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Extension request: better looking points

Started by sdog, February 12, 2012, 01:08:33 AM

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jamespetts

Quote from: sdog on February 18, 2012, 10:52:16 PM
we have that happen quite a lot, just think of a train in a station reversing direction, there is no yard present.  Someone already gave a good interpretation how such a turn could be taken: move the train over the point and reverse it over the switched point to the other branch line.

Hmm - I don't think that this is quite the same. In this case, the in-game convoy simply reverses along existing lines. It would be quite something else for it to start travelling on invisible tracks.
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dannyman

Quote from: sdog on February 18, 2012, 10:52:16 PM
i think Junna is absolutely right there. For the graphics to change it should be enough that such turns do not happen in normal operation. (due the low speeds they are not desirable.)

we have that happen quite a lot, just think of a train in a station reversing direction, there is no yard present.  Someone already gave a good interpretation how such a turn could be taken: move the train over the point and reverse it over the switched point to the other branch line.

I think this would be a low priority to implement, but maybe it could be a config setting.  disallow_rail_270_turns ... once we can try it out maybe people will find that a train making the occasional slow-**** turn over invisible tracks isn't as jarring as we might think.  The actual work, I suspect, is in getting the game engine to work with a pak set which offers the appropriate tiles.  (Unless the game engine already knows how to layer tiles?)

-danny

sdog

the screenshot i posted above is not pre-processed. the red markings are painted in the pak set. ths selection of the correct point graphic is already included. as far as i know it is not actively in use in any pakset.

on making the wayfinder to avoid such tight corners:
Quote from: jamespetts on January 10, 2009, 05:29:30 PM
[...] how the system for assessing the cost of a route calculates the cost of a corner. It does not [...] have a specific function for checking whether there is a corner (indeed, one would be very hard to write), but it prefers shorter routes, which have, of necessity, fewer corners. It is not, therefore, possible to tweak the level of preferences, but players can, of course, simply set waypoints to customise their routes - for railways, where corners have the greatest effect, there is very unlikely in any event to be a better route overall that the wayfinder does not find.

MagnusA

Excuse me, but are you really talking about 270 degree turns? A 270 degree left turn is the same as 90 degree right turn, at least in my world.

To me it looks rather like you are talking about 135 (=90+45) degree turns (or 315 depending on where you put the 0 axle) .

but I have misunderstood things before... :-)

omikron

#39
We're programmers, designers and simutrans freaks. Don't expect us to be mathematiciians too :-)

ӔO

maybe he meant 180 degrees? :)

180 on the line is not too terrible for short trains, but longer trains doing it can cause a massive backup.

IMO, such a feature would be more desirable for climbing mountains with switchbacks, without using waypoints.
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Ters

I think this is pushing the limit of what Simutrans can do without having to be rewritten from scratch. Such advanced behavior is more in the domain of Train Simulator or a virtual model railroad. I think a tile is supposed to be one square kilometer in some contexts (running costs?), so turning 180 degrees in two tiles isn't that bad. That it looks strange is a consequence of the multiple scales coexisting in the game.

jamespetts

Quote from: Ters on February 19, 2012, 12:43:36 PM
I think this is pushing the limit of what Simutrans can do without having to be rewritten from scratch. Such advanced behavior is more in the domain of Train Simulator or a virtual model railroad. I think a tile is supposed to be one square kilometer in some contexts (running costs?), so turning 180 degrees in two tiles isn't that bad. That it looks strange is a consequence of the multiple scales coexisting in the game.

Note that, in Experimental, the scale of a tile can be altered, and the default is 250m/tile.

Edit: Also, whilst it might well involve substantial alterations to the code of Simutrans in particular (and for that reason might understandably not be a high priority), I do not think that what is requested is inherently incompatible with the relatively macro scale simulation of Simutrans, as this is already possible, it seems, in the similarly macro A-Train.
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