(Halfways inserious) Catapult gates, catapult start stations and curve magnets

[Spike]

For pak48.Excentrique I'd like to have catapult gates, which can give a vehicle immediate top speed when passing, and also catapult start stations. High level/future tech.

And I need catapult animations for airports, including giant catchers gloves as replacements for landing lanes, for the yet-to be invented Throw-On-Demand air transfers.

Edit: I forgot: I'll need curve magnets which will hold vehicles when passing a tight turns at full speed.

[Spike]

Actually I had expected a reaction of sorts, be it funny or serious. But why nothing?

[ojii]

Can you somehow implement this in real life? Would be useful!

[Ters]

I almost pointed out that you should be able to make them yourself, but backed out in fear of being interpreted too harshly.

[Markohs]

Whould be pretty cool! But doesn't this need changes in simutrans code?

[wlindley]

Something like this, perhaps?

[mEGa]

@ wlindley
Waouh ! very interesting this project! Could we create this on Simutrans as super maglev ?

[Spike]

I almost pointed out that you should be able to make them yourself, but backed out in fear of being interpreted too harshly.

I dunno? If I can do it without programming I'll try. I don't want to program anymore in my free time, and the little that I sometimes do, I want to reduce further. I can't avoid it altogether, but I don't want to get into Simutrans development as a coder again. If I program, then only Java, that is the language I make least mistakes in and which I am most fluent with.

My idea is to change from technician to artist, if that is possible at all ...

Edit: Hey, it was a more inserious request. If it doesn't come, no problem. There are things though which really bother me, since they'd be easy to fix, but no one does it  And other things which are inherent problems of the current Simutrans release process, but I'm talking about that since years (mostly in the German forum) but no change happens. This refers to the translator as crowd sourcing utility and the IMHO bad state of many program texts which stem from this fractured approach to UI text design.

Edit 2: To be clear, I boycott the translator utility, it's IMO the wrong approach. So I won't fix any texts there, but report the mistakes to show what bad and inconsistent texts are gotten from it. But I seem to be fairly alone with my wish for better and more consisting program texts.

[ojii]

Edit 2: To be clear, I boycott the translator utility, it's IMO the wrong approach. So I won't fix any texts there, but report the mistakes to show what bad and inconsistent texts are gotten from it. But I seem to be fairly alone with my wish for better and more consisting program texts.

I didn't even know there was a translator tool. Also quite surprised simutrans doesn't use gettext (I thought everyone uses that )

[Spike]

I think the translator tool was the worst invention that as made after I left development. This is surely not IMHO, but very much IMO.

[prissi]

Without translator we would not have any decent japanese, chinese and korean translation and a mostly non-translated pak128. Also the russian translation was done by mostly people not active here in the forum. The translator has downfalls, but until something better is written to maintain translations I do not see how such a big project should provide translations anyway. Even OpenTTD uses a translator, and those have much less graphic objects to translate.

The translations needs weeding out. Before every release I am checking the english and most of the other languages for very bad mistakes. But honestly, there a assigned translators for many languages, and also so guy responsible. I finer permission system would be great; people testing translations in the game too. But this is a hobby project ... (@hajo btw. the things you are mentioned in the debug threads are from before I took over or were even forgotten to be translated in 84.20)

And about gettext: Yes, it should have been used - why the stupid guys did not publish it in 1997? Ok, I was joking: But simutrans is very old, it predates C99. Thus if you would start such a project today, many things would have been handled differently.

[prissi]

About the catapult: IN the current versions the number of tiles for starting depends on the power. With high power, instantenious start is possible.

(New post, if this is going to be splitted.)

[Spike]

I agree that the translator has it's benefits. But the lack of overview, to know which texts will appear near each other in the games dialogs, makes it hard to achieve consistency. Written rules will help.

I do believe though that there were already like 12 languages supported before the translator was made, including simplified Chinese IIRC.  I remember rather the fonts being a problem, than a lack of volunteers. The good part of having one person per translation was that this one person worked very consistent in style throughout the whole file. My memories may be wrong though ... I know that Finnish, French, Spanish, and quite some east european languages were present for sure.

I'll try the high power catapult start for aeroplanes. Thanks for the tip

[prissi]

The first big patch I ever made was for japanese language support, thus there was only 8 Bit languages before ... And while a person could handle a finished pak set, several of those (like korean, swedish, rusian) were added later with the help im Simutranslator. Some were even made by editing en.tab.

But always, it depends on the person editing the translations. For graphics paks, which evolve sometimes very fast (like pak128.britain recently) I see no other way to keep track of what has been translated as via a tool. I that way, the simutranslator is much more useful for paks than for base.

I can even disable english for a certain pakset, if I think it is finished.