Prior to this change, trees tended to either cover the entire map like an ancient forest, or alternatively you turn off their growth which breaks industry. Furthermore there are these ugly random tree clumps at the beginning of the game which look like squares on the map someone placed there.
This change adds a new tree placing setting which removes the ugly random clumps and only slightly modifies the initial placement. The actual growth causes trees to bunch up in higher levels as usual but on the lower 4 levels their growth works differently. The number of trees per tile is limited and the trees spread out over a wider area instead of only to the neighboring tile. That spreads them out more and makes for a nicer look.
This also allows cacti to spread, since they can now use that same algorithm and avoid bunching up, but spread as they should.
Prior to this change, the game tended to place towns on mountain tops. Realistic heightmaps had limitations because of this.
This change allows the player to specify that the towns should be generated in the valleys.
Prior to this change, road vehicles would always slowdown in curves. This forces the player to build grid like roads. With new height levels and more mountainous maps and in the absense of diagonal roads this causes unnecessary pain. It should be an option to turn this off, so mountainous maps and curvy roads are not punishing the player unnecessarily. Nobody wants to build grid like roads outside of towns.
Prior to this change, lakes could be very small and could also not be deactivated.
This change allows the deactivation of lake creation and the lake size is now the set size +- 25% instead of anything between 0 and lake_size.
This includes:
* CBID_VEHICLE_32DAY_CALLBACK
* CBID_VEHICLE_REFIT_COST
* CBID_VEHICLE_MODIFY_PROPERTY
This is on a per-property basis
The main benefit of this is to avoid callbacks not handled by the
vehicle's current sprite group from using the full graphics chain as
the "default" branch in the callback switch.
In the case where the graphics chain is long/expensive, a lot of work
had to be done before a callback failure result was eventually returned.
The GUI now more clearly shows some basic information about the
server you joined, your client name (and the ability to change it),
and what players are in which company.
It also contains useful buttons to press to join companies, chat
with other people, and for admins to kick/ban people.
Additionally, renamed "advertised" to "visibility"; this has to
do with future additions, but also because it is more clear in
wording.
The original idea was that people could find a server they could
talk in their native language on. This isn't really used in that
way. There are several reasons for removing this:
- the client also sends his "language" to the server, but nothing
is doing anything with this.
- flags are a bad way to represent languages, and over the years
we had several (rightfully) complaints about this.
- most servers have their language set to "All", and prefix the
servername with the language it is about. This is a much more
efficient way to do the same.
All in all, this feature should go back to the drawing board.
Maybe it could work in another form, but this form is not it.
Vsync should be off by default, as for most players it will be
better to play without vsync. Exception exist, mainly people who
play in fullscreen mode.
