2021 Extended status, and Happy New Year

[Ves]

Hello everyone, long time no see! 
It has been a while since I last visited the forums here, and o boy, the new Extended forum structure is amazing!
I have read and skimmed through most of the topics that was marked as "new", and I can see that you all have been quite busy working on features and bug hunting and implementing stuff from Standard, really inspiring to read about! But it has been alot of text and it is quite difficult to get the overview on the status of things, so I would like to ask and get your opinions directly, if you dont mind:

What are the status of Simutrans Extended, what have happened these last 6 months?
How far has the implementations from Standard come?
What about the new GUI? Is there any hope for my vehicle manager window?
And is the vehicle combination/recombination actively being worked on now?

Yes yes, I know, all these answers can be found if I just carefully read all the threads, but I have so far read more than 40 threads...

Then just a few words: I had to leave because I had to devote my full attention to my (viola) practicing this autumn (and still will in periods in the future), and Simutrans is a true timesink, as you know....

Lastly, I would like to send you a small (and late) new years greeting. This video we recorded with my orchestra viola section, and guess who got to open the champagne 
https://fb.watch/30kQkFECuR/

HAPPY NEW YEAR 

[jamespetts]

Welcome and happy new year! I hope that your viola went well. Your company on the server unfortunately eventually went bankrupt, but fragments of the infrastructure have been re-used in various ways.

To answer your questions:

How far has the implementations from Standard come?

This has come quite far - Ranran will have a better idea, but we are up to date on the bulk of the additions, and I think that we are now more or less complete on transitioning to the new UI model. I know that there were some things that Ranran omitted, some unavoidably, but some that we might want to go back and add again in the future.

What about the new GUI? Is there any hope for my vehicle manager window?

I should definitely like to see the vehicle manager functionality integrated; but the existing design unfortunately used the old code, so it might be quite a lot of work to make it work with the new code. Quite how much work I am not sure as I have not looked into this in detail. Note now that we have the feature from Standard of a simple list of available vehicle types, but this is quite different from the vehicle manager, I think.

And is the vehicle combination/recombination actively being worked on now?

Steps towards this have been taken in that there has been some work on merging all the changes in Simutrans-Extended since early/mid 2018 into the vehicle-management branch: see the vehicle-management-new branch. More work still needs to be done on this before work on this can recommence in earnest, however; I only returned from my Christmas holidays last week-end and have been busy with bugs in the meantime.

More generally, the current focus is on performance on the Bridgewater-Brunel server and private car routing. A short while ago, Freddy did some significant work in making the private car routing system use less memory. This had the effect of significantly improving performance on the Bridgewater-Brunel server, which had become so poor that the game was difficult to play. Earlier this week, I noticed that there was far less private car traffic between towns than expected, and set about investigating this. With help from Freddy, I discovered that what was happening was that the list of cities to process for private car routing was being re-set every time that there was a load/save cycle. This meant that, on larger maps where this processing takes a long time, most cities would never have any private car routing data and thus not be regarded as having any private car routes. When I fixed this, memory consumption from private car routing increased very significantly and as recently as to-day it has been reported that performance on the Bridgewater-Brunel server is again poor as a result of this. This is a very complex issue that will need detailed consideration. Freddy has talked about implementing an alternative, but this will be very time consuming. We will not know without more detailed testing whether any alternative will alleviate the memory consumption enough. This issue, as well as general bug fixing, may well occupy available development time for a while to come.

In any event, thank you for your new year's greeting. Happy new year to you, too, and may much happy Simutrans joy occur in the coming months.

[Ves]

Thank you James!

I feared that when the new GUI would arrive, it would result in a somewhat redo of the vehicle manager. A good portion of it is luckily just logic that filters and sorts vehicles in certain ways, and that was after all the most hard to do.
It will take me some time, though, to get into the new GUI setup. I have seen some dialogs in the past, but will study it a bit more now.
I have been considering wether the best thing really is to code this window as part of the vehicle-management branch (as it is now), or if it should be a part of the master branch. If it where part of the master branch, it could be released when certain features are ready for testing by players, instead of having to wait for the vehicle-management branch to be the master branch. To begin with, it is simply just an advanced vehicle list with no proper action features. After all, no specific vehicle recombination features exist yet, so it is hard to make GUI for it :-)

Now when the window has to be reformed from the ground up anyway, I thought it might be a good idea to do this change!

[Mariculous]

Yes, I guess it's a good idea to introduce it independently of the recombination system if the UI itself is independent of it.
Is the asset manager also part of that work? I'd really love to see it ingame.

[Ves]

No, I had never started on the Asset manager, partly because I wanted the Vehicle manager to be at a certain place first, partly because I wasnt sure how to form the Asset manager and partly because I knew that the new GUI would make me redo lots of stuff anyway,
Also, I had never came to a conclusion wether they should be one and the same (in different tabs) or separate. Now when I have to do alot of things from scratch anyway, it would be much easier to combine, so I would actually lean towards creating the Asset manager now, implementing the old stuff from the vehicle manager to fit into that.