Home › Forums › General Discussion › (semi) Complete List of Bugs and Usability issues (4831) – repost
- This topic has 17 replies, 11 voices, and was last updated 9 years, 3 months ago by RAAndre.
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December 27, 2014 at 02:12 #15200uzurpatorParticipant
Hi ‘ya all.
Below is the (semi) complete list of isses of Train Fever as of version 4831. I will update it after each patch, so we can track how good Urban Games is in improving their game.
The list is not sorted in any particular order. Those are just things I have noticed after ~120 hours of gameplay.
If you have something to add, just reply to this topic.
Reposted, because WordPress sucks and does not allow edits after approximately 0.002 seconds.
Graphical Bugs
- Vehicles with
connecting rods ( such as steam engines or crocodile ) do not
animate their connecting rods when being manually sent to a depot. - Bogies of TFV and
DualStox do not follow the trackage correctly. This is most visible
in tight curves. - Road vehicles are often
not correctly aligned to roads. This makes them ride above the
surface of the road, or sunken beneath the asphalt. - Vehicles with doors
open all doors regardless of the side the platform the vehicle is
stopped at. - Wheels of the A 3/5
steam engine are not round. - The
Walshaerts/Heusinger valve gear on steam locomotives ( BR75 or A4 )
is not correctly animated. The valve gear works differently as it is
presented in game. - Roads in cities
sometimes get adjusted to really awkward angles. - Tracks are sometimes
adjusted into awkward angles, usually near a level crossing. - Locomotives which emit
particles ( smoke, steam ) should not do so when stopped at a light. - Steam locomotives
should not emit smoke from their cylinders when speed is above 5km/h - Electric locomotives
with several pantographs should always ride with rearmost raised. - Shadowing distance is
too short when camera has a very shallow angle ( looking parallel to
the ground). This makes shadows flicker and seem appear suddenly at
a distance. - Roads are drawn with
very low polycount. - Near Clipping Plane
placed in a way that clips away some parts of the viewed object. - Vehicles created by
“Emu” consists with “reverse” property ( such as
TGV or TwinDexx ) do not reverse their icons in build train window. - BE 5/6 Cobra is too
long to fit tram stations. When stopped it overhangs the tram stop.
Usability Bugs
- There is no info about
crucial gameplay elements- train length ( in
carriages and metres ), both in build new train and replacement - average speed and
average round trip time of a given line between each stop - length of placed piece
of track or road - incline of placed
piece of track or road - curvature of place
piece track or road - Industry
increased/decreased its maxumum production - track and road speed
limits - track and road incline
- track and road
horizontal plane curvature - production of
goods/freight should be expressed in production / time unit - No info is given about
speed limits and/or differences between narrow/wide/4 lane roads,
as well as between country and urban roads. Rail tracks at least
display a little speed limit sign when being placed. No such info
for roads. - No info is given about
speed limits between normal and HSR track. - No info about station
capacities. - When a vehicle is
introduced, no info about its stats is given. Player has to
manually open ‘build vehicle’ window. - No info is given about
new roads or electrification. - tally of goods
produced by a given industry, Something like:
- train length ( in
- Tiverton Forest:
Production: 312, Maximum: 400- Destinations
- Crewe Sawmill: 240
- Battle Sawmill: 72
- Destinations
- Crewe Sawmill:
Production: 240, Maximum 400- Destinations
- Crewe: 120
- Battle: 80
- Looe: 40
- Destinations
- tally of passanger
destinations from a given city. Something like:
- Tiverton: population
1000- Destinations:
- Tiverton: 425
- Battle: 160
- Hunstanton: 120
- Crewe: 120
- Looe: 50
- Hedon: 75
- Newbury: 50
- Destinations:
- Game is inconsistent
with its use of time. Sometimes it is expressed in years/months/days
( train age ), sometimes in minutes/seconds ( frequency ), sometimes
not at all ( industry production ). Be consistent. - No info is provided how
to convert years/months/days into realtime. - The “20 minute
rule” is not messaged anywhere in the game. - When saving a game it
is possible to overwrite an existing savegame since no protection is
given. - Not possible to turn of
snapping of built structures ( such as stations ) - Gui is, generally
speaking way too small. On high resolution. - Impossible to build a
level crossing with road over a trackage. - Dragging a track/road
across track should automatically create an overpass bridge. - Land modification tools
are very awkward.- modified area is not
highlighted - “Level”
tool should level all terrain to height from the point of
beginning of the drag
- modified area is not
- Clicking on currently
followed vehicle ( after clicking the crosshair icon ), to bring up
its properties, should not unfollow that vehicle. - Build Road, Upgrade
Road and Remove Road tools should be merged to a single, context
based tool. Possibly as with a key combo ( build + Shift –
upgrade, build + Alt – destroy ). It is extremely annoying to
be forced to switch between those three tools when rearranging a
city. - Clicking on “Automatic
Vehicle Replacement” in lines window should automatically open
the “Vehicle Replacement” Tab on the “Line”
window. - Add “Replace Now”
button to “Vehicle Replacement” tab. - Add “Electrify”
button to “Line” window in train line - Add “Upgrade to
high speed track” button to “Line” menu of train line - “Running”,
“Stopped” and “Reverse” on vehicle properties
should have button frame. - “Go to depot”
button should be on the same tab as “Running”, “Stopped”
and “Reverse” buttons. - Interface is too small
in most places. General rule: use % of screen vertical size, no less
then X pixels to size UI. Icons in “Menu” menu are kind of
right size, but once people switch to 4k screens even those will
become microscopic as well. Those include, but are not limited to:- Icons showing
production and consumption of freight by industries - buttons on most
windows - “Cargo”,
“Land use” and “Contour Lines” buttons - Finances, city
directory, industry directory etc - Most tooltips and
texts.
- Icons showing
- It is not ergonomical
to place the game tools UI on the side of the screen when most of
the action of those tools happen in the middle of the screen. Most
people have panoramic screens these days. Sometimes in the 21:9
format. I shudder to think how bad it is on eyefinity setup. Having
tools along the upper or lower edge of the screen, somewhat in the
middle is much more user friendly. - Money display box has
too little contrast. Use bold font. - There is no possibility
to review messages once they were closed. - There is no way to
check and/or redefine key bindings. How many people know that ‘Del’
closes all windows? - Display ONLY
supported resolutions on the resolution selection window. Moreover.
Check if the selected resolution is still supported when starting a
new game. - Vehicles with
“multipleunitonly = true” property should not be
introduced with a message. - Multiple units should
be introduced. - It is not possible to
adjust order of train cars in “Vehicle replacement” tab. - Scrolling of trains
along their length in “Depot” window and on “Vehicle
replacement” tab is very misleading for long trains. It is
better to start adding cars in another row below the locomotive
instead of adding a scrollbar. - “Depot”
window for trains should always have widith of a 160m long train. - Warning should be
emitted if a train is longer then shortest station on its line. - Autosave period is not
configurable nor possible to turn off.
Gameplay Bugs
- Game will sometimes
route several lines through the same platform on a station. There is
a workaround for trains, but trams, trucks and buses suffer from
this bug. - It is not possible to
drag track from a converging end of a railroad switch if we remove
the little stub of track remaining after the switch construction. - Vehicles replaced by
auto replacement will sometimes emit info about “being too old
and needing replacement” even if they are 10 or so years old.
It seems that age of the vehicle they replaced is taken into
consideration. Usually happens with the ‘25%’ rule. - Cargo has no weight.
- Multiple capacity
vehicles allow for loading of both types of cargo at the same time. - Once the “Main
connection” feature considers player built detour a “Main
connection”, this detour becomes impossble to remove, even with
another detour. - “Main connections”
are often not feasible to upgrade to newer road type. - 4 lane roads should
always be of the same size. - Performance is
generally very bad. Especially when:- Tracking a vehicles
through a city - Having several ( more
then 1 ) cities in the viewport. - Opening ‘Lines’ window
- Opening several
vehicle windows with “Render to texture” feature enabled.
Hint: Transport Tycoon did not allow more then 6 vehicle windows to
be open. Messages with “Render to texture” should replace
one another. Window with no focus can display just a static (
grayscale, for extra style bonus ) image and turn into “Render
to texture” viewport when activated. - Lod system appears to
be very simple. It should not only be based on distance from
camera, but also on pitch angle. The closer pitch is to 0 degrees,
the less distant objects should be visible. I tried to, check how
Lod is calculated for buildings, but LUA code you are exposing does
not seem to show such data. - Removal of particles
and visible passangers seems to improve performance in some cases. - The game is CPU
limited, and the little experience I have in 3d suggests it is
batch-count constrained. Simulation runs quite fast even with 6-7k
of passangers on the map and about 1000 units of cargo with ~400
vehicles.
- Tracking a vehicles
- Responsivity of the
game is very poor. Too often it happens that game stutters because
something needed to be done.- Do all cities need to
rebuild themselves at the same time - I don’t really need
the info, that all 400 of my vehicles cost me $Texas with overlays
and floating texts. - Sending 40 trucks to
depot for sale makes the game pause for a few seconds.
- Do all cities need to
December 27, 2014 at 05:02 #15204simonmdParticipantNice job, must have taken some time to put that together. Makes me wonder if this game is even Beta, reading the above, looks like Alpha!
December 27, 2014 at 07:21 #15206gGeorgParticipantPerfect list.
I would recommend Urban games to use this a template for voting what should be fixed first.You know, simple questionnaire makes the order list to do.Everyone could vote once from each category.
Would you add :
Supply chain train-> truck->customer doesn’t work. Train unload all the stuff at once, it overload the truck station. Goods disappears. Stations in a group should load each other, so prevent disappearing. Same apply for people.
Graphical minor bug: ground floor in any depot is grass.
Game-play: Multiple opening window at depot buying. It should be only for first new vehicle in the depot.
Graphical bug: All UI icons (stations, vehicles, depots, … ) are visible thru the terrain. It should be available only for vehicles in tunnels.
UI layout : Bridge building – the selection of bridge type cover the bridge. It is located in the middle of the builded item. Especially for short bridges it covers it all, so user doesn’t see what does he doing. The only one type (the selected one) of a bridge should be visible. Once clicked, the menu – the current list is shown. Then user can choose the type, and it minimize self back. The icon of a type should be located clearly above a bridge, up about 3 sizes of a road width.
Design issue : Unwanted industry devolve- in case of one train on the line. It cant be sent to depot without atleast 20 points devolve penalty on the industry. as long as it evolve 1 point per month, add a wagon cause hit back for et least 2 years. Vehicles should stay as a part of a line, all the time. Even in depo. In case of more vehicles it works the same, if you are close to the time limit.
UI info: line window
– line capacity per default period (annual ?)
– line usage per default period(annual ?)
– add a column(s) of currently waiting agents (goods/passengers)UI info: station window
– shows throughput of the agents (annual ?)
– shows usage of vehicles leaving for particular line (Lets have 10 unit bus: then 5 passengers on makes usage 50%. In case 20 people stays on the station at the departure – usage 300% )– show all the lines who stop at the station. Even if there is no one waiting – User need to see who could.
UI info : Waypoints – show in his window all the lines who use it. Same for traffic lights.
Gameplay – Waypoints – on delete introduce a shadow, same as for buss station. So user could move a way point few meters away. Its annoying when you redo complicated junction, and you have re-assagin waypoints in proper order to all lines involved. Same for traffic light.
UI graphical : Flying money notification. Tone it down. Or simply enable switch off. It has no value see red horizon. You could show just 10% of the highest numbers. That could make some point. Also, merge maintenance of vehicles in one city and draw just one number for all the vehicles in the city.
Sound – playing one short sound again and again is known torture method, used from WW2. Remove money cha-ching sound asap. If some decent method for flying money comes, the sound could come back, but now its pain.
Avoid any “Vehicle in the way” error message. Its nearly impossible to change layout of a bridge cross whith with buss l ines. lift up vehicle, hold them on the sky, then put them back to nearest station. Whatever, but do not bother user.
Avoid agents disappearing on road upgrade.
Avoid agent disappearing on station group/ungroup
Make land property consistent – City buildings backyard are build over the user property, the train station. In case of train staion upgrade (buldoze and build back), the city building must be buldozed too, cose their land interfere with the station layout.
Finance
– use taxation on profit 10-20% depends on – deprecation of vehicles is 10 years at maximum, not 30years or so. So the vehicle value should be 0 after 10 years.- show re-pay time horizon for a vehicle on his info card. e.g. 10years6 months or 100 years for a less profitable line. Or never for negative income.- show how many times the vehicle repaid already.
I could run a game and check some more, those are just on top of my head.
Uzurpator – welcome to the External QA department of Urban games. 😀- This reply was modified 9 years, 3 months ago by gGeorg.
December 27, 2014 at 10:26 #15208Norfolk_ChrisParticipantCan we have a comment on this from Urban Games please!
December 27, 2014 at 11:08 #15210PasiParticipantI would like to add
UI: Scroll bars are actually proper size and work as a scroll bar. Would be faster and easier to for example find the vehicles in the long list of locomotives and wagons.
Edit: UI: standardize the window sizes etc. It’s pain in the back side to sell vehicles at the depot when the X keeps jumping around or move vehicles between the trains as the length of the vehicle dictates where the up and down arrows and the sell button are. Same problem repeats all over the UI. Keep things fixed.
UI: Don’t open the line windows to that side of the screen, and partly off the screen to indicate where the line is. Frustrating to pull them back into view to be able to see it completely. Especially now with auto replace you need them quite often.
—-
Regarding that vehicle depreciation, 10 years might be ok for trucks and buses, but trams and trains certainly need longer lifespans where 25 to 35 years are more normal.
- This reply was modified 9 years, 3 months ago by Pasi.
December 27, 2014 at 12:08 #15212gGeorgParticipant“Regarding that vehicle depreciation, 10 years might be ok for trucks and buses, but trams and trains certainly need longer lifespans where 25 to 35 years are more normal.” – financial depreciation has nothing to do with lifespan. It is just financial method/tool for lowering/tear down the value of a property.
add
Missing info: maintenance value of stations, depots.
There should be an info panel below the build menu, just up the time. Simple square window without control header. It contains all the info of the item focused in the build menu. On focus lost, the info window vanish.
Bulldoze road says error message- “The building(s) must be bulldozed first” but doesn’t mark by red color which one. Make it consistent to build roads, mark them.
- This reply was modified 9 years, 3 months ago by gGeorg.
December 27, 2014 at 12:22 #15214lobsangParticipantI must say, most of these are minor (Half of them could be improvements for the sequel, or a personal preference)- the criticism about this being an alpha release it a bit harsh
I would think these items should be rated in a category of game breaker/minor annoyance/wishlist
Its all a tribute to Transport Tycoon: Useful as they are, I wonder if those old Windows 3.1 style windows with tiny text are alien to some. It makes me think of a long lost style, others might disagree.
As I’ve said elsewhere , the joy of this style of game, and its greatest weakness, is trying new things and discovering how the world works.
So the lack of introduction works in its favour as well as against it.Having said that, they key message of number 2 is pretty important info:
- The “20 minute
rule” is not messaged anywhere in the game.
A few I’ll add
– Minor: There is one steam train that shows the wheel coupling rods going in reverse when viewed from the left hand side (Looks right on the other side)
– Medium: Performance: Later years with a complex network can be very demanding
Although I do wonder how they can improve on performance without cheating/faking on the actual resident/goods flow simulation like Simcity did– Medium: When you send a train to the depot, it needs to stay connected to the line it was on until you either sell the train or change line.
At the moment, if you send a train to the depot when it is halfway to the station, it will instantaneously disconnect from the line and make goods use a different route, usually when if you were upgrading the train on the same line.
This can adversely affect supply your chain when you were trying to improve it. (Especially if the train gets lost and stuck going to the wrong depot on a different line)The workaround it not to hit the “go to depot” button until the train is very close to the home depot
December 27, 2014 at 13:10 #15217uzurpatorParticipantGreat finds people :). I am updating the list and will post it here and on steam forums shortly.
December 27, 2014 at 16:36 #15230PasiParticipant“Regarding that vehicle depreciation, 10 years might be ok for trucks and buses, but trams and trains certainly need longer lifespans where 25 to 35 years are more normal.” – financial depreciation has nothing to do with lifespan. It is just financial method/tool for lowering/tear down the value of a property.
Exactly what i meant. No rolling stock company or railway company depreciates their vehicle value to zero within ten years. Usually it is somewhere between 25-35 years depending on the rolling stock. Depreciating them to zero so quickly would give tax benefit but lose all the assets. And since running a railway is far from lucrative in the real world (operating profit including govenrment supports are usually around 1-3% from the turnover) there is no need, or possibility, for massive depreciation values. Hence the depreciation follows pretty closely lifespan of the unit. In the game i managed to pull 89.5 million profit in one year from 136 mil turnover, which doesn’t make any sense. Running costs are way too low compared to the income and especially purchase prices are too low on anything. 16k for a level crossing what usually costs around 250k to 400k to make in the real world…
Sorry for this slight off topic, it is relevant for the improvement but can’t be classified as a bug at the moment. More like missing feature which would be nice to sort out later.
- This reply was modified 9 years, 3 months ago by Pasi.
December 28, 2014 at 01:32 #15258simonmdParticipantAnother one for you. Cars use buslanes! You’ll often see cars driving on them. Oh and please Urban Games, make a duel purpose station so we can have proper branch lines.
December 28, 2014 at 01:38 #15259LBParticipantI dunno, I like my flying horse wagons (#3)! 😀
December 28, 2014 at 13:42 #15270medopuParticipantsimonmd,
I dunno, i think cars using bus lanes is sadly WAD:
Some car drivers may get tired of being stuck in traffic jams and switch to the player’s bus line.at: http://www.train-fever.com/2014/12/better-simulation-better-usability-better-train-fever/
I think it’s because player could otherwise cheat and make all city main-connections to bus-lane only meaning cars would be useless for travel between cities.
December 28, 2014 at 15:01 #15271spillParticipantA serious problem with the AI for the BE 5/6 Cobra in traffic is that they can gridlock a town if there are blocks that are shorter than the length of a tram- for instance, a tram enters the block but can’t exit because it is blocked by tram that entered but couldn’t exit because it blocked by one that is blocked by the first tram. Once you get a tram-jam and the centre of a town is blocked, there is no way that I found to fix the situation except sending all trams to the depot and then re-assigning them to routes.
Another improvement that I would suggest is traffic lights to control the flow of pedestrians as well as traffic. When a city gets large, you need a large number of trams running around the stations and there are a large number of pedestrians. It would be better if trams didn’t nudge their way through the constant stream of pedestrians requiring ages for them to clear intersections.
December 28, 2014 at 16:14 #15274GalwranParticipantI would like to see better statistics for vehicles and lines. For example, how many passengers used a certain line last year?
I would also like to have an optional alert if the average speed of a vehicle drops to something like 5km/h so that I can sort out the jam or stuck trains before it bankrupts my business.
And of course, there should be a reason to use trains for cargo. Currently it it pretty mch truck fever, bebause thy work so much better.
- This reply was modified 9 years, 3 months ago by Galwran.
December 30, 2014 at 23:54 #15422uzurpatorParticipantupdate 1.
(semi) Complete List of Bugs and Usability Issues in Train Fever.
Updated to version 4831.
Graphical Bugs:
1. Vehicles with connecting rods ( such as steam engines or crocodile ) do not animate their connecting rods when being manually sent to a depot.
2. Bogies of TFV and DualStox do not follow the trackage correctly. This is most visible in tight curves.
3. Road vehicles are often not correctly aligned to roads. This makes them ride above the surface of the road, or sunken beneath the asphalt.
4. Vehicles with doors open all doors regardless of the side the platform the vehicle is stopped at.
5. Wheels of the A 3/5 steam engine are not round.
6. The Walshaerts/Heusinger valve gear on steam locomotives ( BR75 or A4 ) is not correctly animated. The valve gear in the game works differently then it is presented in game.
7. Roads in cities sometimes get adjusted to really awkward slope angles. Buses climbing 45* slope look very weird.
8. Track sections are often connected at an awkward angle ( not smoothly ). Usually near a railroad crossing. This makes rail vehicles jump when traversing such break of smoothness.
9. Locomotives which emit particles ( smoke, steam ) should not do so when stopped at a light.
10. Steam locomotives should not emit smoke from their cylinders when speed is above 5km/h. In reality steam from cylinders comes from pressure equalisation valves which are opened during a slow speed riding to protect locomotive from damage.
11. Electric locomotives with several pantographs should always ride with rearmost raised. On real railroads locomotives run with rear pantograph raised because that protects the machinery on the locomotive roof from damage if the pantograph breaks or gets torn off for whatever reason.
12. Shadowing distance is too short when camera has a very shallow angle ( looking parallel to the ground). This makes shadows flicker and seem appear suddenly at a distance.
13. Roads are drawn with very low polycount.
14. Near Clipping Plane placed in a way that clips away some parts of the viewed object.
15. Vehicles created by “Emu” consists with “reverse” property ( such as TGV or TwinDexx ) do not reverse their icons in build train window.
16. BE 5/6 Cobra is too long to fit tram stations. When stopped it overhangs the tram stop.
17. Floor of the depots is grass, should be concrete or similar.
18. Tunnel portals for 4 lane road tunnels is incorrect, makes vehicles on the outmost lanes run into a brick wall.Usability Issues:
1. There is no info about crucial gameplay elements:
– train length ( in carriages and metres ), both in build new train and replacement window
– train vehicle length
– average speed and average round trip time of a given line between each stop
– length of placed piece of track or road
– incline of placed piece of track or road
– curvature of place piece track or road
– no visualization of “main connections” is given
– industry increased/decreased its maxiumum production
– track and road speed limits
– track and road incline
– track and road horizontal plane curvature
– production of goods/freight should be expressed in production / time unit
– no info is given about speed limits and/or differences between narrow/wide/4 lane roads, as well as between country and urban roads. Rail tracks at least display a little speed limit sign when being placed. No such info for roads.
– no info is given about speed limits between normal and HSR track.
– no info about station capacities.
– when a vehicle is introduced, no info about its statistics is given.
– no info is given about new roads or electrification being available.
– line capacity ( amount of freight theoretically movable ) per default period
– line usage ( % of capacity actually used ) per default period
– currently waiting agents, and average wait time for a given line
– station throughput ( cargo moved per time period )
– average load % of a given line
– all lines which stop at a station
– train or truck is lost ( displays No Path ) is not messaged to player.
– tally of goods destinations produced by a given industry, Something like:Tiverton Forest: Production: 312 / yr, Maximum: 400 / yr
Destinations:
– Crewe Sawmill: 240 / yr
– Battle Sawmill: 72 / yrCrewe Sawmill: Production: 240 / yr, Maximum 400 / yr
Destinations:
– Crewe: 120 / yr
– Battle: 80 / yr
– Looe: 40 / yr– tally of passanger destinations from a given city. Something like:
Tiverton: population 1000
Destinations:
– Tiverton: 425
– Battle: 160
– Hunstanton: 120
– Crewe: 120
– Looe: 50
– Hedon: 75
– Newbury: 502. Too much info is shown at times:
– Running costs ( red floating numbers )
– Sound of a cash machine when income is generated
3. Game is inconsistent with its use of time. Sometimes it is expressed in years/months/days ( train age ), sometimes in minutes/seconds ( frequency ), sometimes not at all ( industry production ). Be consistent.
4. No info is provided how to convert years/months/days into realtime.
5. The “20 minute rule” is not messaged anywhere in the game.
6. When saving a game it is possible to overwrite an existing savegame since no protection is given.
7. Not possible to turn off snapping of built structures ( such as stations ), which is annoying when one wants to do precise placement of a station.
8. Impossible to build a level crossing by dragging a road over a railroad track.
9. Impossible to upgrade a road on a railroad crossing.
10. Dragging a track/road across track should automatically create an overpass bridge.
11. Land modification tools are very awkward.
– modified area is not highlighted
– “Level” tool should level all terrain to height from the point of beginning of the drag
12. Clicking on currently followed vehicle ( after clicking the crosshair icon ), to bring up its properties, should not unfollow that vehicle.
13. Build Road, Upgrade Road and Remove Road tools should be merged to a single, context based tool. Possibly as with a key combo ( build + Shift – upgrade, build + Alt – destroy ). It is extremely annoying to be forced to switch between those three tools when rearranging a city. Similar issue with track placement tools.
14. Clicking on “Automatic Vehicle Replacement” in lines window should automatically open the “Vehicle Replacement” tab on the “Line” window.
15. Add “Replace Now” button to “Vehicle Replacement” tab.
16. Add “Electrify” button to “Line” window in train line
17. Add “Upgrade to high speed track” button to “Line” menu of train line. Similar button for trucks is also suggested.
18. “Running”, “Stopped”, “Reverse” and “<Target station>” on vehicle properties should have a button frame.
19. “Go to depot” button should be on the same tab as “Running”, “Stopped” and “Reverse” buttons.
20. Interface is too small in most places. General rule: use % of screen vertical size, no less then X pixels to size UI. Icons in “Menu” menu are kind of right size in 2560×1080 resolution, but once people switch to 4k screens then those will become microscopic as well. Those include, but are not limited to:
– Icons showing production and consumption of freight by industries
– buttons on most windows
– “Cargo”, “Land use” and “Contour Lines” buttons
– Finances, city directory, industry directory etc
– Most tooltips and texts.
21. It is not ergonomical to place the game tools UI on the side of the screen when most of the action of those tools happen in the middle of the screen. Most people have panoramic screens these days. Sometimes in the 21:9 format. I shudder to think how bad it is on eyefinity setup. Having tools along the upper or lower edge of the screen, somewhat in the middle is much more user friendly.
22. Money display box has too little contrast. Green on blue is bad. Red on blue is abysmally bad.
23. There is no possibility to review messages and info boxes once they were closed.
24. There is no way to check and/or redefine key bindings. How many people know that ‘Del’ closes all windows?
25. Display ONLY supported resolutions on the resolution selection window. Moreover. Check if the selected resolution is still supported when starting a new game.
26. Vehicles with “multipleunitonly = true” property should not be introduced with a message.
27. Multiple units should be introduced with a “wow” message, just like regular vehicles are.
28. It is not possible to adjust order of train cars in “Vehicle replacement” tab.
29. Scrolling of trains along their length in “Depot” window and on “Vehicle replacement” tab is very misleading for long trains. It is better to start adding cars in another row below the locomotive instead of adding a scrollbar.
30. “Depot” window for trains should always have widith of a 160m long train.
31. Limit train length at 320 metres ( or to the length of the longest station available ).
32. Warning should be emitted if a train is longer then shortest station on its line.
33. Autosave period is not configurable nor possible to turn off.
34. Error messages should be avoided.
– If there is a “collision” or “not enough space”, and colliding object can be bulldozed, mark it for destruction on “apply” of building. I want to build that 5 track 320m station in the middle of Battle even if that costs 100 million.
– If there is a “vehicle in the way”, then schedule the change to a moment when a vehicle will be out of the way.
35. Key bindings do not work at the start of the game or after saving a game.
36. Right-click dragging of the map does not work correctly. It is based on absolute movements of the mouse while it should be based on movement of collision point of ray cast from the mouse pointer along the axis of the camera onto the (x,0,z) plane. Or in short – right click drag should be resistant to camera pitch angle change.
37. New windows should open around the mouse cursor to shorten the path from the cursor to the new window.
38. Mark focused window somehow.
39. The “main connection” feature does not give any info what is considered a “detour”. This leads to lots of confusion, especially since there is no info what are the statistics of roads.Gameplay Bugs:
1. Game will sometimes route several lines through the same platform on a station while leavng other accesible platforms unoccupied. There is a workaround for trains, but trams, trucks and buses suffer from this bug.
2. It is not possible to drag track from a converging end of a railroad switch if we remove the little stub of track remaining after the switch construction.
3. Vehicles replaced by auto replacement will sometimes emit info about “being too old and needing replacement” even if they are 10 or so years old. It seems that age of the vehicle they replaced is taken into consideration. Usually happens with the ‘25%’ rule.
4. Cargo has no weight. Allow for either configuring weight of an unit of cargo in a config file, or to configure empty/full weights if a vehicle in the model meta data.
5. Multiple capacity vehicles allow for loading of both types of cargo at the same time.
6. “Main connections” are often not feasible to upgrade to newer road type.
7. 4 lane roads should always be of the same size.
8. Performance is generally very bad. Especially when:
– Tracking a vehicles through a city
– Having several ( more then 1 ) cities in the viewport.
– Opening ‘Lines’ window
– Opening several vehicle windows with “Render to texture” feature enabled. Hint: Transport Tycoon did not allow more then 6 vehicle windows to be open. Messages with “Render to texture” should replace one another. Window with no focus can display just a static ( grayscale, for extra style bonus ) image and turn into “Render to texture” viewport when activated.
– Lod system appears to be very simple. It should not only be based on distance from camera, but also on pitch angle. The closer pitch is to 0 degrees, the less distant objects should be visible. I tried to check how Lod is calculated for buildings, but LUA code you are exposing does not seem to show such data.
– Removal of particles, visible passengers and private cars seems to improve performance in some cases.
– The game is CPU limited, and the little experience I have in 3d suggests it is batch-count constrained. Simulation runs quite fast even with 6-7k of passangers on the map and about 1000 units of cargo with ~400 vehicles.
9. Responsivity of the game is very poor. Too often it happens that game stutters because something needed to be done.
– Do all cities need to rebuild themselves at the same time
– I don’t really need the info, that all 400 of my vehicles cost me $Texas with overlays and floating texts.
– Sending 40 trucks to depot for sale makes the game pause for a few seconds.
10. There is no easy way to unstick mutually blocking trains. Allow to manually “send to depot” order, which would magically move a train to a designated depot.
11. A train should not peek out of a depot if it cannot continue out of it in its way. This leads to mutually blocked trains when one peeks out of the depot and another is heading to it.
12. Trains should not EVER reverse on their own. Instead of trying to reverse, a train should turn translucent, not block other trains passing through it and emit “Train X is lost” message. Automatic reversal always leads to a cascade of blocked trains.
13. Trains on a track, when assigned to a line that cannot be resolved ( beacuse, for example, there is a trackwork in progress and that line cannot be resolved at this time ) should turn translucent, do not block other trains and emit “Train X is lost” message.
14. Agents should not disappear when a road is upgraded, station electrified etc. Cargo should not disappear from an upgraded station as long as its placeholder still exists.
15. Sometimes city may build buildings within the footprint of the railroad/station/bus stop. After bulldozing that structure it is impossible to rebuild it.
16. Vehicles in depots or which are “stopped” should not cost money to run. They are “stopped” after all. Let them rust in peace.
17. There should be a throttling mechanism for amount of cars a city can generate. Currently sufficiently large cities can pretty much grid-lock themselves.
18. Faster road vehicles should be able to overtake slower ones. - Vehicles with
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