aubergine18

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  • in reply to: Production rate of scale up/down is ludicrous #20640
    aubergine18
    Participant

    I’ve currently got 4 trains on the line but as they are delivering to several cities the route is quite long – if I set them to “Load if available” then most of the time there would be no train visiting the station, which in turn breaks the ‘pull request’ chain and leads to death spiral. This particular line is different from most of my others in that it is in a very mountainous region, as such it’s one of the very rare occasions that I have cargo and passenger trains sharing parts of the same rail network. If I added more cargo trains it would just lead to traffic jams = death spirals. I could try replacing the trains with lots of 2 carriage trains, but by that point I might as well just switch to using road vehicles.

    Regardless, in this instance it’s clearly the core game mechanic that’s broken – and specifically a mechanic that should be trivial to fix. There are so few resource/production buildings in the game that even if the rates of increase/decrease are hard-coded in to each of them, it would still be trivial to refactor and alter this particular game mechanic (like a couple of days to code and test, speaking as an ex-coder).

    • This reply was modified 8 years, 3 months ago by aubergine18.
    in reply to: Production rate of scale up/down is ludicrous #20634
    aubergine18
    Participant

    > With regards to your trains waiting on full loads, doesnโ€™t that push you over the 20 min window on those lines?

    It didn’t when my production was up at 243.

    > I just run my cargo routes to any load, even if they are running almost empty, to avoid the 20 min window issue.

    Tried that last time I ran in to this issue, the line death spiralled.

    The most annoying thing is, that out of all the broken mechanics in the game, this one is most likely trivial to fix. Have the monthly increase in production based on the current level of the building, so for a 100/month building it could get +10 per day, rather than +1 per day.

    building.increasePerDay = math.floor( building.outputLimit / 10 )

    • This reply was modified 8 years, 3 months ago by aubergine18.
    in reply to: Production rate of scale up/down is ludicrous #20626
    aubergine18
    Participant

    One other pic… this is what my cargo trains look like…

    They filled nice and quick when the production was at 243/month. But now it’s death spiralled they take too long to fill. They’re set to “Full Load (any)” – I can’t set them to “Load if available” because then they’ll all go at once, nothing will be waiting at station = death spiral. So for the next 17 game years I have to keep manually reverse-reverse them to kick them in to delivery mode long before they are full, just so the cities know the line is servicing them (otherwise the cities will remove their pull request from the line). That’s bloody annoying. I’d send them back to depot to remove some carriages, but guess what happens when I try that? Of course, big gaps in deliveries = cities remove their pull request = death spiral.

    Can you ask the devs what their thinking was (or what drugs they were taking…) when they implemented this stupid game mechanic?

    • This reply was modified 8 years, 4 months ago by aubergine18.
    in reply to: Production rate of scale up/down is ludicrous #20624
    aubergine18
    Participant

    Just happened again. Infuriating, and not in a good way.

    In pause, I edited some track. The line that was affected did not even use that bit of track. Several cities away, a cargo train got confused by the edit on a piece of track it will never travel on and decided to turn around and try and drive the wrong way and subsequently stalled “waiting for free path”.

    243 production fell to 25 in a matter of minutes (game days). To add insult to injury, the resource buildings are all being downgraded, and there’s sweet f*** all I can do about it other than wait 208 game months (over 17 game years) for it to crawl its way back to previous production level.

    How pissed off would you be? If someone asked whether the game was worth buying, what would you tell them?

    Also, as the production ability at the time of those screen shots is still 100 (already had 2 downgrades), why doesn’t it just spring back to 100? Why does it insist on +1 per game month, when it is capable immediately of outputting 100 per month (+75)?

    • This reply was modified 8 years, 4 months ago by aubergine18.
    in reply to: Production rate of scale up/down is ludicrous #20610
    aubergine18
    Participant

    tl;dr: +1 production increase per month, vs. -โˆž production decrease per month, is a ludicrous game mechanic.

    in reply to: ATT thanks and requests #20541
    aubergine18
    Participant

    Does this work on existing games or only new games?

    in reply to: stdout.txt โ€“ convert seed to usable format? #20540
    aubergine18
    Participant

    It is – at least on a Mac, tested it on several maps ๐Ÿ™‚

    When you load a save-game, the decimal representation of the seed used to create it is put in to stdout.txt.

    Converting that to base 36 using link above gets you the alphanumeric version of the seed, and using that format you can start new games and get the same map.

    I my case the seed in stdout.txt was 1446600056 which in base36 is nx9nqw – using that alphanumeric version of the seed gets me the exact same map, in many cases even with same city placement and even city names. I also tried medium and small sizes and it seems that they result in cropped versions of the large size (at least on a Mac, I appreciate it’s likely different depending on operating system).

    in reply to: When and why use 'Group'? #20536
    aubergine18
    Participant

    I’ve recently started ungrouping all stops – the main reason being I can see more clearly where people are waiting for transport and I can then use that to determine what sort of bus/tram/train etc to put on each line. It’s particularly useful to ungroup when you have buses/trams going in both directions as it helps work out where people are trying to get to.

    in reply to: The West Tilsbury Bypass #20498
    aubergine18
    Participant

    @isidoro ย You are correct, there are no 1-way streets in TF, which is why cars are driving in both directions on the motorway sliproads and roundabout.

    in reply to: The West Tilsbury Bypass #20488
    aubergine18
    Participant

    Note: One-way streets aren’t invented until the 1970’s. ๐Ÿ˜›

    in reply to: The West Tilsbury Bypass #20487
    aubergine18
    Participant

    The bypass is finished! Although it did take 10 years longer than expected…

    in reply to: UX/UI Suggestions #20477
    aubergine18
    Participant

    As a new user I found the mainline feature game-breakingly annoying and gave the game a negative review. Then I realised it could be disabled with the inbuilt mod and started liking the game, and now I’ve got used to the game I make extensive use of the mainlines – but have edited the game config files to allow them to be deleted. So, there are two issues at play:

    1. New (and some existing) users are repulsed by the feature
    2. Once you get used to them you are still annoyed at how fiddly they are to clean up (and even then might still want to delete them)

    There’s no point worrying about the minutiae of (2) while (1) is happening, because the game is getting slaughtered in the ratings, harming reputation of UG in the process. (1) has to be fixed before (2) can even be thought about.

    in reply to: UX/UI Suggestions #20468
    aubergine18
    Participant

    @isidoro – Agreed, but as far as I know the game isn’t yet available on mobile devices (not sure their CPUs would cope with the pathfinding?). Much of the UI would need overhaul to make it usable on touch devices – eg. the small icons in the sidebar would probably need to be bigger, and the number of pop-up windows would need to be significantly reduced too I think.


    @gGeorg
    – What if there were a few different game modes to choose from instead? So, for example, “Sandbox” mode could start with no dirt tracks and the user would have to connect things up at their leisure, a bit like “train table” mode in the game “Railroads”. A “Fever” mode would have the dirt tracks, but allow them to be deleted, and a “Brutal” mode (for want of better word) would have protected dirt tracks (and medium tracks between cities to encourage car ownership and use). That would give rise to 3 completely different types of gameplay, simply by tweaking what happens with the dirt tracks (main lines).

    As for people disappearing from trains, etc., I would approach that with two flags on agents (people). The first, “Protection flag”, is set when they join a line (waiting at a stop or on a vehicle) and protects them from despawn. The second, “Reroute flag”, is only set if their target building is destroyed while the Protection flag is set (otherwise they are not on a line and can be immediately despawned or re-routed). When exiting a line (including transition between lines) the Reroute flag is checked and if necessary they are re-routed or despawned; otherwise clear the Protection flag (if they are transitioning to another line, I assume the Protection flag would be set again once they reach the stop where they will join that line).

    in reply to: UX/UI Suggestions #20463
    aubergine18
    Participant

    @Tom – glad you liked them ๐Ÿ™‚ I’m aware you guys are working on a new game so I’m a bit hesitant to spend too much time on this – that being said, if you are seeking a UX imagineer, I’m available ๐Ÿ˜‰ I have a bunch of other ideas, including numerous gameplay tweaks that could fit within the current mechanics and data models, PR, marketing, etc. Give me a shout on Steam (Aubergine18) or Reddit (Aubergine10) if you’re interested.

    in reply to: UX/UI Suggestions #20454
    aubergine18
    Participant

    Finished set of concepts for vehicle panel…

    Camera view (as described in previous comments):

    Just for @Norfolk_Chris, hover over vehicle name to show pencil (click anywhere on vehicle name or pencil to edit):

    Hover over cargo and cargo change icon appears (click resource icon, quantity, resource name or cargo change icon to edit):

    Choose a resource (current resource in box, click to set resource, clears current cargo instantly if resource type changes, right-click to cancel):

    Info view (hover over “i” to temporarily show, move mouse sideways in to info pane to retain temporary view whilst in info pane, click “i” to toggle persistent view):

    Hover over year panels for detailed financials:

    Hover over vehicle value graph to show “$” (sell vehicle) button:

    Clicking the “$” button shows cancel / confirm buttons:

    Hover over vehicle age to show “replace” button:

    Click the button and selection of vehicles shown (panels fill from the left, newest is on the right, empty spaces to the right if less than 3 vehicles available, hover over vehicle to show stats, click vehicle to confirm replacement or click cancel button to abort):

Viewing 15 posts - 1 through 15 (of 23 total)