Passengers disappear in 1958, bug?

[kill723]

Sorry for the double post. I originally posted this in the Map discussion forum and am not sure how to delete it. Posting it here for better viability. 

 

I've been playing through the Second Campaign (the Austria map specifically) using my modified version of jeffry's US History/1.56+ EXE , and I just came across something unusual, to say the least.

In 1958, passengers just disappear. I've checked the Amtrak West map and also found passengers missing; however, the Elbow Room (drain the Mediterranean) map does not have this issue. Jeffry's EXE adds a "If X, production is changed by Y" condition in 1958, saying that houses supplied with diesel will decrease passenger production by 10%. Could that be related to the issue I'm having? Using Jeffry's EXE also results in missing passengers Is this somehow intentional, or have I stumbled across a bug that we've yet to uncover?

[jeffryfisher]

In my world (the US History map + my modded exe), passengers decline after WWII, becoming scarce but not impossible after the 707 announcement. Mail completely disappears after the 1966 Post Office announcement. Troops also disappear about that time. I think most of those effects are in either my map or the vanilla game, not my mods to the exe.

Try running a few years off the clock. See if there is a wave of passengers about once every two years.

[kill723]

I took a closer look at my game, and I found something very interesting. Passengers may not be showing up in the menu anymore, but they're still being loaded by trains. It's as if they've just been turned invisible. Watch train number 18. It's clearly still loading passengers, even though they're not displayed in the cargo menu or the route screen. It also shows that passengers are still demanded by stations.

 

Even if the game is technically unchanged, I'd like to fix this if possible. Any thoughts?

Edited March 20, 2020 by kill723

[kill723]

(Merging my earlier post with this one so they're not spread across two different pages.)

 

jeffryfisher

The if-then effect  you describe looks like one map's event, not a global program feature. Can you go back and tell us exactly where you saw the diesel-pax decline. documented?

Thanks,

Jeff

 

kill723

•  

I found that in one of your posts from several years ago, you stated "One change that I have made is to add a city demand for diesel (representing gasoline) after about 1950."

https://forum.dune2k.com/topic/23879-historical-rt2-mod/?do=findComment&comment=374634

I decided to check the following scenarios from the Second Century Campaign and this is what I found. All of these were tested with Jeffry's EXE.

• Amtrak West, pax missing, high pax traffic (same place where you pick regional costs of fuel)
• Elbow Room, pax present, high 
• Super Trains (France with no freight), no pax, high 
• Antarctica, pax missing, high
• Remember America, pax present, normal
• Island of Hope (Africa), pax missing, normal
• Austria, pax missing, high

For a moment I thought I was onto something, thinking "the maps with high passenger traffic are causing the issue," until I noticed that Elbow Room has high traffic as well. 

I originally thought that it was some sort of extra challenge that had been added, and it kind of makes sense. Pax traffic fell off a cliff around this time. But I know it's not because of the Amtrak West scenario. Why would a scenario focused on Amtrak not have pax?

 

Any idea on what's this causing this or how to fix it?

 

 

Edited March 20, 2020 by kill723

[jeffryfisher]

Right, so I added diesel demand. Did I say something about passenger decline? I do vaguely recall connecting car deliveries to pax decline, so maybe I experimented with negative "boosters". I know I thought about such, but it has been too many years, and I can't remember what I did 

[kill723]

I've decided to open the hex editor once again to try and tackle this problem. My first thought was to remove the diesel demand to see if I could at least get pax to reappear.

Attempt one brought back pax to the menu, but with an unintended side effect.

 

Attempt two was more successful. The "if supplied" statement now shows up as 0%, so I guess that means nothing happens? I don't know why it's choosing to include this.

I messed around with a few more values, and managed to get "if supplied with rubber, pax reduce by 9%" to work. For whatever reason, though, when I put in diesel (30), it just disappears. I'll upload my "pax increase by 0%" file here. If you want to try and look at it yourself, here's what you need to know.

The house conversion is in line 0x001404B0, and the townhouse conversion is in line 0x00143130. You can also search for 1958 as a value, not a hex address, using the excel map as a guide. The cell marked as 1E (value is 30) is the diesel cell, and the next few govern its production rate (-10% or otherwise). 

 

I think the inclusion of this feature to represent gasoline was really creative, but it's a shame it has this weird bug tagging along. Hopefully we can get it fixed. Until then, I will keep playing on my "pax increase by 0%" file.

 

 

pax increase 0 percent.EXE

[jeffryfisher]

Unfortunately I do not have time these days (working full time and gotta do my taxes). Solving riddles like this is like a game within a game, so keep at it for the joy of victory when you sort it.

[kill723]

It has obviously been a very long time, for me anyway, but on Christmas at 12:30 in the morning, I finally figured out the issue. This evening I decided I'd try to get to the bottom of it once and for all, after two previous failed attempts.

All the maps that PAX disappear on are maps where diesel isn't an available cargo. I can't believe I Didn't think of that before, it's just so obvious. You can't have a conditional production using a cargo type that doesn't exist. 

I still think that the idea was very smart though, so it's a shame that it only works on some of the maps. 

[jeffryfisher]

I still don't understand what you saying. Passengers are never "produced" as an output from diesel input. At most, cities could demand diesel, so city growth could be helped if one delivers. However, "removing diesel" from a map does not remove its cargo code from the underlying game data, so its absence won't bugger the game. At worst, players simply lack a tool by which to stimulate city growth.

A better path would be to read through the events in your map to see which ones have effects on passenger supply. I have more time these days, so if you have one map in particular that you want to play, point it out and I'll take a look.

 

[kill723]

Alright, hopefully this clears things up. If all of these changes were your work, I'm sorry if it seems like I'm explaining it to you as a 5 year old. I guess I don't remember who implemented this change, but it's from the spreadsheet EXE Data under AltConv.

 

 

The original game did not have the "if supplied with X, production is increased by Y" attribute on houses, only on livestock with grain and farms with fertilizer (I think, maybe I'm missing one). Whatever modded version of the game the EXE data spreadsheet goes to has this changed. Houses and townhouses provided with goods produce 50% more mail, I believe to simulate mail order goods (I like to think they're all Sears catalog houses). Late Pax (the year you get the news bulletin about the 707) also adds one for pax. From the game screenshot, when it's working as intended, you can see "if supplied with diesel, production is increased by -10%. Seems the game doesn't have "decreased" hardcoded in so it just drops in a negative sign. Jeffry you're right, there is no conversion of diesel to pax. What you say though is true, it shouldn't bugger the game. As an experiment, I made a test world with no fertilizer and plopped in a farm. The farm still produces cotton even though fertilizer doesn't exist. That seems to go against what I had just said about the pax only breaking when diesel isn't available, so I guess I really don't know. All I do know is editing the exe is a massive headache.

[jeffryfisher]

Yes, editing the EXE is tedious, and yes, I'm the one who did so to produce a version described by that spreadsheet. Others have created other versions.

It's okay to describe a bug in baby-step detail, because that's how a subtle coding error can be uncovered (and how guesses to cause can be eliminated). Right now, my guess is that there's something about your maps that is causing pax to vanish.

Edit: Looking back over the "Small Edits" thread, I am suspicious of whatever you did to change the weight of the post-1958 passenger car. Since you edited the EXE after it left my hands, it's possible that something you changed made those cars vanish (though it's still weird that they only vanish from some maps and not others).

[jeffryfisher]

On 3/20/2020 at 5:56 PM, kill723 said:

Attempt one brought back pax to the menu, but with an unintended side effect.

Looking back at this, I noticed that your "removing" the '30' caused passengers to boost passengers -- That tells me that you replaced the 30 with a zero (zero is the code for passengers). If you want to have no booster at all, use code 127 like you see in so many lines in that table.

[jeffryfisher]

OK, I had a look at both Amtrak West and my spreadsheet. Indeed, it looks like I added a negative booster to house production of passengers, and it appears that the game won't display the passengers as part of "House" or available at stations. It's probably because the map disallowed diesel.

This is surprising to me since a lot of boosters could do this to their underlying cargoes on maps. The original map makers must have been careful to always allow fertilizer and grain even if they weren't supplied anywhere. I wonder if any player-mappers ran into this snag when disabling things like fertilizer.

One fix you might try is to open Amtrak West in the game's editor and allow diesel in the options. You don't need to put any oil or refineries on the map (although California does actually have both). I'll give that a try next time I have time to play.

[jeffryfisher]

When I activated refineries (a diesel producer) in the Amtrak West map, passengers appeared on houses again. Apparently the game really is that sensitive to cargo dependencies even if it's just a booster, not a factory input.

I've now sunk my teeth into the map, calling my version "CalTrain". I'm going to lay some pre-existing mainlines of SP, UP and ATSF so Amtrak can start by running on their tracks. In order to make it work though, I'll need to hamstring the AI somehow so it can't use passengers. It has been a decade since I was into this, so I can't remember whether that's easy or not...