Transport Tycoon Forums

kamnet wrote: ↑14 Apr 2021 18:08

How'd you get that to work? .................

I've made a mistake. Somehow I've been running FIRS 1.3.0, not FIRS 3. I was sure I'd upgraded..
FWIW I'm running it in JGRPP, Spring PP before that.
Also FWIW I've been running ECS Houses with it too.

I'm not going to be pleased If it doesn't work with FIRS 3.
Sorry about that.

Pete.

kamnet wrote: ↑15 Apr 2021 07:40 That's never made a difference in this case, from my observation.

It was just an attempt, I personally didn't try it, only once.

i miss the enormous amount of industries available in one of the earlier versions. please add a mode that allows all industries at the same time.

Have you tried the Steeltown economy yet? It has a lot of industries with some very complex cargo chains. I recently completed a game and found it very engaging and satisfying.

The Extreme economy was removed for a reason, but the Xtreme Industry Set (XIS) is a fork of FIRS which brings it back with even more industries. Perhaps that would suit your needs.

andreasaspenberg wrote: ↑17 Apr 2021 10:37 i miss the enormous amount of industries available in one of the earlier versions. please add a mode that allows all industries at the same time.

Just use XIS. Or Auz Industries.

none of the settings matches the number of industries present in the extreme setting in version 3. for now i am going to play version 3, as that have the extreme setting.

Hi guys, how can I help translating FIRS to Polish? Becuase the links on the page does not work.

Is there somewhere an actual list of all cargoes? Am begining work on a truck set and I would like it to be usable with FIRS...

Vehicle sets use cargo classes so as to avoid having to manually define cargos to match industry sets. But some use cargo sprites for specific cargos which are defined for specific labels, when available, to be more specific than the cargo class. The list of FIRS cargos with their cargo labels can be found here.

What an awesome Fruit Gondola, and I wondered why I had no vehicle to transport Fruit...

Water Gondola is supposed to carry engineering supplies apparently...


So... Did I do something wrong or?

I have seen too many reports of players who don't have any vehicles available for FIRS cargos and/or that FIRS breaks the default vehicles.

It's irresponsible for FIRS not to fix this.

So future versions of FIRS will require specific vehicle grfs to be loaded, otherwise FIRS will disable itself.

This will require players to have in their grf list:

• at least 1 known-working ship grf
• at least 1 known-working road vehicle grf
• at least 1 known-working train grf
• at least 1 known-working plane grf

Of course, the player can freely add further grfs, as long as they also aren't in the list of known-incompatible grfs.

Hopefully this can also be ported to the FIRS forks like XIS etc

This will prevent any new vehicle sets from supporting FIRS as the authors won't be able to test them with FIRS. We can probably find a solution to that.

I am aware already that players think FIRS disabling with e.g. CZTR is because I want to force people to use my grfs.

To avoid this perception, FIRS will not work with Iron Horse, Road Hog, HEQS, FISH or Unsinkable Sam , unless a specific parameter is chosen.

But I do need a list of suitable grfs that FIRS is known to work with.

What are your suggestions?

Please don't just campaign for your favourite grf. It needs to actually be proven to work with FIRS. Also I need specific versions / grfids. Thanks!

5457460a [RVs], 54574607 [Trains] and its addon 5457460c all support FIRS fully, unless their idiot author forgot to map a cargo sprite again. All are in vaguely active development, so if they can go in without a version check that would save some pain. If I recall correctly you can't enable 5457460c without 54574607 being present so only 54574607 needs whitelisting.

54574604 [RVs] and 54574605 [RVs] also have vaguely adequate support, although share sprites between many cargo types. Although they're legacy sets a few people play them.

I'd also vote for not requiring all vehicle sets to be populated if possible. From my reading of the various Steam and Reddit threads, the most common situation is someone doesn't have any vehicle sets at all. By the time they have at least one, they usually have some clue what's going on, and that'd be nice for players who aren't fussed about ships, aircraft and the like.

Oh, and I guess you could pre-emptively add 5457460d [Ships], which will support FIRS cargo types if it gets built. (And it'd be handy to be able to test)

Edit fest continues: personally, I wouldn't worry about having a parameter for "I want to play with Horse/Hog/etc." - "full Andy" is a common configuration and I think it'd generate as many bug reports as the "I have no suitable vehicles" case. One thing I noted from comments on my videos is a few people don't even realise the parameter screen exists; they wanted to know where I got all the extra industries from and had never seen the "Steeltown" option. Possibly a parameter for "Ignore vehicle whitelist" though, on the basis that new FIRS-compatible sets will continue to be developed and authors will want to test sets before publicly announcing them, without needing to compile their own version of FIRS.

andythenorth wrote: ↑27 Apr 2021 19:16 I have seen too many reports of players who don't have any vehicles available for FIRS cargos and/or that FIRS breaks the default vehicles.

It's irresponsible for FIRS not to fix this.

So future versions of FIRS will require specific vehicle grfs to be loaded, otherwise FIRS will disable itself.

This will require players to have in their grf list:

• at least 1 known-working ship grf
• at least 1 known-working road vehicle grf
• at least 1 known-working train grf
• at least 1 known-working plane grf

Of course, the player can freely add further grfs, as long as they also aren't in the list of known-incompatible grfs.

Hopefully this can also be ported to the FIRS forks like XIS etc

This will prevent any new vehicle sets from supporting FIRS as the authors won't be able to test them with FIRS. We can probably find a solution to that.

I am aware already that players think FIRS disabling with e.g. CZTR is because I want to force people to use my grfs.

To avoid this perception, FIRS will not work with Iron Horse, Road Hog, HEQS, FISH or Unsinkable Sam , unless a specific parameter is chosen.

But I do need a list of suitable grfs that FIRS is known to work with.

What are your suggestions?

Please don't just campaign for your favourite grf. It needs to actually be proven to work with FIRS. Also I need specific versions / grfids. Thanks!

This GRF seems to fix my issue after creating a new game, but it also adds this useless base vehicle that breaks balance.

[Trains] 454E0601, 454E1901, 4E4D0324, 544D0101, FBFB0601, 544D0201, 48410101, 4F472B31, 535A0D00
[RV] 454E2502

I find requiring plane NewGRFs to be rather extreme, since people rarely transport cargo by planes, and you can't even move the stuff in the base game by plane.

I am very sympathetic to Andy's intentions. FIRS is a known entity. It is fully documented. It should be easy enough for a transportation set author to fit the bill. Therefor I suggest three categories:
1. Blacklist - known incompatible in some or all respects.
2. Whitelist - known fully compatible.
3. Greylist - unknown - will function as whitelist but an incompatibility will move it to the blacklist pending modification.

There is a danger here. Blacklisting has been used before, especially where the author wishes to maintain a consistency in gameplay or theme. Please respect an author's intentions and try to accommodate them. Industry sets do not have the flexibility of a transportation set.

@Andy - Your transportation sets are known to work with FIRS. Their default should be whitelist. They are GPL so a transportation set author can always refer to them to resolve an incompatibility.

wallyweb wrote: ↑27 Apr 2021 20:29 I am very sympathetic to Andy's intentions. FIRS is a known entity. It is fully documented. It should be easy enough for a transportation set author to fit the bill.

I appreciate the intent and the list, but

(1) FIRS already blacklists other grfs, and has done for years, there is a long list https://github.com/andythenorth/firs/bl ... rfs.py#L52
(2) greylist is a slightly mythical concept. There is no way to keep a known list of unknown grfs. It's somewhat tautological

A cursory search of Reddit or Steam shows that for casual players, FIRS breaks the base game trivially and often.

The only current viable solution is to whitelist known vehicle grfs and require them to be loaded.

OpenTTD could be patched to provide classes on the default vehicles, but this would trigger yet another flood of player complaints, which are getting tiresome every time there is an OpenTTD release

andythenorth wrote: ↑27 Apr 2021 21:18 The only current viable solution is to whitelist known vehicle grfs and require them to be loaded.

"permit" might be more appropriate than "require".
One could then provide the accepted author with one of those marmalade labels:
"By appointment of FIRS, provider of fine and reliable transportation services"

wallyweb wrote: ↑27 Apr 2021 22:43 "permit" might be more appropriate than "require".

I guess, and it lets the funny marmalade thing be written, like Paddington Bear.

Just for readers at home though, the problem really isn't that vehicle grfs need to specifically FIRS compatible. Any vehicle grf using cargo classes sensibly will be fine.

The problem is that FIRS literally breaks default OpenTTD vehicles, and this constantly confuses inexperienced players. For this there is no solution except to require suitable vehicle grfs, and the only way to do that currently is maintain an approved list.

A few examples:
https://steamcommunity.com/app/1536610/ ... 348966147/
https://steamcommunity.com/app/1536610/ ... 340566293/
https://www.reddit.com/r/openttd/commen ... n_vehicle/
https://www.reddit.com/r/openttd/commen ... bout_firs/
https://www.reddit.com/r/openttd/commen ... transport/
https://www.reddit.com/r/openttd/commen ... irs_cargo/
https://www.reddit.com/r/openttd/commen ... play_firs/
https://www.reddit.com/r/openttd/commen ... irs_egvrt/
https://www.reddit.com/r/openttd/commen ... questions/

There are more, and there are many more featuring Kamnet explaining to FIRS players that they'll need an appropriate vehicle grf. There are better uses of human ingenuity than relying on Kamnet to keep doing that.

There is a possible alternative, which is to add cargo classes to the default OpenTTD vehicle, which would fix this issue for all industry sets. Some of the base set vehicles are already refittable to a range of specific labels, so there is precedent for this. Notably planes and ships. But not trains. So in this model new players might be confused that vehicles named 'Coal Wagon' then also refit to iron ore. But there would be a default set of vehicles handling every cargo in every industry grf ever.

But if we make that change, some experienced players will inevitably complain that the change destroys the game for them in some way we hadn't forseen, as per all recent OpenTTD releases. So this route looks problematic.

Therefore my proposal is to simply make it much more difficult to use FIRS. Raising the barrier to entry should solve the 'broken vehicles' reports from inexperienced players.

It's easy for me to make a controversial change in a grf and ignore complaints. Whereas it's very hard to change anything in OpenTTD ever, because the complaints are usually quite overwhelming.

andythenorth wrote: ↑27 Apr 2021 19:16 So future versions of FIRS will require specific vehicle grfs to be loaded, otherwise FIRS will disable itself.

I think that if you will just show warning message instead of disabling FIRS, it'll be much better solution.

andythenorth wrote: ↑28 Apr 2021 05:55 Just for readers at home though, the problem really isn't that vehicle grfs need to specifically FIRS compatible. Any vehicle grf using cargo classes sensibly will be fine.

The problem is that FIRS literally breaks default OpenTTD vehicles, ...

You are making me think and that is giving me an "Extra Strength Aspirin" class headache.
Now I am beginning to see some of these in my sleep.

Question: Does this issue exist with OpenGFX + Trains and OpenGFX + Road Vehicles?
If not, then can these be added to the baseset group?
If yes, then can they be updated before adding them to the baseset group?