by adding a bar to the icon? Each one will occupy a width of 10-14px.
There will be a large number of symbols above the stations that accept piece goods. Is a passenger icon really needed at a station that only accepts passengers? I think a colored bar is enough. Especially if we consider the effort involved.
at least using icons in the dialogues, so these can be understood by players is still better than nothig can be understood by players.
I don't agree at all. Please imagine. How confusing the dialog is that both category and goods have a symbol in them so they both appear.
How are cars(category) represented by cars(goods)? Do you have two identical symbols side by side?
It is difficult to tell which symbol it is by lining up two similar goods category symbols and goods symbols. I think the text is still easier to read. (Especially in Chinese and Japanese, the characters are like pictures. It will bring us great benefits. But it's not good from a universal design perspective :p)
There is an idea to put a frame on either side, but the original size is too small and the size is not fixed. Also its design depends on pakset.
One issue is that there is no alignment and it's in a single horizontal row, but with lots of symbols and numbers lined up it's just hard to see.
It's still easier to understand if you know that square blocks mean goods. Fortunately, the division into colors and symbols made that distinction easy.
For example, transport fever has symbols in goods, but categories do not.
Is it wise to abolish category symbols instead of adding goods symbols? I don't think so. Because the goods category is tied to the type of freight wagon, having a unique symbol makes it easy to identify which freight car you need and what it can carry.
On the other hand, I don't get a glimpse of the need for goods symbols and their benefits yet.
The graphics work is negligible.
I don't think it's so easy to represent all the goods with this little symbol. On the contrary, I think that it may be difficult for the player to understand.
For example, I don't know what some of the symbols for transport fever represent. What is the red block? Is it a lego block? Is a spanner a spanner?
The pax/mail/ware symbol is 8x8 px. It is difficult to express the picture of the product in such size. So I drew the goods category symbol a little bigger at 10x10 px. However, considering the line height, it cannot be increased further. It should be noted that translucent pixels have a lot of color loss. Images that are simply reduced may not look good.
Under that condition, it is required that the design makes it easy to understand the difference between the category symbol and the goods symbol. For example, changing the background color for each category. For example, now "foods" has a meat-like design. It has to be changed because it has meat in it and it should be a design that represents "a category" like "foods". The same applies to long goods and oil. You have to clearly distinguish between "the oil category" and the difference between crude oil and gasoline and fuel. It will be harder if pakset have set it in the liquid category, like pak.128.
That's why I say it's difficult to add new industries and goods. Consequently, it will only be worse than currently without such a sophisticated design. At least I can't think of a good design and I don't want to do it if I am a pakset developer.
You should listen to the opinion of the pakset author.
Well either it needs to be coded
If it's too much work to add icons to the bar,
Unfortunately it's so difficult that I can't do it. It's not as easy as adding a category symbol. My attempt at it has already failed a year ago. That is why special goods do not currently have a unique symbol. (I proposed a method to have a symbol by considering special goods as one category, but that method cannot be used for ordinary goods.)
I don't have the skills to do it so it must be done by someone who can do it. Then, prepare for him all the goods symbols for testing. In addition to that, the GUI will need a lot of work to handle it. And it must be sophisticated as explained. Of course, any issues that might arise will need to be resolved first. That way I am afraid but I find your idea very unlikely. That is my point.
I encourage you to look for another solution. Some may have been presented by Ves and Vladki.
I feel like the information would decieve me into thinking that that stop has no passenger capacity at all, for instance.
I'm afraid but I think it's a direct conflict with this patch. I think that's because I and you have different perspectives. But think about what is important for "line management".
I think that in the line management dialog, the player wants to know information about the cargo waiting for the line.
Passengers waiting for another route on a different platform, for example, is unnecessary information in the "management" of the "line".
Freight wagons and coaches do not usually use the same platform, do not unload coal on the passenger platform.
Simutrans sometimes does that, which is strange in a realistic sense, it's like a cheating, we just need to put the freight attribute in an unrelated tile, but acceptable because the player is not penalized at all.
However I don't think so when I want to see the data. I think it's annoying that the passenger platform data is displayed even though I want to know the information of the freight platform.
There are many examples of simutrans being treated as one station, unlike reality. Are the dock and the bus stop the same station? What is the ticket gate? Is it realistic to put it together? What separates it? Rather, I think it's deceptive to me that the bus stop or railway station and the airport are currently together.
The only difference is whether the player did it or not. (When I play offline, I use multiple companies to keep the stations separate so they are easy to manage. But sadly, I found that it doesn't work well with the large online map.)
So it's strange information that changes depending on how you have separated the stations!
And,
Line management is not station management. It interferes with management by making information hard to grasp.
Thus I don't think it's good to stick to the whole station in the line management dialog.
And that's why I also think that the station list and the station list in the line management dialog should have different views.
However, I think that the number of connections is as important as the waytype display at stations. Providing rapid services to skip underutilized stations is important for reducing travel time, and is often done in reality.
I already proposed another patch for that.
Also the number of users at the station may be one of the important information for that purpose, but at the moment, I think that the amount of information displayed is too large and the implementation becomes complicated. They are like station statistics. I think at least it's best to compromise and rely on another dialog.
There are other dialogs like the list of stations, such as schedule list and location information I proposed.
In any case, this patch's goal is to only show cargo (destination match) waiting for that line.
I think that Station list should be used for the information that Ves says.
Another idea is to add a line filter to the current station list to display station-specific information. It would be nice if there was a link to open it from the line list.
It's possible that another line running in the same spot could snatch the cargo, but I don't think it's a concern. It should be displayed because in effect that line is in competition. (I also think it difficult to implement, given that the station dialog doesn't currently show it.)
Currently, if you want to check it, you have to open the dialog for each station, sort, scroll and check. The purpose of this patch is to save that effort.
For example, as described above, simutrans often has strange station combinations, so it is very difficult to understand whether the bus stop is crowded or the platform is crowded at the station where the bus stop and the railway station are combined. I think it's better if the bar that extends to sky is easy to understand whether that passenger is going to the city area or going far.
Currently you need to click on the station to see the destination to know it. One of the reasons why I find the station dialogs inconvenient is that there is a "via" sort but not the direction or the line. Also there is a big difference whether it's your line or another players line that is causing crowding at the station where other players are using.
I think the line management dialog should allow it to be managed.
First of all because there tend to be so many of them so they get hard to remember,
There is no need to "remember". As I've already explained, unlike station bars, square boxes have tooltips so you can quickly see if you don't know what goods their color is.
Currently, the list looks quite busy, with colors everywhere. It gets difficult to get an overview, and it would only be worse if your line served stops from multiple other players,
Since the goal is to display only the cargo of that line, the cargo of "other players" will not be displayed in that case.
I would like to ask wether it really is important to know in this stop list exactly what goods are waiting, or wether it would be enough to only display the amount of good categories are waiting. After all, the vehicles doesnt care what goods they have loaded, only that it is a certain category. And you can anyway not tell where the good wants to go without opening the stop info window, which in turns also reveals what exact cargo is waiting there. Therefore I would argue that the important bit of information is how much of a specific category are waiting around the network, not the individual goods. That we have the stop info window for, which is easily accessible with a single click.
Please note that the destination information is not displayed here. So the colors of goods can be a hint of your destination. I don't think that hiding it has any merit because it makes the flow of things difficult to understand. If it's correct, simutrans doesn't have to separate goods from the beginning. Goods category is enough. When you want to know if the meat is being carried correctly, you only have a category view. I think this is just annoying. It's obviously worse than "before".
After all, the vehicles doesnt care what goods they have loaded, only that it is a certain category. And you can anyway not tell where the good wants to go without opening the stop info window, which in turns also reveals what exact cargo is waiting there. Therefore I would argue that the important bit of information is how much of a specific category are waiting around the network, not the individual goods. That we have the stop info window for, which is easily accessible with a single click.
I'm sorry I don't understand what you are saying. You seem to want to depend on station dialogs, increasing the need to open other dialogs pointlessly is not an improvement. As already mentioned, the information required for station management and line management is not the same. It may be easier to use the one specialized for each. And in my opinion, at least the station dialog is very difficult to use. Because, as mentioned above, the waiting list is not displayed for each direction and line. That's why I made this patch.
It is ridiculous to check which route the cargo is going to use at each station by looking at the via among many passengers and mail list.
Listing only the waiting good categories would also help towards solving another issue that this list might suffer , which is its width. If multiple goods are waiting at a stop, the line of text gets too big, and the info is lost. With fewer horisontal entries, more information can be condensed into the view.
The width issue is certainly one issue.
1) However, the width should have been greatly reduced compared to the case of text
2) Displaying only goods related to line does it still cause a problem or not
I think the category and goods displays may need to take into account the addition of toggle switches like the tabs on the right.
you could add a small square of color just to the left of the stop name. I believe this would greatly help reducing the color business when the list contains stops from multiple players. I am not sure if this would actually look better, as it is difficult to anticipate without having seen an example with different player stops, but it might be worth a try if the list is still too colorfull.
In my testing, this change looks very nice.
I would suggest to always display at least SOME info about what this stop may hold. It could look like this:
When pressing the passenger button:
[passenger icon] : X, X, X, X, X (max: Xmax) [mail icon] : Xactual/Xmax [general cargo icon] : Xactual/Xmax
When pressing the mail button:
[passenger icon] : Xactual/Xmax [mail icon] :X, X (max: Xmax) [general cargo icon] : Xactual/Xmax
I'm sorry, but I don't know what this is intended for. What will change?
1) max is not really max.
2) There are strange conditions on how much max can be exceeded. Cargo cannot exceed a certain capacity when boarding directly, but it can endlessly exceed when coming from outside.
3) I don't want to display letters as much as possible to organize the information. I don't think it's important information.
4) Cargo capacity is common to all categories. In other words, what you want to display is not what is waiting, but the capacity of the station? This seems to be station management, not line management, as I said above.
For those reasons, I think it's better not to display it, and that's why standard didn't. Like a station dialog, it doesn't need much space if it's itself a symbol. But it's too incompatible to show along with information about what and how much is waiting.
I think you should use commas in between the numbers. Commas represent a horisontal list in written text. Semicolon could perhaps also be used, otherwise in between each category. I dont think "+", "-" or "/" should be used, as they might insinuate something else. Only the "/" could be used as in the above example as distinguishing actual amount versus maximum amount.
Perhaps that is true of many dialogs in simutrans. And is there a good alternative for class display?
