Preventing mass land leveling in multiplayer

[elmex]

Hi!

I've been wondering whether it would be possible to somehow
prevent people from leveling a large amount of land in a short
time.

It would certainly be very useful to limit the amount of land that can
be levelled in a specified amount of time (eg. 10 tiles in 10 seconds)
and disallow it when the amount is reached. (Best would be if this is
server-side settable).
An alternative would be to limit the amount of tiles that can be levelled
at once just in the GUI (but i fear thats not enough).

It would prevent jerks from mass-leveling land to sealevel, as it happened
to my multiplayer games many times.

This limit would of course also make building of long lanes straight through
mountains harder, but at least for my taste thats fine if such things would
take longer.

Such a limit would also give the admin of the server some more reaction time to kick&ban the jerk.

What do you think?

[Wolf01]

about x tiles at time i don't agree, think if you want terraform the base tile of a loong slope, all the tiles above will be terraformed
just code a grf which changes the terraform cost and set it to an higher value

[Dave]

Or use pb_build.grf, which greatly increases the cost of terraforming, tunnel building, tree removal, building on slopes and other bits and bobs. Excellent stuff.

[Wolf01]

link link link

can you link it please?

[Dave]

It's part of Brianetta's Standard grf bundle.

[Zojj]

I was thinking about this too, and came up with a company "dirt pile". When you lower land (remove dirt) from the map, your company dirt pile grows. When you raise land, your pile shrinks.

The bigger your dirt pile gets, the more it would cost to remove more land.

Just one of my many crazy ideas. =)

[Youri219]

I was thinking about this too, and came up with a company "dirt pile". When you lower land (remove dirt) from the map, your company dirt pile grows. When you raise land, your pile shrinks.

The bigger your dirt pile gets, the more it would cost to remove more land.

Just one of my many crazy ideas. =)

I was thinking about really moving land (tile by tile), instead of removing/adding it, a similar idea.

But I don't think this would help that much, people will always find a way to grief others. Best thing you can do is revert to an autosave and block his IP.

[elmex]

A grf has the disadvantage that everyone has to have it if he wants to play
on my server. And most ppl who just want to play will pick a server that
he can connect to without much hassle.

[NukeBuster]

A grf has the disadvantage that everyone has to have it if he wants to play
on my server. And most ppl who just want to play will pick a server that
he can connect to without much hassle.

I totally agree with that.

[elmex]

about x tiles at time i don't agree, think if you want terraform the base tile of a loong slope, all the tiles above will be terraformed
just code a grf which changes the terraform cost and set it to an higher value

Well, i more thought about the actual area one _wants_ to terraform.
Eg. limiting the equal-level-tool to an area of N tiles.

But ok, one can still make high mountains with just a one-tile-terraform
operation ;-/

And still, if he really wants to level a long slope he just has to invest
some more time. That is of course bothersome and tedious if you
want to run a track over the whole map and just want to equal-level it,
but such kind of leveling isn't really realistic.

As this is a major influence on gameplay i would make such a tile-terraform-rate be configurable.

It would also help the servers that have the 'no leveling' rule.

But I don't think this would help that much, people will always find a way to grief others. Best thing you can do is revert to an autosave and block his IP.

Sure they will find a way to annoy others.
But without terraforming most of their actions can be reverted by kick&reset_company.
Terraforming isn't as easilty reversible as bought land or a laid railroad.


And just making terraforming cost more doesn't really prevent abusage,
it just limits it to people with much money.
In my case a player with lots of money once became bored and low-levelled the land before leaving. Even if it would cost more, he could've certainly levelled lots of land with his multi-billion balance.
(And this is not just a single case where this happened).

A grf has also the already mentioned disadvantage that noone has it
(even thought he could crawl the web for it).

So in the end a change on the server&client code has to be done.

[Dave]

A grf has the disadvantage that everyone has to have it if he wants to play

I personally think that is a poor attitude.

[elmex]

A grf has the disadvantage that everyone has to have it if he wants to play

I personally think that is a poor attitude.

Why do you think that it is a poor attitude?

All I wanted to say is: if this is implemented with a grf the broad mass
of servers wont take any advantage of it. I rarely see a server which
uses some special grfs.

Or atleast, if it would be implemented in a grf, then it should be distributed with openttd.

The leveling-problem is not localized to my server.
What if I would like to play on dihedral or <insert any other server which usually has more than 0 players here>?
I'm mostly sure the admins of those servers would love
to enable such a patch setting if it would exist, or at least some.

But ok, maybe I'm completly mistaken here and noone actually thinks
that it's a problem except me and the people I usually meet in the games
online.
Eveyone is usually pissed off if a perfectly fine game is ruined in the end by some bored mooron. Kick&banning him wont fix the game.
Loading a savegame is also more work.
Preventing the damage before it's being done is more effective IMO.

It would also be another option for general public servers to provide
a challenge and reduce the amount of unrealistic terraforming or at
least makes it harder.
But i agree that here a GRF which makes terraforming more expensive is probably better.

[Dave]

But the chances of such a thing making it into the game are low - remember that OTTD offers less choice and more ease-of-use than TTDP which gives the user the choice.

I think any implementation to the game would involve EVERYone having to suffer, and that's not really fair, in my opinion.

A .grf can be activated quite easily.

[elmex]

But the chances of such a thing making it into the game are low - remember that OTTD offers less choice and more ease-of-use than TTDP which gives the user the choice.

I think any implementation to the game would involve EVERYone having to suffer, and that's not really fair, in my opinion.

A .grf can be activated quite easily.

Ok, I haven't thought about the chances of such a feature getting in,
so a GRF is probably the only possibility...

And that ultimately means that the levelling situation isn't going to change.

[Dave]

pb_build doesn't prevent levelling anyway - it merely makes it more expensive and thus less attractive.

I can't really see how you could stop a player from mass-levelling without making other players suffer, to be honest.

[elmex]

pb_build doesn't prevent levelling anyway - it merely makes it more expensive and thus less attractive.

I can't really see how you could stop a player from mass-levelling without making other players suffer, to be honest.

Yes, it would of course limit the overall ability to level.
But wouldn't that be a challenge for itself? A nice game mode where
large (unrealistic) releveling actions take an efford

[Dave]

You could just rely on the clientele of your server to behave

[dihedral]

if the dynamite and the level-land tool were limited in the way the planting trees is (max 20x20tile field) that already would be of help.
patch.limit_dynamite = true|false
patch.limit_level_land = true|false
would then let an admin decide if used or not used

personally i think this would appear a simple way of implementing the limitation, though will prob only be user-side and not server side. but at least it's a start, as the most players blowing up the map or leveling the map to see level will most likely not compile their own game.

[elmex]

if the dynamite and the level-land tool were limited in the way the planting trees is (max 20x20tile field) that already would be of help.

Thats nearly exactly my idea
(just that i don't think 20x20-tile field is small enough, but it's indeed a start).

patch.limit_dynamite = true|false
patch.limit_level_land = true|false
would then let an admin decide if used or not used

Yes, exactly my idea too. But I would like something like:

patch.limit_dynamite = <max tiles>
patch.limit_level_land = <max tiles>

where <max tiles> is the tile count one can change with one action,
0 would be disabled.

That would be equally easy to implement (I guess) and the admin
can still decide to what extend he wants to limit it.

personally i think this would appear a simple way of implementing the limitation, though will prob only be user-side and not server side. but at least it's a start, as the most players blowing up the map or leveling the map to see level will most likely not compile their own game.

I agree

[hertogjan]

if the dynamite and the level-land tool were limited in the way the planting trees is (max 20x20tile field) that already would be of help.

Thats nearly exactly my idea
(just that i don't think 20x20-tile field is small enough, but it's indeed a start).

The size needed to create a flat patch of land on which the largest airport fits may be a reasonable limit. It may be useful however, if it would still be possible to flatten a long but narrow patch, for instance for a long station or railway tracks.

So I could propose the following:
-Flattening a rectangle of which both dimensions are smaller than or equal to 10* tiles is allowed.
-Flattening a rectangle of which the shorter dimension is smaller than or equal to 3* tiles and the longer dimension is smaller than or equal to 30* tiles is allowed.
-If neither of the two previous criteria is met, then flattening is disallowed.

*The actual numbers may be chosen somewhat differently, but should be in this order of magnitude.