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People are just too impatient.
No, I´m convinced that the whole concept of the game is bad.
You have created a game called Train Fever and a world that isn´t made for trains.
A good transport simulation consists of so many parts, that you can´t simulate everything.
At least you loose control over many mechanics.
10000 people to transport in the whole world of the game ?
I will laugh the next ten years about that fact and play the free Simutrans again, where I can find so many people at a single station. This is a job for a train in the game, where it isn´t easy to build the right proportions.
People also have targets there, whithout simulating citizens and there it leads to building networks and I have to coordinate my tracks and lanes, will choose the best vehicles and doesn´t fight against the bugs of city growth and silly game mechanics.
If I could see a good approach that convinced me, I had a lot of patience, but I only see the necessity to build the whole game new, so I will play the better game.
People are just too impatient. All they want is instant gratification. “Anything I want and can afford, I can have in a week, at most two weeks, time.” might work for anything mass produced, it doesn’t work for anything that takes a longer time to complete. For example, fixing the performance issues inherent to late (highly developed) games. And adding the new features everyone’s complaining about because “openTTD has it”, is probably going to be improbable whilst these issues are not fixed.
Impatient you say….late (highly developed) games you say…
Nope, just performance issues from start to finish, more pronounced and noticeable late game… which I tolerate and have done since release… I am being patient….I have also been thankful for the last performance update… but the fact is, the game still performs poor in many areas to the point of being game-breaking. S
So as you say, Making it work is more important…if they are unable to make it perform well enough to be playable past a certain level of activity or whatever the causes may be (UI implementation is one of them) then maybe they should re-think a few things so it scales better.
As for features what are in open TTD, whilst I have never referenced that game, I do agree that these things should be at the bottom of the pile… Stability and performance should be top until its done right.
A lot of people complain about not being enough stuff to transport around. that can be fixed easily, in about 15 minutes.
Make the passenger wagons and busses and trams carry 25% of the current amount of passengers/cargo. Adjust runing costs to match. adjust tonnage to match. There you go. Now you have lines that require 8 trains where before that 2 were enough.
I am not a Game Developer, I have nothing to do with the development of this game.
Simutrans most likely calculates the destination overhead (x% from zone 13R destination 13C, x% from zone 14R destination 13C, x% from zone 13R destination 14I). TrainFever is developed by 5 people (of which 3 seem graphics involved). They picked a wrong approach in destination determination and it’s costing a load of PC resources.
I also believe a passenger represents multiple people. After all, the max travel time is 20min, which is 2,5 years in game time. Nobody ever goes on a 2,5 year train ride to commute. It’s representative. If you want 10.000 people standing at your station, feel free to play Simutrans. I’m not really bothered by the low number of peons as long as I make a profit and can build cool rail systems.
I guess it is very unlucky you have performance issues all through-out the game. Here it only starts after significant growth. For me it’s still late-game breaking, but I can still enjoy the rise of transit era.
Still, they have pledged to work on it until it works. They are not very experienced and don’t have a lot of manhours. And people have no idea how much work goes into rewriting an entire feature. I say if you enjoy even the thought of what this game could become, give them a break, put the game down while they fix it if that’s what it takes to be willing to give it a shot later.When I am waited on in a restaurant, I take his/her efforts into account, as well as behaving in a way that makes the experience positive for him/her as well. When I get on a bus, or get ticket checked on the train, I’m nice to the driver and the conductor. The same goes for software development. They aren’t more capable than other human beings, the same laws of nature that restrict us, restrict them. They have to work with an infinite number of variations in computing resources of their users, and solving a problem is often not as straightforward as in the real world. Because this thing is something you have created out of thin air and logical systems, if something doesn’t work, and that something is connected to many other aspects of the application, then all those aspects have to be rewritten too. And that is just HOPING you’ve interpreted the problem correctly and even then, that your solution works.
It’s a tough occupation and people never seem to empathize with that, seemingly because they don’t understand the effort and complexity.
I think the point is that we have paid for a game that a lot of buyers are finding unusable. You might buy a ticket for a train and be nice to the conductor, but if it’s late or csncelled I’m sure you’re mad at the train company! I think we have a right to (politely) nag the developers when we have paid for a product of substandard quality.
@Traian Trante Sure, add another personalized preference to the list of non-relevant replies. Then presume the solution is in balancing and that you know exactly what other gameplay factors are directly influenced by silly things like capacity and running cost.
Here’s a few you probably hadn’t thought of:
Average city->city distance.
Average non-player route travel time.
How about nr of busses/trains required to move the same number of people to the station?You can’t make the drop in capacity equal for all vehicles (ie. 25% of the original), because passengers have to be transported in whole. A vehicle can’t carry 1,25 passengers.
If you want to change the capacity for trains, but not road vehicles, road vehicles will become even more desirable (they already outperform trains).
In other words, your idea would pull everything off balance even more.
Edit:
Yes, you have every right and every freedom. But it won’t help anything, and is basically a waste of effort. I can complain to the Train company that my train was delayed all I want. It doesn’t turn back time and make my train be on time; it doesn’t mean it won’t still happen in the future. They are working at the top speed of their 5-man team. There is nothing to be done about it. There is no reason to complain because even if they wanted to (and trust me, by now they REALLY want to) they couldn’t speed up the process.
This is the difference between an independent developer like at Kerbal Space Program, who have a relatively large team for an indy developer and multiple people with years of experience; and a 5-man motley crew that probably finished their game design/software engineering studies relatively recently.
And is easy to yell at the developer you never saw than to yell at the bus driver sitting 5 meters in front of you. On the other hand it is a bit of the dev’s fault as well. They almost never poke their virtual faces on this forum.
I’m not really bothered by the low number of peons as long as I make a profit and can build cool rail systems.
You didn´t get the point.
Small maps, rythmn mechanic and small number of passengers – they all work against trains. I also want to make profit, but I want an interesting game either. To balance trains better against buses and trams you need a bigger map and many more passengers. Then you can propably establish the rythmn mechanic and make a game of it.
They are not very experienced and don’t have a lot of manhours. And people have no idea how much work goes into rewriting an entire feature. I say if you enjoy even the thought of what this game could become, give them a break,
I am giving them a break 🙂 but I am also losing interest in replaying to a particular point. If nobody mentioned anything negative, the dev’s would have no indication of the experience people are having and would assume all is well in the world of train fever.
The performance issues don’t suddenly appear mid-game.. they are present from the start, but system spec’s may well make it less noticeable, lets take the vehicle windows for instance. Buy 10 vehicles in succession on an 1850 map and monitor the FPS… it may not have a great impact losing 70% of the FPS at that point (I may be exaggerating @70%), since for me (without vsync) I can hit easily 100+ fps here… but as the overall performance decreases, that 70% becomes a big deal, when the average is 30, more so when the average hits 20.
Anyway, the fact that everybody in this thread is posting here and have not just uninstalled, stopped playing and walked away is actually a good thing, positive or negative. The fact that people want more, the fact that people want it to work shows that those are passionate about the possibilities of the game Urban have released.
Passion drives sales and future commitment. Passion from end users can have the same effect, its not just required from the dev’s.
Nothing I can say to that except, even though your logics are correct the developers have the freedom to configure the game mechanics the way THEY envisioned it. Adding features or rebalancing the entire game is not going to happen soon, because as stated earlier, the devs have stated that they are currently still working on game performance (with waypoints as a secondary objective). This was in the most recent patch newspost. If you are unable to enjoy something that isn’t made to your exact preferences, I suggest you learn how to code and model and create a railroad sim that’s just right for you. Or you could wait until the performance issues are solved and the devs actually start working on rebalancing and adding features. At which point I doubt they’ll look for your suggestion in this post.
It’s too bad the forums are so rudimentary. Having a single sticky topic with links to specific and well-supported suggestions would save them a ton of digging later on.
I agree these things need to be said. I just believe it needs to be done with dignity.
If there’s a gamebreaking issue, report on the issue.
If there’s a bug, report about the bug.
If you have a suggestion, make a topic about your suggestion (after checking if it’s not already there a dozen times).They have one thing in common: dramatizing and acting peeved off don’t add any value to the case (as usual…). I am not saying you do this. I am saying the OP does this and a lot of complaints are made in this manner.
If you’re invested enough into the game to even make suggestions, then how much of a stretch is it to convey your issue in a proper, soundly supported manner. Is the point I wanted to make. 🙂
Oh FFS!
The game was developed by 5 people over 2 years. OTTD was developed over a period of 10 years, on the basis of a game developed for another 10 years.
You know. I played a transport game that had very simple cargo model, annoying manual vehicle replacement, glaring pathfinding issues, choppy graphics, manual track upgrades and other issues.
You know what game that was?
Transport Tycoon Original.
Believe it or not, but TF is not far away feature wise from TTO. Comparing TF to a game that had 20 years of community backing and thousands man-hours of effort behind it is dishonest.
Train Fever needs fixing of a few bugs, some features and polish.
I paid full retail price for TF and, as of yet, played for 51 hours. At this moment I can drop another 30 euros to make it better. Seriously.
The only thing I can complain about is Urban Game’s involvement in the game community ( or lack thereof ):/
I was actually using the comparison to support the point you’re making. Saying that people want too much in too short a timespan from too small a team. But people compare the two to no end functionality-wise, so I used it as an arguement.
They have one thing in common: dramatizing and acting peeved off don’t add any value to the case (as usual…). I am not saying you do this…..[snip]
If you’re invested enough into the game to even make suggestions, then how much of a stretch is it to convey your issue in a proper, soundly supported manner. Is the point I wanted to make.
I don’t disagree 😉 … sometimes… the frustration can get the better of you.
Anyway, ED B3 time for me… should keep me busy whilst hoping for another patch.The only thing I can complain about is Urban Game’s involvement in the game community ( or lack thereof ):/
It would be nice, but… if the are focusing on development, I guess I would rather that.
Their news / patch frequency has been a lot better than huge corporations with billions and dedicated community liason’s so credit where its due…@crossmr There are path signals. Block signals are essentially useless when you have path signals.
I’d rather see pre-signals than block signals.
If you look at openTTD early in it’s lifetime, it was just a recreation of TTD that would run properly on modern OS. It’s still adding features, and has done so for 10 years now.
People are just too impatient. All they want is instant gratification. “Anything I want and can afford, I can have in a week, at most two weeks, time.” might work for anything mass produced, it doesn’t work for anything that takes a longer time to complete. For example, fixing the performance issues inherent to late (highly developed) games. And adding the new features everyone’s complaining about because “openTTD has it”, is probably going to be improbable whilst these issues are not fixed.
Because from an engineer’s point of view “Making it work” is more important than “Making it do more”.
They’re not essentially the same. You asked for something that was talked about, but not in the game. You got it, now you want to move the goal posts. You’re also missing the bigger picture. That paragraph would imply dynamic track switching, which is an even greater feature. People aren’t impatient, they want the game they paid for. Not some bug ridden poorly designed early release candidate.
A lot of people complain about not being enough stuff to transport around. that can be fixed easily, in about 15 minutes.
They’re mostly complaining about industry trains and only the devs can fix that.
The game was developed by 5 people over 2 years. OTTD was developed over a period of 10 years, on the basis of a game developed for another 10 years.
So what? They still released the game and are charging money for it aren’t they?
So what? They still released the game and are charging money for it aren’t they?
It is relevant because the game they released is on the level of what Chris Sawyer released 20 years ago. It could not be better, because it does not have the luxury of “unlimited” budget and audience of millions.
This is how capitalism works you know. If you have marchandise that is of limited demand, its quality will be lower and price higher then of marchandise of higher demand. There are atm 402 people playing this game ( according to Steam ).
You could bark at Activision or Blizzard for relasing a unpolished game for 30 euros.
I tell you this from a position of 8 years of experience and about 500.000 lines of written code.
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