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pak48.Excentrique

Started by Spike, November 03, 2009, 03:12:11 PM

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Spike

Quote from: IgorEliezer on December 26, 2011, 12:11:35 AM
Excellent work Hajo.

Thanks, I'm glad to hear that  ;D

Soon I can start with vehicles, today I finished a first version of depots for the magnatrail. They're kept in mostly the same visual style as the stations, so it's easy to recognize the magnatrail elements on the map.

prissi

The waviness at the very end reminds me together wie the texture very much of a bin "Blechdose". Maybe using a slightly more golden color would remove this association (if not intended).

Anyway, very good to have pak excentrique back and, more important yourself, back to creativity.

Spike

pak.Tincan for the win ;)

Thanks Prissi, it's good that I can be more active again, indeed.

It's been a silly moment, but the tincan structure was chosen by purpose  8) But luckily it's easy to change when I get some better ideas. The depots will benefit from more details in general. Maybe I should replace them with giant slingshots and rubber bands  ;D

For the moment these must do though, I want to work a bit on vehicles next.

Spike

A first tourist attraction was spotted in the world of pak48.Excentrique - Giant crystal splinter growths!


Spike

These crystal structures seem to exist in at least two variations, at least a second one was spotted today!

Spike

Some new city elements came into existence, too.


Spike

#76
I've uploaded a new release to Sourceforge, v0.13:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/simutrans/files/pak48.Excentrique/v0.13-for-Simutrans-111.0/

Changes in v0.13 since v0.12:

- Several new city buildings.
- Magnatrack depots and stations.
- Magnatrack vehicles.
- One new landmark in two variants.


Lately the old feeling of frustration about missing feedback hit me badly again. Combined with a feeling of being ignored - no feedback for my announcement that Solarex is now on Sourceforge, no feedback about my Tilemaster project, although I released two plugins just for Simutrans related work, no feedback about my ideas for a street name list for pak48.Excentrique and besides Prissi and Igor there was no one writing something about the new pak48.Excentrique additions that I have presented since I'm back ...

Yesterday evening I felt rather irritated about the number of hits that the threads have (Tilemaster > 200, Excentriue > 500 new hits since I'm back ..) and the number of replies (0 about Tilemaster, 2 for Excentrique, 0 for Solarex, 0 for the street list).

In my head this means people look at my works, but don't find them worth to try or comment ...

The thought makes me sad and frustrated. So I'll take a break from development till I feel better again. Since I didn't want to leave things undone already again, I've spent this day to completed the magnatrack transportation with a few "vehicles" so that it's usable (somewhat), and now will go and think a while about what are better ways to do things.

Sorry for the words if someone feels offended, I don't intend to hurt someone. But I wanted to express my feelings. Also I wants to say thanks to Igor and Prissi give me a share of their attention!

More thank thanks go to Frank for the Christmas card, VS for the holiday greetings last summer and Prissi for his nice new year email! I don't want to repeat the mistake and let you feel ignored as well. Better say thanks late than never. I hope.

Yes, I'm also bad at communication. But I'm still happy if someone thinks about me, and you are not forgotten. Well if I forgot to list your name, it's solely my fault and there are more than the named ones about whom I keep very positive memories. Best of luck to you all, named or not :)

An_dz

I'm frustrated on hearing this Hajo. I kept track on those posts but I didn't know what to post, and I was getting bad seeing no one was posting.

I was going to say you are too fast, and might stop posting or would lose your Ambassador of Slowness title. :)

About the pak:
The magnatrack trains have a very realistic turning effect, you made a great work on those convoys. And those Orange Cherries are my favorite tree.

prissi

I think you are too fast; posting means people need to download stuff, testing it an so on. You need to give a weekend at least before becoming too frustrated. But well, simutrans team leading has teached me patience, tolerance and that is is not clever to hope much for external reward in relation to the wark you put in. More people will complain than praise (although the maturer lthe lesser problem). In that way silence means you did something right. ;)

Imho the key to happyness is not doing stuff because one pleases other people (although this can be a great motivator) but doing stuff because one self feels like it needs doing. Everything else will get stale anyway after a short time. Only the reward from yourself (and people you *really* know and care for) counts.

Spike

I want to reply to a few points. Not trying to defend my position, but to explain.

Quote from: An_dz on January 07, 2012, 07:47:05 PM
I was going to say you are too fast, and might stop posting or would lose your Ambassador of Slowness title. :)

It's a self chosen message. I think our world is getting too fast and more slowness would be good. I'm a victim of this trend as well ... sorry :(

Quote from: prissi on January 07, 2012, 09:46:15 PM
In that way silence means you did something right. ;)

Yes, but it irritates me.

Quote from: prissi on January 07, 2012, 09:46:15 PM
Imho the key to happyness is not doing stuff because one pleases other people (although this can be a great motivator) but doing stuff because one self feels like it needs doing. Everything else will get stale anyway after a short time. Only the reward from yourself (and people you *really* know and care for) counts.

You know the phrase, "Yes, but ..."

So here my "but" part: Even if I start doing things just for myself, at some point I want to show the results, and well, hope for good feedback. I don't like critiques, but I have learned to see them as helpful too, in a way that they point to aspects which could be better. Good criques even give hints how to do things better. I like those much better - if I know how to something better, I surely will do so next time.

The lack of feedback is a problem for me. It leaves me helpless, aimless, irritated. I have no idea if the stuff that I do is good, irrelevant or uninteresting. At some point I will turn towards other fields then if I find that there happens no communication about something, because I'm usually pleased with little and then start to do something new. pak48.Excentrique has reached this point.  I like the results as they are now. If I had freedom, I'd just make buildings and landmarks, and create a pretty thing to fly over and watch.

Doing transport stuff is serious work for me. I need some external motivation for this part, or I just do it by pushing myself, and then things like today happen, frustration if the effort and work seems to be unrecognized.

Having said this I'll do a break from pak48.Excentrique anyways. Experience shows, in a while my interest will return. But sometimes the breaks are very long, sometimes my projects just died because I lost interest.

So you are right Prissi, it's best to do things that one can enjoy all by oneself. I haven't found that for myself yet, but I was searching and will be searching again. Meanwhile I'll be happy if I can talk with people about my creations. I have enough issues with people and communicating with people already, so I'm usually happy to have an "accident free" conversation and often keep a good distance to everyone, but still I need a bit of talk now and then. (There are days when I am like "people just hurt", and just want to be alone and be left alone ... )

Quote from: prissi on January 07, 2012, 09:46:15 PM
Only the reward from yourself (and people you *really* know and care for) counts.

Frankly said, there are no close people who are interested in my works.

wlindley

Loving the refreshed pak, it is a fun break from the "seriousness" of my usual pak128.Britain.

Spike

Quote from: wlindley on January 08, 2012, 04:44:00 AM
Loving the refreshed pak, it is a fun break from the "seriousness" of my usual pak128.Britain.

Thank you, makes me happy to hear :) I'm currently pondering what sort of "force fields" would make good signals for the magnatracks ...

wlindley

#82
Perhaps a signal mast, along the lines of a Golden Age of Radio microphone : (US President Warren Harding, NBC Radio Archives)



...where the outer loop would be the signal mast; the squared elements inside (springs, in the original)  would be lit with red or green, and the inner circle (the actual microphone element in the picture) is where the "train" would be?

isidoro

I fully understand you, Hajo.  It also usually happens to me, but I have come to the conclusion that the problem is in myself.  I'll explain:  I see that one of my thread is visited a hundred times and I tend to choose among all possibilities the pessimistic ones: they don't care, they don't like it,...  But, if fact, if you think like that, what would you leave when your thread is not even visited by 9 people instead of hundreds?

I've come to the conclusion that the state of happiness and motivation depends more on oneself than on anything else.  The oil to fill my tank is inside, not outside.

I'll give you another example.  Imagine that your work if followed by hundreds of people and that you get a lot of feedback.  It is, in fact, nothing.  A pessimistic character like ours will tend to think that they are faking, praising for interest, etc.

I finally give you another example:  my quest through the code and final proposal for a possible implementation of a one-way kind of road.  I usually have a time tracker installed on my computer and, out of curiosity, this is the time it took me to do that:

     
  • Read the brainstorming thread again to fetch the ideas: 1:00h
  • Download source code, compile and run r5035: 1:15 h (and I had done that before!)
  • Looking down the code and writing the reports: 28:30h
  • Writing down my proposal, do corrections...: 2:30h

Almost one and a half day of continuous work...  And these times do not include the time reading/answering the posts...  And I arrive to the final proposal and,  da-daaa, no answer, time passes, no answer,...  Oh, here it comes, prissi answers!.  And to tell you the truth, it was, to say it softly, not a very encouraging answer: nothing good, all wrong, problems, more problems and problems again, blah, blah...  ;D   But I learned to enjoy it, what else?

And I don't mean that prissi is wrong and I am right, please don't misunderstand me.  I don't have such a high concept of myself.  Maybe he is right, but I don't care.  Fortunately, some support also came: from Dwachs and you, for instance...

But I guess the same happens to all those marvelous artists when they spend their time designing a new plane, etc. for the game.  Or Isaac managing forum stuff.  Or in other aspects of life, when you have used a full afternoon to run, buy and prepare a nice dinner and, at the end, all are defects, it is salty, too hot, too spicy...  Whatever...  It's really funny for me...

I don't know the early history of this community since I have arrived here mid-way.  But for me you are an authority here.  Like Gandalf or something like that.  I would envy you, had it not be for I prefer the dark side of the force and be Dark-Vader instead, for instance...  8)   The world is filled with good people,  bad people are the really interesting ones...

I usually feel I don't belong to this Cro-magnonian world with groups, ambitions, power, winner vs. looser stuff, etc., that nothing is thought or built thinking of me, and feel more like a lonely Neanthertal, but I have learned to live (and lastly even enjoy) it...  And I believe it is something that has to be learned...

Oops!  Maybe I'm sick...  A normal person is supposed not to feel good in such circumstances...  Hmmm...  I have to see the Doctor to make me behave as I must behave...  Now, I'm worried.   ;)


Spike

Quote from: isidoro on January 08, 2012, 07:43:13 PM
I fully understand you, Hajo.  It also usually happens to me, but I have come to the conclusion that the problem is in myself.

Same for me. The problem is, some aspect of ones personality are difficult to change. I don't want to dive too much into the topic, but to say, I'm trying, and I think I make progress, but in very small steps.

isidoro

Or not.  Not a problem to stay if you feel ok...  ;)


Spike

The last release of pak48.Excentrique did contain Magnatracks, which Simutrans treats like rail tracks, but no signals, leaving the tracks mostly useless.

To remedy this I've made a sort of signals called "force gates", which should work much like the signals as they are known from other pak sets.

The positioning on diagonal tracks is not good, but on straight tracks it's a quite nice effect when the force gates open and close :)

Besides the force gates I've attchaed an updated ground.Outside.pak which should contain a proper version number for the pak chooser dialog.

Good luck with the force gates. May the power drop be with you ;)


prissi

They are also quite visible. Maybe define signals on left=0 explicitely in your simuconf.tab or else ...

Spike

Quote from: prissi on January 09, 2012, 10:36:41 PM
They are also quite visible.

I'd think this is a good thing? The one way signals look a bit odd though, but it should work.

Quote from: prissi on January 09, 2012, 10:36:41 PM
Maybe define signals on left=0 explicitely in your simuconf.tab or else ...

Soo many new settings. Didn't know about this one. Thanks for the hint!
I can't find it in the default simuconf.tab (from the 111.0 download) though ... what's the exact name of the parameter?

isidoro

They are nice.  I wonder what you have in mind for power lines...

prissi

Forgot to add this to simuconf.tab:

# signals on the left side (=1)
signals_on_left = 0



DirrrtyDirk

#91
Quote from: prissi on January 10, 2012, 10:11:46 AM
Forgot to add this to simuconf.tab:

# signals on the left side (=1)
signals_on_left = 0


Not wanting to derail this thread, but...
this sounds interesting... could you also explain what exactly happens when this is set to "1" some time? Thanks!
  
***** PAK128 Dev Team - semi-retired*****

sdog

@hajo, i haven't read the discussion about recognition before, a bit late, but still i should like to point out to you that this thread had already 11155 views.

Spike

Quote from: prissi on January 10, 2012, 10:11:46 AM
# signals on the left side (=1)
signals_on_left = 0

Thank you. I've now added this to the pak set configuration.

Quote from: sdog on January 10, 2012, 10:10:20 PM
@hajo, i haven't read the discussion about recognition before, a bit late, but still i should like to point out to you that this thread had already 11155 views.

Yes, it's been part of my irritation. There were like 700 new views since I had presented the magnatrack stations and depots, and the more recent additions, and besides Prissi, Igor and An_dz no one commented (and An_dz only said he will try the set, but didn't return to tell if he likes it/dislikes it, has ideas, wants changes or such ... I had been waiting for such feedback when he said he'll try it).

700 views to 3 comments were an irritation relation to me, and my conclusion was that people watch, but then turn away uninterested. At least my impression was that my works are so bad that they do not trigger any comments.

I still feel a bit irritated about the number of views in relation to number pak set downloads, and also comments, but well it will stay a mystery of the internet and all the statistics there.

wlindley

It has long been said, in marketing and customer support, that if one thousand customers have a problem with or are upset about a product, that only one will correspond with the manufacturer; if ten thousand are pleased with the product, only one will write a letter of praise.  So 3 replies to 700 downloads is quite above the average!

Spike

Ok, didn't know that. I guess must get used to the new times first. Simutrans is much bigger project now with a much less familiar group of fans.


sdog

to be honest, i haven't looked into the pak myself for more than a year. in fact i haven't started simutrans since i looked at the submissions for the last pak contest in autumn. i didn't want to comment on it without looking at it first hand. (btw, i liked the tin can depots on the screenshots)

there is another reason you shan't get as much feedback as in other paks. it is very much different, and excentric. quite a lot of the comments are criticism on the proportion, realism etc. here people would have to comment on aesthetics alone, that is something most try to avoid. especially the bunch of us nerds you find here, we lack the language to do so politely.
(if you also want some feedback on less liked aspects, read on else skip graciously, as it is likely not relevant:
I'm not so fond of the colour palette, as it always reminds me of a colour photo negative. i'd have hoped for a bit more excenticism there.)


By the way, it's pretty cool, you -- contrary to your announcement -- stayed here for the discussion, instead of retreating. Afterall, you still got the option if we get too much of a pain.


ps.: before i never had enough contact to you, to properly thank you for making simutrans, and making it open source. there is only one game i spent so much time with in two decades of hardcore gaming. you certainly beat valve (half-life+mods) and microprose (transport tycoon, ufo).

An_dz

Quote from: Hajo on January 10, 2012, 10:33:07 PM
An_dz only said he will try the set, but didn't return to tell if he likes it/dislikes it, has ideas, wants changes or such ... I had been waiting for such feedback when he said he'll try it
So I forgot my review... :D

I tried the pak sometimes, and I've found those 'bad' points:
-The forests make the city disappear, I found myself lost sometimes looking for a city. This is probably because there are few citybuildings and trees options.
-The lack of road-magnatrack crosses is a pain.
-The stop/station symbol is not intuitive. I always forget what button is it.
-The magnatrack vehicle is too slow. It don't look like a magnatrack.
-The sharkwaggon stay out of the road in Up-down diagonal streets.

I just couldn't test much the magnatrack because my generated maps never had big cities.
And it's not an easy pak, you need some planning to make a profitable company.

Hope this helps you Hajo.

Spike

Quote from: sdog on January 11, 2012, 03:38:44 AM
quite a lot of the comments are criticism on the proportion, realism etc. here people would have to comment on aesthetics alone, that is something most try to avoid.

(if you also want some feedback on less liked aspects, read on else skip graciously, as it is likely not relevant:
I'm not so fond of the colour palette, as it always reminds me of a colour photo negative. i'd have hoped for a bit more excenticism there.)

Hehe :)  I'm trying to get more into an artistic direction, but most of my education was about technical stuff, so I guess you're right there, there could be more excenticism.

The "photo negative" impression most like stems from the fact that I chose dark grounds with bright objects, which is more or less opposite to the other existing paks.

Quote from: sdog on January 11, 2012, 03:38:44 AM
By the way, it's pretty cool, you -- contrary to your announcement -- stayed here for the discussion, instead of retreating. Afterall, you still got the option if we get too much of a pain.

Now and then I'll need breaks, but currently I seem to have a fairly good phase.

Quote from: sdog on January 11, 2012, 03:38:44 AM
ps.: before i never had enough contact to you, to properly thank you for making simutrans, and making it open source.

Thanks  :D
A good share of that goes to Prissi, though, who so tireless and persistently works on Simutrans. Without him, Simutrans wouldn't be where it is today.

Quote from: An_dz on January 11, 2012, 03:24:47 PM
So I forgot my review... :D

...

Hope this helps you Hajo.

Yes it does, thanks! The lack of crossings, bridges and tunnels really makes it difficult at the moment. This should be solved sooner or later, though. About the forests and cities, at the moment I have no idea how to help that, but I'll keep it in mind that it can cause troubles.

Really big cities I had now and then, but they have their very own visual problems  ??? The Dolphincar and the Sharkwaggon both need to be redone, I'm working on a new vehicle template.

Meanwhile I have been trying to do something about the industries ... I once had asked for help ( http://forum.simutrans.com/index.php?topic=3702.50 ) since I didn't feel able to do the music instruments, but now I thought I'm just going to borrow images that I had made for another project a while ago, and which roughly fit the theme. So here are the first two previews of the new industry chain which will be about producing music :)


isidoro

I definitively like the idea of producing unmaterial stuff: music, but also poems, prime numbers, programs...  really excentrique!


An_dz

I had some ideas for the pak, very excentrique by the way:
Big spiders and beatles rided by the spark citizens as trucks, can add a big box over them to look like the storage place.
Some dragons as airplanes will also look cool.
And as atractions or monuments, the Blue Screen of Death, a big computer with the BSOD.

IgorEliezer

And don't forget an outdoor that says "Die Brücke ist nicht frei!"

* IgorEliezer runs

Spike

Quote from: isidoro on January 11, 2012, 11:30:31 PM
I definitively like the idea of producing unmaterial stuff: music, but also poems, prime numbers, programs...  really excentrique!

Thank you :)

Quote from: An_dz on January 12, 2012, 03:00:30 AM
Big spiders and beatles rided by the spark citizens as trucks, can add a big box over them to look like the storage place.
Some dragons as airplanes will also look cool.

Animals with legs look odd when moving without animation. But I could offer snails ;)

Quote from: IgorEliezer on January 12, 2012, 03:11:22 AM
And don't forget an outdoor that says "Die Brücke ist nicht frei!"
* IgorEliezer runs

There were two big trees, a rope bridge in between. An on the bridge a big gorilla, with a sign "Die Brücke ist nicht frei!"  ;D

Now I must practise to draw gorillas  ;)


Todays news:

Level crossings for magnatracks and powertrails!

And some trumpet cars for transporting fanfars. These might need some more work, though.

sdog

ah, i misunderstood you before, i thought the cars would transport the sounds made at the factory, similar to the muenhhausen story where a sound is frozen in a post-horn.

Spike

#104
Quote from: sdog on January 13, 2012, 06:33:29 AM
ah, i misunderstood you before, i thought the cars would transport the sounds made at the factory, similar to the muenhhausen story where a sound is frozen in a post-horn.

I meant to produce and transport the sounds. It's just my lack of words to express it precisely. "Fanfar" seems to be the name of an instrument as well as some trumpets sounding together in a certain way. I meant the sound.

I've tried to improve the fanfaporters, and attached a new screenshot.

The beatnuts to transport beats might be a bit more clear. Heavy beats, so beatnuts must be sturdy, and they can't carry many beats.