Autorenew/Replace Merge

[Lordmwa]

Currently in OTTD you can Autorenew a vehicle - When it gets old it gets replaced
You can also Autoreplace - When you want to upgrade a fleet it is automatic

How about a third option?

Autoreplace when old. When setting the autoreplace it would be great if you could choose to have a fleet renewed over time as it gets old, currently you either have to do the whole lot or do it manually and although it isnt a major problem i could see this being a nice extension of the feature

[Voyager One]

The idea is not bad but I ask you this: sincerely, how often would you use this?

In major number of cases, the vehicles get replaced before they even get old, and in the rest of cases they get renewed before a suitable (newer) replacement is available.

Is it worth the trouble?

[Lordmwa]

i play with UKRS a lot and there is stuff that i want to upgrade when old but not waste money before

[Eddi]

The idea is not bad but I ask you this: sincerely, how often would you use this?

this question is the wrong way round. it should be:

"how often are you annoyed that this is not possible?"

if the answer to that is "at least several times", then the request is perfectly valid.

when using autoreplace you very quickly get into situations where you just wasted your entire money on it, crippling your entire development for changing perfectly good engines for marginally better ones. if you could, by one button click, limit the replacement only to old vehicles, it could save you a whole lot of money.

afair someone has done a mockup gui merging the "autoreplace" and "autorenew" features, i don't think i have ever seen an actual patch.

[Voyager One]

"how often are you annoyed that this is not possible?"

Yes, definitely a better question. And to give you my personal answer: almost never.

Boh, it clearly depends on the devs if they'll see it good to implement.

[KouDy]

Maybe it would be easier to do following :
1) allow vehicles to be in more than one group at the same time
2) create reserved group called "Old" or "Soon Old" or whatever else and old vehicles would go there automatically
3) set autoreplace to the place
4) exclude all other groups from autoreplace

Imo more ellegant way around this (also it would create that vehicles can be in more than 2 group at the same time which some might find handy too).

[Alberth]

In my view, groups are sufficiently useless to warrant a re-design. Auto{replace,renew} should be part of that I think.
The biggest pitfall may be that different people have different ideas of how groups are to be used. (The above "4) exclude all other groups from autoreplace" is one example of such an assumption, but there are many more.)

[KouDy]

Using groups currently is a bit harder (meaning they have only limited use).
Btw my suggestion was based on my laic idea of "how to do the most with the least effort". "Simple" allowing vehicles into more groups and automatic group (trigger stuff) shouldn't be that hard i think and it would greatly boost current groups options. Of course if you have already plans to major overhaul of groups then no problem .

[Alberth]

Of course if you have already plans to major overhaul of groups then no problem .

I don't, as I have no idea how it is used currently, nor what you'd want to have with groups.

Personally, I never bothered to use groups, and I don't play enough to get a good idea either.

[planetmaker]

Long time ago Brianetta wrote a nice treatize on groups: http://www.tt-forums.net/viewtopic.php?p=728175#p728175
It's still current, though

[Alberth]

I pondered on this during the weekend, and got stuck almost immediately.

As proposed by Brianetta, having groups inside groups seems useful. Also, I believe that differerent users will have different ideas on how or what to group, which leads to a somewhat generic system where you can create new (sub)groups in any way you like.

What I cannot see is how to make a GUI that allows this (as in screen-layout).


With auto-renew/replace, I sort of have the same problem. I think you should have an 'example' train, and make a second ('new') train by a) moving wagons/engines from the example, and/or from the buy-menu.
When you press 'go', it will then modify trains that look like the example to the new form.

However, how do you draw an example 'new' train, where it is obvious where each wagon/engine came from?

[Lordmwa]

I think i may have been misinterpreted here:

Really simply i think it would be good if you can set up an autoreplace as you can at the moment (change on engine type to another) But have a little tick box so that it doesnt happen right away but instead when the train would be autorenewed

[Alberth]

No, you didn't get misinterpreted, having more control over when a replacement is done may be useful.

I just try to generalize a change in the GUIs so several problems get solved, instead of just adding a toggle and nothing more.
The investment to make any change in a new area is pretty large (and not so much related to the effort needed for the actual change), so I prefer to tackle more problems at the same time.

[Lordmwa]

Thank you

[andythenorth]

Some thoughts on this. The whole reworking groups / orders / autoreplace things is a bit complicated.

Discussing it on irc, there are people with quite different desires / needs / use cases / ideas.

It could be best to not talk about groups at all for now. The word means too many different things to different people. My suggestions are
- orders sets (replacing orders and shared orders as a way of telling vehicles where to go)
- search / saved search, replacing part of what current groups try to do, but better
- consists, enhancing current autoreplace/renew

Each of these could be tackled individually, breaking down the patching task into manageable chunks.

Every set of orders ever created would be cached and made available as an order set. This is similar to suggestions of lines, services, schedules etc. From what I understand, shared orders already exist in a pool in code, orders sets would expand on this.
Each vehicle still follows one set of orders and one only (pointer to a 'virtual' vehicle with orders)
Players would be able to delete / modify / copy order sets.

order_sets.png (118.5 KiB) Viewed 2489 times

Order sets might be accessed in many ways (vehicle windows, station windows) and also maybe like this:

stations_orders_menu.png (151.55 KiB) Viewed 2489 times

Groups would be reworked. Currently a vehicle can only be in one group, and there are not many ways to add vehicles to a group. This would be replaced with a filter / search system, and search criteria could be saved. Vehicles could be in more than one saved search. Players could perform actions on vehicles in a saved search list.

reworked_vehicle_list_window.png (111.33 KiB) Viewed 2489 times

Consists - not figured out yet. Got some ideas, want to discuss more

[Nite Owl]

As proposed by Brianetta, having groups inside groups seems useful. Also, I believe that differerent users will have different ideas on how or what to group, which leads to a somewhat generic system where you can create new (sub)groups in any way you like. What I cannot see is how to make a GUI that allows this (as in screen-layout).

I would not even begin to suggest that I understand the many complexities of coding a GUI such as this but would not a "simple" + and - system as currently used for the Advanced Settings window work?

[planetmaker]

I would not even begin to suggest that I understand the many complexities of coding a GUI such as this but would not a "simple" + and - system as currently used for the Advanced Settings window work?

That's a good choice, if you want a hirachical tree of groups, where each sub group defines something more than the previous parent group. But this fails, if you want something like 'all vehicles with blue livery' and 'all vehicles older than 15 years' to be valid groups at the same time.

I guess one of the main things which first needs to be made clear and decided is: what do we want groups to be?
- an order-based thing (some call it line or route-based) where you define properies for vehicles with the same order? Partially that's possible even currently using the shared orders
- as current, freely assigned to vehicles, but with the option to define further properties for vehicles within that group
- or is a group the result of some property descriptions which contains all vehicles which match that description (e.g. vehicles older than 15 years, steam engine with passenger wagon)

All three make somewhat sense, probably there are more options, but one can probably not have all three (or more) at the same time without getting a complete GUI mess.