Sailing Ships - Development Topic

[sevenfm]

To be honest, it was a small personal tweak for my playing, I don't think it should be labeled as a continuation of official development in any way, especially since it has some tweaks like unhistorical introduction rates or ship roles decided for my view of game balance and not real world or original creator's view.
I don't mind my tweak being distributed in any way, but please make sure to not confuse it with original work, so it's clearly labeled as unofficial tweak, unless original author appears and approves the changes.
Also to clarify, if you plan to add some tweaks to my tweaked version or change/revert some of my changes, I don't have any problem with that, just make sure to provide all proper information on history of changes and contributors.

[kamnet]

I don't mind my tweak being distributed in any way, but please make sure to not confuse it with original work, so it's clearly labeled as unofficial tweak, unless original author appears and approves the changes.

The beautiful thing about GPL projects is that you explicitly do not need the original author's approval for anything. Per the license agreement everything is permissible so long as you make the full source code available upon request.

Perhaps it would be better to mark this as a fork of the previous project. FWIW I've been playing with your version for awhile now and I don't find any of the changes you made objectionable, it made game play better.

[leifbk]

I'm very happy that somebody will take on the maintenance of this old GRF that I love to play with. I want to contribute with a Norwegian translation.

Most of sevenfm's changes make sense, but I greatly prefer the original introduction years, and would dearly like to have them at least as an option.

[Argus]

Has the author responded and is it possible to upload a new version to bananas?
It's pointless for me to download the whole resource.

[sevenfm]

So I made just that - option to have historical or balanced ship introduction dates.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1KuCdt9 ... UxMxGVKDwA
Only 2 ships are affected - Barque and Schooner, with historical dates they appear in 1790 and 1800, with balanced dates in 1740 and 1700, which makes early game in 1700s less boring.
Please let me know if I missed something.

Update: in 0.72 version historical option also allows pass/mail cargo for Brig and Barque, as otherwise player will have no pass/mail sea transportation before 1800 when Schooner appears.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1JnUOil ... exkl_V8atC
Note that in my tweaked version ships are divided into fast/slow classes, fast are Schooner, Merchantman and Clipper, slow are Brig and Barque (also Windjammer goes into this bulk cargo oriented class even if it's not slow), fast cannot transport bulk cargo, slow cannot transport pass/mail cargo (unless historical option enabled which allows slow class to transport pass/mail).
So please keep it in mind if you decide to use this set.

Also, I looked at wiki and it says Schooner type ships appeared around 17 century, so there shouldn't be any problem with them appearing in 1700 in this set. Same with Barque probably, moving it 50 years back doesn't sound too ahistorical to me.

[leifbk]

So I made just that - option to have historical or balanced ship introduction dates.

Please let me know if I missed something.

In that case, it's totally cool

I did download your code once, but never got around to actually test it, and so I'm still on the ancient v. 0.62.

[Argus]

Too bad, I already downloaded it and don't want to pull the whole resource again. If I don't like 0.7, I'll do it

[enthusiast]

I don't really want to take on maintenance or development, I was just frustrated that my ships were running empty on one half of their routes and wanted to add refit-at-station support to fix that. Having spent a few hours learning enough NFO syntax to make that change I'd rather no one else have to do that, so I want to make a tweaked version available on BaNaNaS

I'll pull sevenfm's new changes into the git repo and publish to BaNaNaS this week. If the default behaviour differs much from the original then the name and description will make clear that it is a different package, otherwise I'll email about taking over the BaNaNaS entry.

Edit: I've now merged sevenfm's changes into the git repo.

[enthusiast]

I've added leifbk's Norwegian (Bokmal) language file as well.

One thing I've noticed is that the parameters appear as "0" when I open the parameters menu in OpenTTD. If I press the "Reset" button or if I remove the GRF from the list of active GRFs and re-add it then the correct defaults are loaded and the strings show, but until then they seem to have value 0, which means the intended defaults in the NML aren't being used (e.g. the Schooner turns up at its balanced date of 1700 rather than the historical date of 1800).

I think this error will occur for people who upgrade from a version of the GRF without parameters to one with parameters, but I'm not sure. Perhaps it only occurs for GRFs that you manually install.

Anyway, it's probably some bug with OpenTTD and I've opened an issue (https://github.com/OpenTTD/OpenTTD/issues/10549).

I'm not sure how to fix this beyond changing the code so that the defaults all have value 0, which is easy enough but would probably cause people using version 0.7 already to have their parameters changed silently.

Edit: I've updated my version so that the default values for all parameters are 0, which works around the issue in OpenTTD.

[enthusiast]

I finally got around to uploading this to BaNaNaS.

https://github.com/cmcaine/OpenTTD-Sailing-Ships
https://bananas.openttd.org/manager/newgrf/434d4301

It's available as Sailing Ships (community). The (community) version has a different GRFID to the one James published (and to the one sevenfm publishes) because I had to change the GRFID to get BaNaNaS to accept the file. If you use the (community) GRF you shouldn't use any of the others or you'll get duplicate ships.

A version with the same GRFID as James' and sevenfm's versions (for using in existing games) is available here: https://github.com/cmcaine/OpenTTD-Sail ... s/releases

[kamnet]

I finally got around to uploading this to BaNaNaS.

All of this is wonderful, and awesome! Thank you!