Crash probability increases as aircraft ages

[gabrieldiego]

Hello all,

I made a small patch to increase the probability of a aircraft crash according to its age. I did so that the probability increases linearly up to 20 times the probability as it was when the aircraft was new.
I did this patch because I think that it is too annoying when the aircraft slows down because of a break down due to its decreased reliability. This is specially annoying when I have a super sonic plane making a very long flight and it breaks down right in the beginning of the flight, so the entire flight will take like ten times longer (which may mean an entire year in a huge terrain). In real world this rarely happens and the consequence of flying unreliable/aging aircrafts is mostly the increased crash risks and increased maintenance.

I was thinking also in other features like:
- Adjust the probability according to the reliability
- Adjust the probability according to the number of flight cycles and flight hours (will need to log this)
- Create a maintenance cost for the airplanes, just like the A-D check in real planes depending on its age/reliability/cycle#/flight hours.
- Crash the plane also in-flight (Currently only happens when the plane has no alternative landing airport)

I will keep improving my patch and look forward for more suggestions.

Regards,

[Alberth]

OpenTTD is not a simulator, it does not aim to mirrir reality.
It is a game, you have fun playing it. Kids of age 12 should have fun playing it.

Aircraft crashes are annoying in all ways. In my view they mostly exist to make aircraft a bit less of a money printer, but it mostly adds annoyance imho.
Reducing reliability in some complicated way as you propose just pushes the player into earlier auto-replace, adding labor rather than fun.

What you want with aircraft is more varied fun play. Diverting to a nearest airport on breakdown would be nice perhaps, but what airports?
It may need some radical out of the box thinking to come up with more enhanced game play for aircraft.

[kamnet]

I play OpenTTD for fun. I like nice, organized networks that just run and keep running and I don't have to tinker with.

OpenTTD, however, is a clone of a management simulation game. While never meant to be a simulation of real life, there are still many aspects of the game that you must manage if you want to score high and win. I see this patch as being a way to further challenge advanced players to better manage their fleets.

[moki]

I'm all for a new way to calculate aircraft crashes... right now, I always turn them off, because they're just very annoying and way too random, as Alberth said. If they were calculated in a meaningful and balanced way, I might think about turning them on again. I'll try this patch tomorrow.

A little idea/suggestion: What about implementing a kind of multiplier in the settings to set the frequency of crashes? I'd like to be able to not only set the crashes to normal, reduced or none but an arbitrary number between "once per century" and "be happy to survive the first flight". This should be the base probability to which the higher risks from age and bad maintenance are added.
Or maybe a 2 separate settings would be more useful: one value as the base frequency (new plane, fresh out of the hangar) and the other as a max frequency (50 years non-stop in the air), so that every player could basically set a curve for crash probability that could be either completely flat (old style behaviour) or very steep (harder gameplay). I have no idea how any of this would work in the code, but maybe the suggestion is an inspiration to you.

[EDIT]
Well, it does work... started with 33 planes from the av8 GRF in 2000 and have 10 left in 2020 with relatively few crashes in the first 5 years and much more later on.
The main thing I noticed/would like to see fixed is that the fleet of Boeing 747s (long range flights) is still almost complete while the 737s and other smaller planes (regional flights) are all gone, long before their maximum age. I guess, the chance to crash is calculated for each landing, which is a great disadvantage for smaller planes that land more often. Sure, landing is the most dangerous thing about flying, but it seems a bit too much right now. Logging flight hours and cycles and integrating them into the calculation is probably the right way to solve this.

[gabrieldiego]

Thanks everybody for the feedback!

moki, indeed in this patch (as in OpenTTD in general) the probability of a crash is in function of the number of landings, thus aircrafts that fly longer flights have much less chances to crash compared to aircrafts that have many short cycles. The problem in my patch is that it multiplies the chances of a crash by a factor of 20 in the end of the aircraft life while the chance of a crash when the aircraft is new remains the same as the standard in OpenTTD. The solution to this is to put a smaller crash probability when the aircraft is new then the rate would increase over the time. Your suggestion to make a adjustable crash frequency is very good and I would add a second parameter which is the base crash probability. That is the crash probability today is hard coded so that at each landing there is one chance every ~2800 landings that the aircraft will crash. If the aircraft is large landing in a small airport the chance will be 75 times greater. My idea is that this base value would be adjustable then the rate on which it would increase would be too.

I did a small adjustment to the patch so that it will adjust the crash probability is adjusted according to the reliability of the aircraft. It will decrease the initial crash probability by a factor of 4 when the reliability is 100% then will increase linearly until it is 4 times greater when the reliability is 0% (hard-coded).

plane_age_crashes.patch

(783 Bytes) Downloaded 41 times

I will think on creating the adjustable parameters (with nice default values for those 12 yo who just care to play the easy way ) but for this week I must focus on programming other projects, I mean, those that pay my salary .

BTW, I mistakenly created this topic in the Developers forum. Could a moderator/admin move it to the Suggestions forum, please?

[kamnet]

As you've actually published a patch, it should belong in the OpenTTD Development forum.