Train loading times in 9.0

[Carl]

I've been trying out 9.0 in pak64. Looks good! But I have a question/observation regarding waiting times. Has the absolute minimum loading time for trains been raised to 4000? I couldn't find any mention of this in the release notes, but the waiting time at stations seems to have increased for all my trains.

This has made my saved games basically unplayable, so I looked into changing it by editing some vehicle dat files to include a lower loading_time value. But this seemed to have no effect: the vehicles in question still displayed a loading time of 4000 in-game. I assumed this was a set minimum, but I also tried raising the waiting time to 10000 by again altering the paks. But this doesn't seem to work either. I assume that either the game can't read these parameters, or I was doing something wrong. For information, I simply added a line of "loading_time=x" to each component of the .dat file. Was this correct?

Can the universal minimum loading time be altered somewhere? If not, how can one alter the loading time via the paks given the above.

[Carl]

A little more to add to the report:

Upon cranking up 8.2 to compare data, I can see that

-- Trains still *all* display a loading time of 4000 (despite some of the pak files requesting differently)
and yet
-- The time that trains wait at stations is far smaller than in 9.0.

Strange!

[jamespetts]

Jha4ceb,

thank you for that feedback. This was caused by an attempt to integrate the Simutrans-Experimental way of dealing with loading times into new refinements in Simutrans-Standard about how loading should be handled, which increased loading time in some cases. I have reverted that change now, as, having tested it, the two methods do not seem to work well together, so, from the next version onwards, the loading times of vehicles will always be the given loading times in milliseconds.

The settings in the pak files are working, however, and are properly encoded with the latest version of Makeobj.

[Carl]

Hi jamespetts,

Thanks for the response! For illustration, the effect on a saved game with a large network was to bring down the "distance" values of almost all train routes by almost half.

I should say that many of the other fixes integrated into 9.0 are excellent -- I've noticed definite improvements in many of the issues I've previously reported. Thanks!

[jamespetts]

I am very glad that 9.0 is working well for you :-) Do let me know if you have any further trouble.

[jamespetts]

This change is now incorporated in version 9.1.