Maps to small or acceleration broken

[Dr.Acula]

Today I played a bit around with the Concorde and I used it in an open game with a 1:3 large map to connect two airports one on each side of the maps. So they use a very long distance.

So I started the planes and I followed the flight path. After the initial turn the plan made it to about 1300km/h before going down to 250 for approaching the other airport. If you have a huge mape like I do and the fastest plane on the longest distance can't even get to maximum speed, something is seriously wrong.

Either we need bigger maps or the acceleration of the vehicles has to be increased.

The problem is also visible with trains. I either have to build routes that skip certain cities so trains can get to their full speed I ignore trains like the TGV altogether and stick with slower trains (up to 200).

[Saint Landwalker]

Honestly, a supersonic transatlantic jet is maybe not the best barometer by which to evaluate acceleration in a game whose maps are smaller than Rhode Island or Luxembourg.

Personally, I don't really understand why the Concorde is even in the game.

[Gregorovitch]

You are right in the sense that most fast vehicles in the game seriously underperform becasue they are unable to operate at full speed. This was the case with TGV in Train Fever, for excample, and it still is. Cheaper vehicles of average performance usually perform better.

However you cannot deal with this question in isolation from all the other miriad issues around scale and time that require balancing in a transport sim game like TpF.

The basic reason why fast vehicles don't get up to speed is because they are much, much bigger than they should be to scale compared to the distances between cities the game is attempting to depict but at the same time they are modelled to look realistic, for example reasonably realistic acceleration rates.

There are two main reasons why this is so:

firstly the trains are the star of the show so we do not want them to be too small on the screen, we want to watch them behhaving realistically in detail at close quarters.

secondly they have to look realistic whilst travelling between two cities at normal game speed but at the same time they have to get to the next city in two or three minutes max or the game will play far too slowly (a real train would take maybe 30 mins to travel to a city 30-40 Km away which is far too slow for a game).

Taken together these factors force the game to hhave distances measured to the scale of the trains themselves between cities far shorter than they would be in real life and therfore fast trains like TGV (and of course planes in general) cannot reach max speed quickly enough to take advantage of it.

Nobody has the time (or I suspect the inclination) to play a transport sim in real time and that necessarily means a combination of model and map scaling, time acceleration and distance contraction are required. Different games choose different settings for these things but whatever combination you choose you will by definition get various anomolies, It is not possible to design them out. You can choose to make one thing look or behave pretty realistically (in TpF form example that would be how trhhe trains accelrate and brake, and how fast they seem to travel to scale on the tracks) but then then another thing will look or behave unrealistically.

All transport games have differnt approaches:

For example Eurotruck Simulator does it by making the actual distance (to scale)you have to drive between, say, Paris and Berlin about 5 Km so it takes you five minutes to drive there rather than several hours.

Train Simulator is actually in real time over real distance to scale - but eachh "mission" is just one trip taking perhaps an hour or two max which is suitable for a single play session. Ther is no economic game spanning months or years to consider.

It would be extremely diifficult to get the TGV, let alone Concorde, to operate realistically in the context of TpF without making the game all but unplayable.

[peterhoepfner]

Odd that your concord only reaches 1300 km/h on a large 1:3 map. I made a concord line from corner to corner on a large 1:2 map and they also reached 1300 km/h.

[uzurpatorex]

Yes. Acceleration is too slow in relation to world size. It should be an order of magnitude more pronounced.

[Saint Landwalker]

Originally posted by uzurpatorex:

Yes. Acceleration is too slow in relation to world size. It should be an order of magnitude more pronounced.

In relation to the map size, acceleration is probably not too slow. Which is what creates the perceived problem—it "feels like" the map should be a lot larger than it actually is.

(Edit: The one quick record I could find showed a 747 reaching its cruising speed about 15 minutes after takeoff, and after covering a distance of over 100 miles. Considering the size of the maps we're working with, 747s should never reach their cruising speed, or anywhere close to it, because they don't have anything close to enough room.)

[Vimpster]

Originally posted by Landwalker04:

Originally posted by uzurpatorex:

Yes. Acceleration is too slow in relation to world size. It should be an order of magnitude more pronounced.

In relation to the map size, acceleration is probably not too slow. Which is what creates the perceived problem—it "feels like" the map should be a lot larger than it actually is.

(Edit: The one quick record I could find showed a 747 reaching its cruising speed about 15 minutes after takeoff, and after covering a distance of over 100 miles. Considering the size of the maps we're working with, 747s should never reach their cruising speed, or anywhere close to it, because they don't have anything close to enough room.)

I would say that uzurpatorex is correct. If we were to imagine that a large 1:3 map in the game is a scaled down version of a 1000 mile distance, but was actually about 10 miles distance in the game, than one would expect, based on your recorded example, that a 747 would reach it's top speed on the map in about 1 mile. When you scale down the map the the distance needed to accelerate to top speed should be similarly scaled in my opinion.

It really does seem strange to me to include vehicles with speeds that can not be reached in the game. Especially when the value you are expected to place on the vehicles is largely suppose to be based on what their top speeds are. That said, in the case of planes in general, in this game a considerable part of the problem in their not reaching top speeds is the ridiculous slow down that occurs so early when approaching a runway or making a turn.

[Gregorovitch]

Originally posted by Vimpster:

It really does seem strange to me to include vehicles with speeds that can not be reached in the game. Especially when the value you are expected to place on the vehicles is largely suppose to be based on what their top speeds are.

It's just for a bit of fun. I mean I've got to 1980 now, I've got $850m in trhe bank and I'm making about $100-120m p.a. before train purchases etc, I'll get my Transport Tycoon (hard) achievement whatever in the next five years or so, so I'll have "beat" the game. Why shouldn't I play with TGV line and maybe set up an airport and play with Concorde for a bit of fun? I don't give a toss about making a profiit out of it, it would be nice just to watch it take off and land, same riding along with a TGV at 300kph.

And that's the point - when I watch them I want them to look realistic, I don't want them to accelerate to mach 2 instantaneously, I wouldn't be able to see them on my screen, and I don't want my TGV to behave like a saturn rocket on wheels either.

The meat of the game is about workaday commuter trains and grimy old coal trains running nose-to-trail along tracks built a hundred years ago as best you can manage, that's what you make your money from, as indeed it is IRL.

[uzurpatorex]

Originally posted by Landwalker04:

Originally posted by uzurpatorex:

Yes. Acceleration is too slow in relation to world size. It should be an order of magnitude more pronounced.

In relation to the map size, acceleration is probably not too slow. Which is what creates the perceived problem—it "feels like" the map should be a lot larger than it actually is.

We've been over this.

Europe 6. Dead straight track from Paris to Lyon. In TPF its equivalent of TGV it takes about 50% of trip time to get to ~300kmh, or 50% of travel time.

Prototypically, this trip takes about 2.5 hours on a TGV. The same TGV takes about 7-10 minutes to get to 300 km/h, so about 6% travel time.

In short - in TpF trains accelerate about 10 times too slow.

On the flip side - in TpF hills are very short and cargo is weightless, thus influence of hills is greatly underplayed.

[Agent B]

If you wanna try, you could unlock the 1:5-map size ....

[Saint Landwalker]

Originally posted by uzurpatorex:

Originally posted by Landwalker04:

In relation to the map size, acceleration is probably not too slow. Which is what creates the perceived problem—it "feels like" the map should be a lot larger than it actually is.

We've been over this.

Europe 6. Dead straight track from Paris to Lyon. In TPF its equivalent of TGV it takes about 50% of trip time to get to ~300kmh, or 50% of travel time.

I think it's fairly obvious that the game's maps are very significantly scaled down. The Paris to Lyon air distance is almost 400 km. A Megalomaniac-size, 1:5 ratio map in-game is about 53.7 km on its longest side.

Now, some folks may understandably make the argument that if the maps are scaled down so much, acceleration should be scaled up so that trains accelerate over an appropriately-scaled distance. In one sense, that's already true—vehicles in the game accelerate much faster than they should in real life on a time basis, but that's unlikely to satisfy some folks.

Sure, the devs could make it so that acceleration is almost instantaneous (which it would pretty much have to be to match up to the scaling of the maps), but that would be undesirable gameplay-wise because it would eliminate one of the more significant areas in which vehicles' performance can differ.

My personal preference, if silly things like "technical performance" and "smooth(ish) playability" didn't matter, would be for the maps to be closer to real-life scale in terms of distances. Since it seems like the biggest hang-up (literally) for game performance is agents and other "decision-making stuff" in the game, I've been entertaining the idea of playing around with the configs to basically wind up with a Megalomaniac map with the same number of towns and industries as a Small map, just much, much more spread out. I have no idea how feasible that would even be, but it would seem like the kind of tweak that would make actual top speed a more meaningful quality than it currently often is.

[uzurpatorex]

Originally posted by Landwalker04:

I think it's fairly obvious that the game's maps are very significantly scaled down. The Paris to Lyon air distance is almost 400 km. A Megalomaniac-size, 1:5 ratio map in-game is about 53.7 km on its longest side.

We should limit ourselves to what the game was shipped in. Which is something like 20x20km or neighbourhood of.

Now, some folks may understandably make the argument that if the maps are scaled down so much, acceleration should be scaled up so that trains accelerate over an appropriately-scaled distance. In one sense, that's already true—vehicles in the game accelerate much faster than they should in real life on a time basis, but that's unlikely to satisfy some folks.

This is a slippery issue. Balance is one of those things every person has its own opinion of. _I_ think that both acceleration should be scaled up but also hills should be made harder and trains weightier ( cargo weight - where is it?! ).

However the game works more or less fine with what it shipped with. It's just not really intresting in terms of strategic choice.

It just one of those things that makes this game average instead of great.

Sure, the devs could make it so that acceleration is almost instantaneous (which it would pretty much have to be to match up to the scaling of the maps), but that would be undesirable gameplay-wise because it would eliminate one of the more significant areas in which vehicles' performance can differ.

Whatever choice we have is purely illusionary in this game. Once you understand how the game works, then there is zero choice in what vehicles to use - unless you intentionally gimp yourself for extra style points.

My personal preference, if silly things like "technical performance" and "smooth(ish) playability" didn't matter, would be for the maps to be closer to real-life scale in terms of distances. Since it seems like the biggest hang-up (literally) for game performance is agents and other "decision-making stuff" in the game, I've been entertaining the idea of playing around with the configs to basically wind up with a Megalomaniac map with the same number of towns and industries as a Small map, just much, much more spread out. I have no idea how feasible that would even be, but it would seem like the kind of tweak that would make actual top speed a more meaningful quality than it currently often is.

I kind of doing that right now. I play on large map with sparse cities ( seven of them ) and sparse industries. Its pretty fun at slower time scale. 50 hours in this map alone and I am still having a blast.

[Grazzit]

My personal preference, if silly things like "technical performance" and "smooth(ish) playability" didn't matter, would be for the maps to be closer to real-life scale in terms of distances. Since it seems like the biggest hang-up (literally) for game performance is agents and other "decision-making stuff" in the game, I've been entertaining the idea of playing around with the configs to basically wind up with a Megalomaniac map with the same number of towns and industries as a Small map, just much, much more spread out. I have no idea how feasible that would even be, but it would seem like the kind of tweak that would make actual top speed a more meaningful quality than it currently often is.

I kind of doing that right now. I play on large map with sparse cities ( seven of them ) and sparse industries. Its pretty fun at slower time scale. 50 hours in this map alone and I am still having a blast. [/quote]

What I'm doing is chosing a few cities and making them into hubs right now concentrating passengers into longer lines so I can actually see things like the zephyr and TGV hit max speed

[General Tso]

Originally posted by uzurpatorex:

Originally posted by Landwalker04:

In relation to the map size, acceleration is probably not too slow. Which is what creates the perceived problem—it "feels like" the map should be a lot larger than it actually is.

We've been over this.

Europe 6. Dead straight track from Paris to Lyon. In TPF its equivalent of TGV it takes about 50% of trip time to get to ~300kmh, or 50% of travel time.

Prototypically, this trip takes about 2.5 hours on a TGV. The same TGV takes about 7-10 minutes to get to 300 km/h, so about 6% travel time.

In short - in TpF trains accelerate about 10 times too slow.

On the flip side - in TpF hills are very short and cargo is weightless[\b], thus influence of hills is greatly underplayed. [/quote]

Bummer. I noticed while playing the game that it appeared as if cargo weight wasn't being taken into account. I was hoping that wasn't the case. It's a great game either way but I wish this "small detail" was included in the game play.