During the development of the Tropicset, uzurpator drew a set of traincars that are shorter than the norm. This is because in the early days, the traincars were little, and they looked cool. The short vehicles were never released because they caused various confusion with the Patch.
The Patch now supports short vehicles. However, there still seem to be a couple of problems:
1. We still want the longer version of each vehicle to be available, just not at the beginning of the game. They'd show up in the late 1950s or early 1960s. But there aren't enough IDs to have an early and a late version of each and every vehicle.
2. The AIs aren't choosy about which vehicles they buy, and they will stick with the early version through the entire game which is silly.
Thus, my question is:
Is it possible to do a graphics override that not only changes the graphic, but actually changes the length of the vehicle? We know it is possible for the graphics of one particular vehicle to change over time, with already-built instances keeping the same appearance that they started with but newly purchased ones looking new. E.g. the local passenger cars in the DBset - they start out as green, but change liveries and get more modern looking as the game goes along, although only one is available at any given time and they're still the same vehicle. That would be the way to handle short traincars - at the beginning they are all short, but sometime in the middle of the game the graphics get replaced with the newer, longer version. But any existing instances of the vehicles stay short until they are manually replaced.
Is this doable, or would it cause irreparable spacing confusion?
OK Josef, I understand, do you have a suggestion as to how to square this circle, since you know the possibilities better? You know what the goal is, it doesn't really matter how we get there as long as it works.
The vehicle stats shouldn't change... although I suppose capacities could. You'd do this by saving, quitting TTD, changing your newgrf.cfg and going back in the game. I don't see a way to automate this.
OK, let's see about the other way - is it possible to have two types for every vehicle, the short and the long, and somehow convince the AIs to switch to the long ones when they come available?
I have no objection to the short vehicles being removed from the list as soon as the equivalent long vehicle becomes available, in fact that would be mostly realistic.
I've no idea how the AI handles replacing vehicles, I would suspect that the entire train is replaced at once which would work fine.
The "persistent vehicles" part of the Patch would have to be changed to allow this, since by definition the short vehicles would no longer be available to purchase while they were still in play.
krtaylor wrote:The "persistent vehicles" part of the Patch would have to be changed to allow this, since by definition the short vehicles would no longer be available to purchase while they were still in play.
No, they'd be the same vehicle, except some would (could) have a different look because they were bought when they were shorter.
If we switch grfs then I persume all wagons will have "new" graphics since old "short" sprites will be in the old grf - thus making impossible to have varying length... or am I missing something?
You don't switch grfs, you change the parameter in newgrf.cfg.
Then the parameter sets the length of the wagon in action 0.
However, for displaying the wagon, you always use the current length of it, and it'll show as short when bought before changing the parameter and as long if bought afterwards.
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