[patch] Warning display of waiting too much for loading

[Ranran(retired)]

As I pointed out in another thread, factories some time impose very low max transit limits.
The player may set a 100% loading limit that will never be reached and the convoy may wait forever there for loading.
However, the system never report this as an error and the player may be unaware that he is stuck in the trap for a long time.

The UI should be gentle like a British gentleman. I think Professor Layton will say so. I made that patch and went up to level 5. (I heard fanfare and my health became max)



It's kinda stuck, so it's displayed in orange. After waiting for 3 months, the bar color and display will change at the beginning of the month.
If it wait for 4 months, it will annoy you with a well-established message. After that, it spams every month at the beginning of month just like any other stuck.

Also I am confident that these English is bad. Therefore they need to be calibrated.

Code Select Expand

Vehicle %s wait loading too much!
Waiting too much for loading (%i->%i%%)!
I also recommend shortening it if possible.

github branch is here
https://github.com/Ranran-the-JuicyPork/simutrans-extended/tree/wait-loading-too-much

Hope this patch saves the trapped player. Thank you. (´・ω・｀)

[freddyhayward]

Maybe just display "Vehicle %s has now been waiting for %i months." after the time has passed. The player can judge themselves whether this is too much.

[Ranran(retired)]

Maybe just display "Vehicle %s has now been waiting for %i months." after the time has passed. The player can judge themselves whether this is too much.

This also applies to stuck and waiting clearances, I think they're not doing it now because they can't display the exact month.
The only way to calculate it is to look at convoy's chart history and see that it is not working. But it can only be checked for up to 11 months.
Create a strange break of n months, 11 months or more.
Is it acceptable? What is the English notation?
Maybe it's better to add another convoy status to skip the calculation.

Is there any other reason not to do that with stuck or waiting clearances?

[Mariculous]

11 months is already a quite long time. I'd not expect any convoy to run that rarely, so it might befine to display the month when possible and otherwise something like "at least n years", which is available as a stat either.

[freddyhayward]

Past 11 months, it could say "for over a year". If the player still ignores it by then, I don't think they will care whether it's 2 years or 100

[Ranran(retired)]

Past 11 months, it could say "for over a year".

The alert said. "convoy has been waiting for 10 months".
In the next month, the alert says "convoy has been waiting for over a year".
I think this is strange.

[freddyhayward]

The alert said. "convoy has been waiting 10 months".
In the next month, the alert says "convoy has been waiting for over a year".
I think this is strange.

Oh, I didn't think of that. That would be confusing.

[Mariculous]

So add another month to the stat, it shouldn't be too hard.
I had a look at that loadsave code part of this and it's just as simple as adjusting a single constant there.
Might be a little more work elsewhere, I'm not sure about it but shouldn't be too much work.

Alternatively, I don't see what's wrong with showing "over 11 months" in these cases.

[Ranran(retired)]

If the player still ignores it by then, I don't think they will care whether it's 2 years or 100

As you can see, I don't think the month display is so valuable.
I don't think it makes much difference whether convoy waits 4 months or 6 months.
Also, if two convoys are on a line where one is waiting for load forever, the other one may warn first to make the waiting clearance by the forever loading convoy.

But if it's only one convoy, it won't issue a warning and the player may not notice it. The purpose of this patch is to solve that problem. Therefore, I think it is enough to add one or two months to the waiting clearance warning.
I'm not sure if it's okay to put in a process to check how many months they have been waiting for hundreds of loading convoys at the beginning of the month. My point is I don't think it's worth it.

So add another month to the stat, it shouldn't be too hard.
I had a look at that loadsave code part of this and it's just as simple as adjusting a single constant there.

It involves many changes and increases the amount of data saved. I don't think it's worth doing it as above.

[DrSuperGood]

I think the grammar is off. Surely it should be...

Vehicle %s has been loading for a long time.
Loading (%i->%i%%) Long Time

Short and concise, especially for the floating text.

[Ranran(retired)]

Loading (%i->%i%%) Long Time

Thank you very much. That's the answer I was looking for. The text displayed in the tooltip is preferably short.

[jamespetts]

Thank you for this - now incorporated. I should be grateful if you could add the translatable texts to Simutranslator.

[freddyhayward]

This caused a bug where convoys waiting for too long would never load at all, even with goods waiting at the same stop. I fixed this in: https://github.com/jamespetts/simutrans-extended/pull/219
EDIT: attached the reproduction case.

[jamespetts]

This caused a bug where convoys waiting for too long would never load at all, even with goods waiting at the same stop. I fixed this in: https://github.com/jamespetts/simutrans-extended/pull/219
EDIT: attached the reproduction case.

Splendid, thank you; now incorporated.

[Ranran(retired)]

Yes, I neglected to check the behavior of recovering from the error. I'm sorry.(´・ω・｀)
Thank you for fixing the bug rather than reporting it.