SVXConverter 1.06 + Sourcecode released!

[Roman]

This is the moment I've been working for over the last two years...

Who didn't ever wish he were able to continue playing his old TTO savegames in TTD. And who didn't ever execrate the savegame incompatibility between TTO and TTD. Well, that's over now.
Here comes SVXConverter, the tool that converts TTO savegames and scenarios to TTD!

The program is available only in English, but on the website you'll find both an English and a German readme textfile.

Here you can download SVXConverter: http://www.tt-ms.de/svxconverter

[SpComb]

Wow, that's interesting!

Pity is, I have no TTO saves to use it on :/

[Lakie]

Seems like a nice tool, but it's been a long time since I had some TTO saved games.
Or been able to run TTO for that matter.

~ Lakie

[jacke]

Interesting for sure!
I have a few old TTO saves somewhere, and I will definitely try your tool on them
Thanks!

[WWTBAM]

ive got one that i definately will use it on and tell the patch to auto renew all my old vehivles.

[orudge]

Mmm, a nice looking tool. I've converted a couple of games with it, they both crash OpenTTD and TTDPatch doesn't currently want to start at all on this PC for some reason, but if I can get some form of TTD running, I'll definitely test them.

Just a question: is the source ever likely to be released? Or some sort of description of the TTO saved game format? Thanks

[Jezulkim]

This is amazing! And it even works . I can finally convert my TTO saved games to ttd format. All I can say is Thank you

[Roman]

I'm happy you guys are enjoying it. If you have some good converted savegames, I'd be pleased if you let me take a look at it. Just of fun...

is the source ever likely to be released? Or some sort of description of the TTO saved game format? Thanks

The source code is likely to be released, but not within the next few weeks/months. I'd like to add a few improvemts to it first, like the one mentioned in http://tt-forums.net/viewtopic.php?t=23704, or the AI activity, which is currently not being converted.

I'm probably going to release the TTO savegame structure description, which presumably will be geared to the TTD savegame internals, written by Marcin Grzegorczyk.

[Roman]

New feature in version 1.01:
In case of surplus towns/industries you can now remove any selection of your choice in the world editor instead of only the predetermined one in order to make the savegame convertible.

[Gurluas2000]

if you want to keep graphic you may be intersted in this.
http://www.tt-forums.net/viewtopic.php?t=22069

[Roman]

Just FYI: I uploaded version 1.02 a couple of days ago.

Changelog:

- Bugfix: Short monorail bridges are now always shown correctly.
- Bugfix: The monorail accessibility date was rarely miscalculated by some months.
- Three small bugfixes that are irrelevant to the conversion quality.

[Roman]

Again, FYI: Version 1.03 is online.

Changelog:

- Bugfix: Right after the conversion, some airplanes moved incorrectly for a short moment.
- Bugfix: The manager's skin color can no longer be black.
- Bugfix: The calculation of some vehicle data was incorrect.
- Decreased memory usage (stack).

Get it here: http://www.tt-ms.de/svxconverter

[Redirect Left]

Great work

[Roman]

Version 1.04 is online. It's most probably the final release, features a full conversion including the AI activitiy (which was the only component missing before) and comes with a solution to the World Editor issue: It's now possible to let SVXConverter remove a selection of towns or industries if there are too many of them (thus, no more need to manually pre-edit the savegame in the World Editor or anything).

BTW, I found the reason why some observed severe balance drops after the conversion. It consists of a combination of the following points:
- Too high base cost for many expenses. This has been fixed.
- The game speed. A year in TTO takes a bit more than 21 minutes which is much more than the approximate 12 minutes in TTD. While the vehicle running costs stay the same over a full year, all vehicles have much less time to arrive at their destinations and create income. This effect is now eliminated by a correspondingly higher cargo payment base factor.
- TTD has considerable property maintenance costs, TTO doesn't. This is no serious factor anymore since the higher cargo payments compensate a lot.

Changelog:
Feature: Full AI activity conversion.
Feature: Automatic removal of surplus towns and industries according to the user's selection.
Feature: Increased cargo payments to compensate for the faster time advance compared to TTO.
Bugfix: In very rare cases trains could get stuck.
Bugfix: Some costs were miscalculated.

I'm planning to release the sourcecode together with all documentation files that accumulated during the development in a few days or weeks.

[orudge]

Ooh, excellent. As you may remember, I e-mailed you in the summer with regards to using this in the new Repository - I have some rough functionality working from your old source code, so it'll be nice to update to the new version. I'm hoping to get the new Repository finished this year at some point, and if it can analyse (and convert) TTO games, then that would be rather good!

[SmatZ]

Great tool!

Though there are some bugs... maybe because I am running it in Wine.

For example, this savegame fails for me: http://www.tt-forums.net/viewtopic.php?p=410821#p410821
It is converted, loaded, but after a while a train crashes an after clicking on it, the game shuts down.
edit: I see, this has been pointed out already: http://www.tt-forums.net/viewtopic.php?p=502316#p502316

Another problem is that converted savegames are not loadable in OTTD... probably it contains some bugs, and OTTD cannot handle them.

[Roman]

Great tool!

Though there are some bugs... maybe because I am running it in Wine.

For example, this savegame fails for me: http://www.tt-forums.net/viewtopic.php?p=410821#p410821
It is converted, loaded, but after a while a train crashes an after clicking on it, the game shuts down.
edit: I see, this has been pointed out already: http://www.tt-forums.net/viewtopic.php?p=502316#p502316

Another problem is that converted savegames are not loadable in OTTD... probably it contains some bugs, and OTTD cannot handle them.

Could you specify those bugs you're talking about in a bit more detail? The savegame from http://www.tt-forums.net/viewtopic.php?p=410821#p410821 converts & runs fine on my machine.

I haven't tried to load any of the savegames in OpenTTD, but i don't see why the oldloader shouldn't be able to handle them, since it does just the same as TTD. I am, however, unaware of whether the current OTTD version still features loading old TTD savegames right now. If it doesn't anymore, that might explain why you can't load it.

[SmatZ]

That bug was about train on a crossing - but it seems to be fixed in the latest version, I will test it later today.

OTTD has the ability to load all TTD games and many TTDP games. But when loading a game from SVXConverter, it crashes... I can give you better examples when you can't test it yourself - but problems are at various places (wrong tile type, invalid orders index, ...)

[Roman]

OTTD has the ability to load all TTD games and many TTDP games. But when loading a game from SVXConverter, it crashes... I can give you better examples when you can't test it yourself - but problems are at various places (wrong tile type, invalid orders index, ...)

I can of course test that myself, too, and I certainly will, as soon as I find some spare time... From my current point of view the converted savegames should be pretty self-consistent, provided that the input TTO savegame is so as well. But we'll see.

[Roman]

I have done some investigations on the OpenTTD compatibility issue. The savegame I used could not be loaded in OTTD 0.4.0 or newer (probably caused by the new OldLoader introduced in that version, see http://wiki.openttd.org/index.php/OpenTTD_0.4.0) and suffers from severe bugs already in 0.3.6. In earlier versions no problems seem to occur.

So it appears to be a OpenTTD problem rather than a wrong conversion. The goal was to make TTO savegames TTD compatible, but if the new OTTD versions can't handle TTD savegames correctly there's litte I can do about that. OTTD 0.4.0 even fails to correctly load the original scenarios that come with TTD that I tried out.

By the way, TTDPatch can handle the converted savegames with no problems at all.