Splitting cargo between industries at a single station

[Eldarion]

The situation:
Several industries that accept the same cargo connected to the same station.

At the moment OpenTTD sends all arriving cargo to one industry and nothing to the others. Eg. I've got an iron ore mine and a coal mine served by the same station. Both of them accept vehicles, but the arriving vehicles get delivered only to the iron ore mine. The coal mine gets nothing and therefore it's output is limited.


So, a feature suggestion. Allow the arriving cargo to be split between the industries. There are several ways the cargo could be distributed: evenly between all industries, in the same ratios as the max. waiting cargo limits of the industries, let the user define the ratios, etc.

To me it just doesn't make sense to deliver all the cargo to one industry and leave the others starving. Building another station and using separate trains just to get the cargo to both industries seems quite pointless as well, especially if the infrastructure maintenance costs are enabled. Another player has asked about this feature here: http://www.tt-forums.net/viewtopic.php?f=31&t=57079

[kamnet]

Default OpenTTD doesn't know how to split cargo between multiple industries that are within a station's cachement area. And how would you have it decide how much of what cargo to send to each industry?

The simple solution, as pointed out in the thread you linked to, is to build two separate stations to split your cargo between.

You could also rebuild your station so that it is just outside the cachement area of both industries, and then switch your unload order to a transfer order, then finish delivery of your cargo from that station to a station at the industry you want to deliver to.

You could also choose to play with a version of OpenTTD that has either the Cargo Distribution or Yet Another Cargo Destination patch compiled into it. Both of these automatically separate cargo out by their final destination and would allow you to serve them from one station.

[lawton27]

As Eldarion clearly states however building two stations is not always the best idea, especially with infrastructure maintenance (which is a trunk feature!). Surly it would be reasonable to suggest the cargo is split between the two accepting industries at the ratio of how well cargo was being taken from them (rating or whatever). This would mean if one industry wasn't being served the delivered cargo would only go to the one who's boosted output would benefit the player.

[FooBar]

Indeed. Let us not forget that this is the suggestions box.
And this suggestion is quite good, as this currently just doesn't work properly. Like kamnet stated there are workarounds, but these are just that: workarounds.

Still, the chances of having this changed any time soon are slim. Apart from the feature-freeze until the end of the month, I'm not surprized if the devs start looking into some form of cargo destinations after that. Something that changing this behaviour hooks into quite heavily.

[Pyoro]

Back in that thread I would've preferred evenly split cargo, but I have to admit that the way things work now you essentially have more control over what happens - especially with FIRS, some production chains are just more useful than others, so you might not want to "waste" cargo

Obviously though an "advanced setting" for each station where, possibly with some nice sliders, you can decide how much cargo - maybe in % - goes to each possible industry, maybe also with a possible player set limit ("30% of the cargo goes there unless that's more than 1000 tons/month)...that would be rather...interesting.
And it wouldn't change anything as long as the standard setting would be 100% for the nearest industry and 0% for all the others. Theoretically ^^

[Eldarion]

Hey,

Thanks for the positive feedback
Now all there is to do is to hope that the developers pick up this thread and like it well enough.

In my mind a simple splitter shouldn't be too difficult to code. I haven't done any coding for TTD before and haven't really got the time to do it at the moment either, otherwise I could look into coming up with a patch myself.



Cheers,

E

[Alberth]

There is the conceptual problem that you are only transporting cargo, rather than owning it. That means you don't get to say who gets what.
That in turn means the game has to decide.

Secondly, you have a few edge cases, what if you transport only very little cargo, what if some transports are very big and others are very small? What if several stations do these deliveries? What if industries of the same type are created or are funded near an existing setup?

Finally, I am not convinced that a player should get away with dropping so much cargo at one place. The game is already too easy, why make it even more trivial?

[Eldarion]

I personally would be happy with the game deciding how to divide the cargo. Take my example of using the ratios of the inbound cargo acceptance limits of the industries for distribution. That would handle any amount of incoming cargo and there would be no player intervention. One could possibly have a game setting to set the way the cargo is distributed -- 1) using the ratios, 2) equally, 3) disable the feature at all.

I do agree that once you've got a little bit of experience with OTTD, it is fairly easy to generate massive amounts of income, but I still find it unreasonable that if I've got two industries at one station then I can't deliver the same cargo to both of them. Especially with infrastructure maintenance enabled. You could always disable the feature if you prefer not to use it.

[Alberth]

Indeed, I have always disabled infra structure maintenance.

(But no doubt you had other ideas about what to disable )

[Eldarion]

Right, in the end I still took the time and wrote the piece of code myself. Now the question is, mainly to you Alberth or any other developer following this thread, how do I publish it so that it gets checked by an official developer and hopefully added to the trunk. I found the wiki not the easiest place to navigate and to find information from and the documentation could also be improved. I can send/upload a unix patch file. This should be the easiest I think. I'm still considering some optimisations to reduce the amount of calculations needed, but at the moment it works and all the bugs seem to have been ironed out.

Do you have any information on if the goods delivery system will stay with the packet by packet method? If it does and the packets stay small as they are now, it would allow the amount of calculations to be reduced quite a bit.

[andythenorth]

If you have a patch, start a thread in the OpenTTD Development sub-forum