Topic: pak 128 features vs pak64?

[afransen]

Is there a reason why the pak64 features are so much less than pak128? There are many fewer vehicles, and less industry variety. Is it just that more development focus is directed toward pak128?

Btw, my two cents is that pak64 has a nicer feel as a game. I find pak 128 a bit too weird in how it places industry and shops.

[PatrickN]

Pak64 was designed form the start as a default set, and was meant to be kept small.  Pak128 is huge, nearly 20 MB now.  The large size also brings more complicated transport systems.

[Spike]

PAK 64 is the older pak, and when PAK 128 emerged, a lot of new graphics were made for it, but only few of those were also included in PAK 64, since most need some manual work after scaling to look good in PAK 64.

I think most people are like "bigger is better" and 128 is double of 64 ... so maybe the PAK 64 doesn't get as much attention as PAK 128?

While I was still active I have ported a few buildings and vehicles from 128 to 64, but it was quite some work and I had other things to do as well, so it remained a few. (And I don't really know what happened to the PAK while I was away).

[prissi]

Als pak128 industries were very unbalanced, with Ore Mines producing amounts of ore impossible to move with anything but a massive numbers of trains. Or supermarkets which required more than 40 idustries and so on.

Many vehicles in pak128 are not distinct, but just similar to their precessor. This may add variety, but for gaming experience this adds confusions. Even more since only few of them have company color (which is important, if one competes with the AIs).

Finally, styles are even more mixed up in pak128. Badly renders mix with detailed handdrawn buildings with 3D models and flat images. In that aspect pak.german has the most uniform and nicest style of them all.

pak64 really lacks contributions, I could choose for incorporation into the game. 90% of the buildings added in the last five year were either from raven or Alexander Brose. Getting more of those (and espcially more vehicles too) would also result in a little bigger variety.

And finally, pak64 has most features, like powerline bridges and similar stuff introduced in the last year, since pak128 always laking behind. The actual development happens in pak64.

[wipi35]

Als pak128 industries were very unbalanced, with Ore Mines producing amounts of ore impossible to move with anything but a massive numbers of trains. Or supermarkets which required more than 40 idustries and so on.

Therefore I'm very lucky with the new "Industry Builder" where you can adjust the capacity yourself.

[PatrickN]

Somewhat biased comment -> I like the diversity of graphics in pak128 because the buildings are not all one style.

I sometimes wish pak128 could be broken down and simplified to be exactly like pak64, only with the 128 graphics.  It is nice to have diverse vehicle types, but they cost too much and make too little money compared to pak64.

[Ashley]

The main issue with vehicle diversity is improper timelining and no easy way to upgrade vehicles automatically, there shouldn't be more than 2 vehicles for transporting a given good at a time, preferably just one most of the time, but over the course of a 100 year game there could potentially be switches every 10-20 years (bringing incremental capacity/speed improvements), with timeline/show obsolete turned on you only see a small number of vehicles.

The only problem then becomes keeping track of all your vehicles and upgrading them over time of course. I think Raven, and certainly I had planned vehicle sets for pak64 which would follow these sort of timeline based incremental upgrades, there comes a point where you have to balance between the micromanagement of upgrading and the richness of changing vehicles though (usually by reducing upgrade frequency to 30 years, and then having the various good type vehicles overlap, so you upgrade passenger trains one year, then maybe coal next year etc.)

I've always preferred pak64 because the scale seems to be more consistent, pak128 often suffers from "sparse tiles", e.g. rail tiles seem to be too spacious (the tracks take up such a small bit of the tile), and the larger size exaggerates the inherent scale discrepancies in the game. It's quite cool that you can zoom pak64 up to 128 size now in software (it doesn't even look that bad xD)

[mobo]

..., there shouldn't be more than 2 vehicles for transporting a given good at a time, preferably just one most of the time, ...

I think there should be at least 2 at each time, because otherwise the player doesn't really have a choice. He can't do it right or wrong good or bad if there is only one vehicle to choose anyway. So for gameplay reasons there should always be a choice between 2 at least - even better would be: 2 good choices one bad (so you can do something wrong). Maybe not for every good, but for passengers at least.

Only my 2 cents.

[yoshi]

I also think there should be at least two choices; one for intercity sevices (high speed but low capacity) and other for commuter sevices (low speed but high capacity).

[Bernd Gabriel]

I also think there should be at least two choices; one for intercity sevices (high speed but low capacity) and other for commuter sevices (low speed but high capacity).

Right! That's exactly, what simutrans needs!

But the speed bonus forces you to use high speed trains as urban subways :(

I think in my next simu-life, I will set the speed bonus to 0.

BTW: in my current simulation (still the test sim for ravens 19th Century pack) we are writing the year 2095. I wonder, whether I will meat Captain Kirk some years later in a hangar ...

This leads me to a change request...