Transport Tycoon Forums

I think I have a solution for those "magic bags". When you buy a station you can add some platforms (up to 3, for example) that can only be used as "storage platforms". Then, when you free a loco at a station, the loco AUTOMATICALLY appears in those platforms, and when you want to use it you can simply click it and order it to get to the platform/train you want.
Let me explain in a graphic way.

STATION

Normal Platforms Storage Platforms

1 2 3 4 5 A B

Train with 2 locos stops at platform 1. You drop 1 loco for that train then it appears automatically in platform A, and so on. That can be an easy-to-understand and easy-to-play solution.

Ehhh... would be great if you could use RRT3's engine.... wouldn't it ?

Also I like simutrans's passenger transportation model (to certain location, not just anywhere)

EDIT: What i secretly dream about is a custom-tile (polygonal) 3D engine. While in 3D this possible, furthermore, you can't get more realistic than that, can you ?

EDIT: For trains, big depots, not just a shed, but a big expensive mechanical yard, with turntables, loco garages, wagons repair halls, fully customisable. This would also encourage building big complex networks (realistic), not just placing a depot (shed) near every little line.

Furthermore, vechicles shouldn't appear out of nowwhere, player should send an order to appropriate factory that will require time to produce a vechicle which will than be transported (will appear in factory or in docks, for imported). If that is done, than every vechicle should have it's factory (and country) of origin and every map will need a position on world's map, costs of importing vechicles would than vary, but this needs support of transport machinery history However additional world's regions and epoch's could be downloadable from an official website.

Most of these things are allready decided.

To answer you're questions I here are links to the threads where these topics have been discussed.
Depots
Maps - cell based or freedome or somewhere between
Triangular or square shaped cells?

Ownership should be kept quite generic in the core engine. (This could
be restricted by the game rules, which should be runtime-implemented like in FreeCiv, so that different scenarios could be designed with different rules.)

* Any station (component) or piece of track should be ownable by any player *or* any town, with a possible extension to ownership by other entities in the future (for scenario design). (Possibly there should be a "generic" owner who owns things nobody else owns, as well.)
* The owner should be able to define the "usage policy" for the item.
(1) My vehicles only!
(2) Anyone's vehicles.
(3) The vehicles of these specific people who I give permission to.
(Possibly in exchange for some automatically computed, or negotiated, compensation, but you wouldn't need to implement that to start with; for the initial purposes, unpaid access is all that is needed.)

This would also include demolition policy (in the case of town ownership).

It should probably also include whether competing players' stations could be integrated with yours (unless y'all decide to go with implementing walking and pathfinding like in SimCity, which might be a good idea).
It could also include things like "Are (foreign) trams allowed on the heavy rail tracks?"

A town would have a little mini-AI which would decide access and other rules on its property. This would also include whether roads/tram tracks/buildings were used/important enough that they could be demolished and transferred to player ownership, or not. In the default rules the towns should probably allow anyone to use anything they own, and the town "AI" should follow simple fixed rules. (In the far future, someone might design a much more complicated AI which negotiates with players in an attempt to get the maximum transport for its city at the minimum cost to the city, but if the architecture is done this way, it could just be a plug-in replacement.) The towns should also have an "eminent domain" power to steal property from players, although I'm not sure exactly how this should be used in the default rules. (Perhaps the towns should automatically possess all airports, for instance, but no railway stations.) There should also be a "can someone else enhance this tile?" access option, relating to whether private tram tracks can be built on city streets. (The rules might cause the city to automatically possess them.)

To reiterate: Both towns and players should be able to build/own airports, bus stations, tram tracks, etc, and the owner should be able to set access rules. This is realistic: in some towns, each railway has its own station; in others, they go into a Union Station, which may be owned by one company or by the government. Both private and public tram tracks have been on city streets in different cities at different times. It's also relatively straightforward to implement due to its generality (no special case rules for airport ownership etc. in the main engine code, it just looks the rules up in a table). A file of game rules read at the beginning of the game would restrict the options significantly, to implement the actual game and avoid having way too many options in the UI; but it would allow experimentation with different options for a long time.

Whew. I think, in a certain way, this proposal would resolve a lot of the currently open discussion questions on the Transport Empire design board; in essence, you can have it both ways on some of those questions, and it doesn't cost much to code if you do it right.

neroden wrote:I think, in a certain way, this proposal would resolve a lot of the currently open discussion questions on the Transport Empire design board

What open discussions? Sure the threads aren't locked, but all discussions have ended more than a month ago. You make it sound like we agreed to not have sharing of infrastructure, while the poll shows the opposite. (6 for, one against.)

But what you're suggesting is in effect an ACL system with one ACL per object. In a minimum implementation, that might take one byte to store owner, one byte to store number of items in ACL and two bytes per ACL item: entity having rights and a bitfield for what rights.
On a 256x265 map, you might imagine having several objects rights can be decided on per tile: The property itself, a road running on it, a railroad crossing the road, a tunnel underneath and a bridge or two above. Of course that's a somewhat exaggerated example, but it shows a rather bad scenario. If you imagine there's in average 2 objects that can be assigned rights to per tile, and there's in average 4 items in each ACL (rights for each company), that's 10 bytes per object, 20 bytes per tile, 1.28 MiB for the entire map. But most likely those things will be accessed through one or two level indirect lists with pointers, so in total the data grow much larger, and indirect access isn't the cheapest thing.

One thing you don't mention is how things like usage fees would be handled, and especially differentiated usage fees could be a problem.
Say you have two stations where you have allowed your competitor access. on one station, you change $100 per car per hour, on the other $200 per car per hour. How should that be stored? I think it's clear it has to have something to do with the access control, but how should the differentiated fees be handled? Storing them in the ACL would require even more memory. You could also make an somewhat inverse approach, and (internally) let each company have several ownership IDs, that charge different usage fees, but that could risk quickly depleting the number of ownership IDs.

On the city ownership of stations, the reason for the decisions we made was not for simplicity of implementation, but for simplicity of gameplay, IIRC. Even if it's relatively easy to make a very elaborate scheme for ownership and control, what good is it if it confuses the player? Nobody wants to play an overly complicated game. (Here, complicated should be taken as "number of possibilities for the player".)


But in the end, there's no discussion that there will be some kind of shared infrastructure, because we already agreed there will be. What you're suggesting is a way of implementing things. Let's first decide on what to make and when we're done, decide how to do it.

Yeah, what I was suggesting was a way of implementing things. Sorry. How far are y'all from hitting the implementation phase?... I'll refrain from making any more implementation-type suggestions until then. The process of implementation routinely induces design changes, so I'm not sure that separating them too strictly is a great idea.

In terms of basic ideas, I hope to see a certain type of extensibility and flexibility which is lacking in most such games. Since the official goal is to make a highly extensible game, it seemed reasonable.

I don't know if someone already said this, but it would be awesome if the maps could be so insanely large that you could go hours without even meeting your opponent...

I also really like the idea of huge metopolis's spreading across the land would be cool too, with lots of unique buildings.

Both have been suggested before, it's our goal to support large maps. Metropoles are more difficult but we intend to have large cities as well.

I have an idea for stations.


*have a loading the cargo thing so you can watch cargo being loaded on a train.
*Have the factorys that produce stuff "deliver" the cargo to the station.
*Show the cargo waiting at the stations for the train. like in locomotion

I beleve that these would add to the realism of the game yet are easy to do.
(i would not know i dont model these kind of stuff.)

-Sliders in the financial window, that allows you to specify amount of funding in, say, maintenance and advertisement.

-Specular mapping for Runways/Taxiways on airports. and make airports more to scale

-Dynamic textures that have the ability to change over time, i.e. Grafitti decals that have different levels of transparency. These decals could appear on you vehicles, to reflect their levels of maitenance.

Same could apply with grass decals that cover you track

DaisyCutter wrote:-Sliders in the financial window, that allows you to specify amount of funding in, say, maintenance and advertisement.

We don't have much of the economy related issues in the design document. Perhaps these two items should be discussed here.

-Specular mapping for Runways/Taxiways on airports. and make airports more to scale

Feel free to make some artwork.

How would specular mapping make runways more realistic? (I.e. if you can, please show a picture)

-Dynamic textures that have the ability to change over time, i.e. Grafitti decals that have different levels of transparency. These decals could appear on you vehicles, to reflect their levels of maitenance.

Same could apply with grass decals that cover you track

I like this.

I think transport empire project died

I don't like 'bold' remarks without an explanation, it's too easy. Either be more specific or just say nothing at all.

Hyronymus wrote:I don't like 'bold' remarks without an explanation, it's too easy. Either be more specific or just say nothing at all.

To which post(s) are you referring?

The silly one, hence alistairgrew's post.

plz plz dont let this game die, i may not see it finished (it seems so slow that by the time it is playable i will be like a grandad)

i have some ideas too for the game:

1. concentrate on the game rather than on websites and wikis etc

2. underground should be available

3. leave the opponents ai till the end so we can start playing sooner

4. allow simultaneous laying of double tracks

5. allow individual wagon management (like 1 wagon for coal and ore but
on a train u can individual set it to get one of the goods) so u can have
trains that wait for full load of coal and get as much ore as is available
on a next station and then picks the goods from the factory to deliver
them in a town

6. night time!!

7. i second the idea of variable transparency for grafiti on trains!

8. waypoints should be there (i hate AI deciding where my train whould go)

9. allow easy customisation of trains and other things (not in obscure dat
files but say in a txt file where even i can read and change)

10. if the game is in 3D, when laying a track you should have preset slopes
like you say u choose to have max slope of 5% in any part of the track

11. track laying might be like when u draw a curved line in say photoshop
where u chose start and finish and then add "waypoints" that alter the
curve

well thats all if anyone reads all that give me a call heheh

Some problems, issues, ideas and other stuff about Public Transport games.

• The towns in locomotion (I didn't play TT for a lot of time so i will talk about loco),
  are very big, despite the small stupid map, I think that if the map was much bigger,
  the towns are still too big, and should be smaller. (let's say 70% of the size in loco?).
  On the other hand, it creates a problem with the trams and buses, so,
  hmmm... I don't know...
  I'd like to hear your opinion about it (NOT about the size of the map, which is not the issue).
• It is really hard to edit the underground trains, I think the solution is to be able
  to see just one or two level of the ground, when the rest of the object are invisible.

Why not display the underground network overground when a view is toggled, it can be shown like the tram systems you can get now with the patch but going through invisable buildings, this would be relativly simple to use.

make buildings removable, but only when in bulldose mode, so that editing track, if its like lomo doesnt remove a city to change one piece of track.

Underground tracks could be viewed via two ways;

- The way LoMo/RCT does it. Mainly for tracks which can be both above and under the ground.
- The way SimCity does it. Mainly for tracks which are always underground.


About city size; I think cities should be larger, more realistically, so you can setup a network in cities too, like a feeder service. However, indeed this would require a bigger map.