Hello all,
welcome to this thread announcing YACD - Yet Another CargoDestinations to the world. This patch brings cargo destinations into OpenTTD by creating specific demand between towns and industries. This means that you'll have to shape your network according to where the cargo wants to go, because if you don't, your trains will just run empty! This is significantly different from Cargodist, which will route the cargo along your existing network and not to a specific fixed destination.
How to play:
Start by enabling cargo destinations for either pax/mail, industry cargoes or all cargoes in the advanced settings, section Economy. Begin a new game (you can load an existing save, but completely reorganizing a network before you go into bankruptcy is hard work).
Let the game run for one or two months, this is needed to properly collect some internal statistics. Then click on any town or industry to see where the cargo wants to go to and build your network accordingly Please note that the cargo to/from towns is actually routed to a specific tile of the destination town, which is randomly determined. The tiles near the town's centre will be chosen more often than those further away, so start there. In order to capture all possible cargo from town A to town B (or from an industry to a town), you'll have to cover both towns completely.
The GUI integration isn't complete yet, but the station view will show you the waiting cargo sorted by either final destination, next hop (i.e. the next stop of the vehicle the cargo wants to board), transfer station (station where the cargo will exit the vehicle again, final delivery counts as transfer for this) or source (unchanged). The total cargo tab of the train detail window will show the final destinations of all cargo aboard.
Highlights:
- A new challenge
- Predetermined tile-to-tile cargo destinations
- Dynamic cargo routing which will spread out cargo over multiple connections
- Automatic transfer handling at stations
- Will not break totally when using conditional orders or other indeterministic constructs
- Highly configurable, but hopefully with sane defaults
- Better performance (a full 2k by 2k map will be very heavy on your CPU)
- NoAI support
- Better NewGRF interaction, e.g. for stockpile limits
YACD will be released in form of a git-style patch, which any sane (this does not include TortoiseSVN) patch tool will be able to apply (use -p1 for the standard GNU patch). The version numbering will consist of a major and a minor version. The minor version will increment on any change and the major version will increment when the patch isn't savegame compatible with the previous version. I will not maintain savegame compatibility over trunk savegame changes.
Compiled binaries are available at http://bundles.openttdcoop.org/yacd/ (with thanks to the openttdcoop guys).
The latest patch version will always be attached to this post. Older version will be available from the archive. Alternatively you can pull from my git repo. This repo will occasionally be rebased, so please read the instructions.
I hope this different way of playing OpenTTD will be fun, but that is something only you can decide. Please let me know your thoughts.
-- Michael Lutz