Town growth

[Stevie D]

Two suggestions re town growth, that I think would improve things...

The first one is to modify the town's road building algorithm, so that it favours 2×2 blocks of buildings rather than 1×1 blocks. I don't know if this is easy, or even possible, but I get very frustrated by towns that build roads on every other tile, leaving no room for buildings.

The second is an alternative or amendment to the "towngrowth" switch. This would base the rate of town growth in part on the number of active industries within the town's area. So, maybe, with four industries all at a high rate of production, the town would grow at its maximum potential rate; with no active industries, it would only grow slowly - and with anything between that, it would grow in proportion.

As I said, this would only be an influencing factor - along with passenger, mail and goods carried/delivered and the frequency of passenger services - but I think it would make it easier to plan services, and more realistic growth. You would know that a town with lots of active industries will grow quickly so will need better transport developed - at the moment, it's a big lottery which towns will grow fast and which won't, so you can often find that one station is suddenly overwhelmed with people.

An interesting catch on this is that you could count a company headquarters as an industry - with the rating of the company being mapped to a rate of production - so an Engineer's HQ would make little difference to a town, but a Tycoon's HQ would have a bigger effect.

So - over to you guys - would the clever peeps behind the code be able to to do either of these - and if so, would other player peeps like to see them?

[Nasher]

town growth is a real problem but it will be fixed in the next major version (0.6)

i've read about a fixed version that is yet available in a nightly build

actually (with version 0.52), every town with at least 1 bus connexion to another town, grows into a large city within smthg like 20 years

i'm currently playing a test-game over 200 years (1940 to 2140) and... my map turned into a mega....no, gigalopolis with only a few "dead zones" :/

issues:
- towns become cities that join together fo create a map-scaled grid
- industries become useless as you can get a large profit from tranporting passengers and mail...

[Ameecher]

Nasher, this is the TTD Patch suggestions forum, not the OpenTTD suggestions forum.

[Stevie D]

An interesting phenomenon with town growth...

Using the Ctrl+Boulder trick in the scenario (great idea, whoever did that one - thanks!) I built a couple of towns with a outyling "villages" nearby - the villages were part of those towns, just half a dozen houses well away from the rest of the town.

Both villages, and one of the towns, had a good bus service for 60 years. The town that had a good bus service grew from pop.350 to pop.3500, while its nearby village dwindled from 6 houses to just 2. The town that had no bus service to the centre did not grow at all, and the nearby village, which did have a bus, didn't grow at all either.

This strikes me as maybe a minor flaw in the way TT decides where to build. I would like to see it building houses/shops/offices around where there is transport provision, rather than randomly.

I was really keen on this plan to build satellite villages around a town, to increase the number of small settlements that don't grow wildly out of control - but maybe I'll have to scrap that plan and go back to re-thinking my 'newtowngrowth' settings instead.

[Raichase]

I was really keen on this plan to build satellite villages around a town, to increase the number of small settlements that don't grow wildly out of control - but maybe I'll have to scrap that plan and go back to re-thinking my 'newtowngrowth' settings instead.

Thats something I would like to see too. I mess around with the probabilities a town will build a road BRANCH mostly - less branches means the towns grow along their existing roads, without building their own intersections. It doesn't help much, but it helps guide a town a little, and will stop a town growing at all if they have no "dead end" roads to expand.

You may well be aware of the feature, but if not:

http://wiki.ttdpatch.net/tiki-index.php ... BranchProb

This also may be of interest to you, prevent towns from building roads at all:

http://wiki.ttdpatch.net/tiki-index.php ... uildNoRoad

I used to use the latter, but got sick of chasing towns around building roads for them, even the tiny hamlets I didn't care about.

[Csaboka]

With the current town growth algorithm, your satellitte villages can't grow. When a town decides to build a new house, it starts from the road tile below the town sign, then walks along the road randomly until it finds a suitable position for the house. Therefore, all towns grow from the center, and satellite villages can only lose their houses slowly.

It would be interesting to select the "seed" tile randomly from the stations that have accepted passengers in the last month (including bus stations). I don't have time to try this right now (and I'm not too familiar with that part of the code either), and I don't know how realistic that would be, but it would be worth a try.

[wallyweb]

... it starts from the road tile below the town sign ...

Just curious, but:
1. What if there is no road tile below the town name? Sometimes, when I create scenarios, I will leave that square empty or with a building, and put a road around it.
2. What if that road tile under the town name branches in four directions (N,S,E & W)?

[Csaboka]

Just curious, but:
1. What if there is no road tile below the town name? Sometimes, when I create scenarios, I will leave that square empty or with a building, and put a road around it.

TTD first tries finding a road tile in a 3x3 square around the town sign. If it finds no roads there, it will try building one in the same area. If both of those fail, it gives up and does nothing.

2. What if that road tile under the town name branches in four directions (N,S,E & W)?

TTD picks a random direction to go, just like it does for other junctions.

[Stevie D]

With the current town growth algorithm, your satellitte villages can't grow. When a town decides to build a new house, it starts from the road tile below the town sign, then walks along the road randomly until it finds a suitable position for the house. Therefore, all towns grow from the center, and satellite villages can only lose their houses slowly.

It would be interesting to select the "seed" tile randomly from the stations that have accepted passengers in the last month (including bus stations). I don't have time to try this right now (and I'm not too familiar with that part of the code either), and I don't know how realistic that would be, but it would be worth a try.

It's pretty low on the priority list - below all the other things I've suggested

It would be nice to have hamlets and villages like that, but I suspect it's a lot of work (and only has a big effect on hand-made scenarios). The benefit would be that towns grow around stations rather than randomly, which would help.

All in all, I think it's better to play with the road building and 'tgr' switches. If I wanted to ensure that towns with a mail service grow much quicker than those without, am I right in thinking I need a high

Code: Select all

tgrmailinweight

value?

[DaleStan]

That looks right. You also need to ensure that towngrowthrate is set to 2, otherwise the entire tgr* family will be ignored.

[Dave]

Finally. A newbie with some fecking SENSE.

[DaleStan]

It would be interesting to select the "seed" tile randomly from the stations that have accepted passengers in the last month (including bus stations). I don't have time to try this right now (and I'm not too familiar with that part of the code either), and I don't know how realistic that would be, but it would be worth a try.

So.

Is this what all these recent commits of yours have been working toward?

[Csaboka]

Not really - I was working towards implementing some of Michael Blunck's ideas. He wants town buildings to react to accepting cargo. This allows them to work like a dumbed down version of industries: accept cargo, start animation after accepting cargo, maybe even generate cargo. They are dumbed down because they don't know the amount of cargo they accepted, and it's impossible to implement stockpiling with this.

I read this topic when I was already working on this, and realized that the acceptance history could be used for other things too. I'm still not sure if my idea would work well. For example, I live near the edge of my town, and we have a bus stop right in front of our house. It doesn't seem to boost town growth, though... We have a train stop nearby, too, it is outside the town proper, and no one seems to build any buildings there just because there's a train stop nearby. Furthermore, the stations can't remember how much passengers they accepted, only the fact that they accepted some. Transporting one passenger per month would give the same boost as one thousand per month.

[Ameecher]

Just thought I'd throw in my comments here, even if they are only slighty relevant. One thing I like doing is setting up branchlines early on in the game and still have them as branch lines in the 2000s, not as great big double track mainlines with 5 tile long trains, because the town has grown like it is a sprinter on steroids. Even having townsbuildnoroads on the "problem" is reduced but instead of the town spreading out the buildings get incredibly dense resulting in skyscrapers being in a village.

Not a major issue just something that kept some places in a sort of timewarp might be nice