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Depot Window - replace "gear" with "effective power"

Started by The Hood, November 18, 2009, 09:00:45 AM

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The Hood

Hopefully this is a fairly simple, but useful, request.  At the minute, the depot window displays power and gear of a vehicle.  The game uses power * gear to calculate acceleration.  This isn't very intuitive, and even when you know this, it isn't neceessarily very much fun to calculate power * gear in your head / on a calculator for every combination of vehicles.  This makes it hard to make a direct comparison between vehicles in the depot, and causes confusion with newbies.

So here's my suggestion.  Could we replace the "gear" entry in the depot window with an "effective power" / "in-game power" entry, which has the value of gear*power, which would then allow a direct comparison of different convoys?  Nothing in the dat file or game engine would need to change, just a cosmetic change in the depot window.

I think this would generally make life a lot easier and clearer.

PS one reason for asking this is because gear multipliers in pak128.Britain are used to modify the power, which is the historical value for diesels and electrics.  I'd generally like to keep historical values in, but as different vehicles get modified by different amounts, it does cause confusion in the present implementation.

PPS seeing as this looks pretty simple, I'm almost embarrassed to ask for it, but I have no knowledge of C coding and no time to learn (especially while maintaining/developing a pakset).  Hopefully one of the coder-types has a spare few minutes to write a patch :)

prissi

The gear was exactly for that purpose: To show the correct power. Showing two powers will confuse players more than helping imho. And for seeing how much an engine can pull, calculation is not required, since the correct value is shown in the depot under the consist.