Wasteland [WIP] - 0.5.0 Released Sept 24, 2020!

[Dave]

It probably doesn't - I just found the town grew quicker after I turned it off (don't know if that's even vaguely related)

[Andrew350]

Thanks guys, glad to see people enjoying it

Um, I'd like to report a bug... Iron ore mines does not produce iron ore...

D'oh! A long time ago I must have switched the produced cargoes for testing purposes and I completely forgot about it! Sorry about that, I'll fix it soon. In the meantime, NO CHEATING!

(and none of the raw material producing industry accept wastelanders :S )

Are you sure? Is anyone else having this issue? I can't seem to reproduce it.

A very very minor thing discovered thus far: A station built next to a farm is suffixed as "... Mines"

Ah, that's a very easy fix, will be in the next update

I wonder if some of the road vehicles need some tweaking to make them more "different" - I just built the best of each one. But appreciate this is just a test

Yes, finding good stats will be a long process, if you have any general suggestions let me know, it may be a little while before I get a chance to play it thoroughly myself

Meanwhile I went bankrupt after every town I touched disappeared from existence,

It always goes like this: I bring them water or irradiated food or both and they start flattening their rubble. However, they barely ever build any shacks in their place. There's never enough shacks in one place to even consider bringing clean food or building materials.

It sounds to me like maybe you're not delivering both cargoes at the same time or just not delivering them frequently enough. Both cargoes need to be delivered in the same ~2 month period, otherwise just delivering 1 cargo will in fact cause the town to shrink. It is a bit counter-intuitive though, maybe I'll investigate whether I can halt town shrinkage until both cargoes are delivered without disrupting the other mechanics.

If that's not the problem though then I'm not really sure what's hanging you up.

Eventually there's not enough ruined houses to accept irradated food and water...

This should never happen ever, there should always be enough houses remaining to accept cargoes no matter what, and if not then shack houses should start appearing on their own over time. I don't really have time to test this at the moment, so would it be possible to post a savegame where this has happened/happens so I can check?

...cargodist...

You know, I never even considered cargodist when making this set and never got a chance to test it, so I have no idea if Wasteland will work very well (or at all) with it on. Same thing with AI's, but those I'm sure are broken, at least in terms of being useful...

[Drury]

Did a few tests to isolate the core of the issue.

The problem was with the irregularity of the service. I used trains and it seems currently it is set to react more to frequency of delivery than amount.

At worst there was a month between delivery, at best a week. Only the latter resulted in growth, and that was a rare occurence.

Made a test save with only trucks and 3 test towns. One got only water, one only rad food, one both. The two towns with partial service slowly shrunk, with only the one receiving both commodities grew shacks. Every other town on map with no service stagnated, which is what I'd also expect from towns receiving partial service, alas, that is not the case. It's a bit annoying as if you don't have both water and farm within reasonable distance of a town you might as well generate a new map since delivering only either will bite you later when the town shrinks so much it stops accepting stuff and you go bankrupt.

TEST.sav

(350.41 KiB) Downloaded 124 times

Also would have to share Dave's sentiment, seems there are too many road vehicles at the moment. There's a couple for each year and for the most part they're more of the same! Also a personal pet peeve, I'd hoped we'd have crazy Mad Max-esque battle truck designs, at least from the very start, although Fallout bus is very welcome.

Great fun otherwise though, sparked my interest in OpenTTD again.

Some additional feedback:

Having both seeds and irradiated food seems redundant. The former becomes useless as soon as you develop all nearest towns past the stage that they accept irradiated food, the latter continues to be useful throughout the game. I'd remove seeds and use irradiated food in their place as a component for clean food (the food is likely to contain seeds that rad-free food can be grown from so it makes sense).

I get the idea that when you deliver resources to an industry, they patch it up and start up production, but if you take time between deliveries the thing just falls apart again and it's really funny. It's like there were little peons holding up the roof who just gave up and went home with everyone else. I think it'd be cooler if the thing remained partly destroyed as it produces stuff initially, only patching itself up over time as you keep providing service (similar to self-upgrading power plants in ECS).

As I mentioned, towns destroy buildings if you provide only one type of resource. I'm certain you kind of meant for them to remove buildings and at the same time build shacks as both food and water are provided, however, I'm not sure if that's also a correct approach from both aesthetics and gameplay standpoint. Not sure if it's possible to delay the building destruction, but if it is, it should happen only by the time that renewed buildings come to be so you don't come to the point that town is full of shacks and doesn't accept irradiated food anymore too soon. The clean food chain takes the right amount of effort and time, but by the time you get there the town will stagnate for a considerate amount of time. In addition, it makes little sense to destroy perfectly fine ruins to build your tiny corrugated metal shack. I'd imagine there'd be ruins in the center with shacks making up the suburbs. Also, renewed offices are, as I understand, restored ruins, so if the townsfolk destroy all their ruins there's not much left to restore.

Self-sustained offices also seem a bit too much of a leap at first. Self-sustained shops would be more fitting at first, maybe more post-apocalyptey still as they'd perhaps look more like military bunkers (even after decades of intense rebuilding, you can't trust the world to be perfectly civilized, and who knows what kind of weather conditions and mutated wildlife are out there?). Office blocks seem to me like far-off endgame stuff.

Might as well read what andrew had to say while I'm here

Thanks guys, glad to see people enjoying it

Thank you for the thing, it's the tits.

Um, I'd like to report a bug... Iron ore mines does not produce iron ore...

D'oh! A long time ago I must have switched the produced cargoes for testing purposes and I completely forgot about it! Sorry about that, I'll fix it soon. In the meantime, NO CHEATING!

Too late!

(and none of the raw material producing industry accept wastelanders :S )

Are you sure? Is anyone else having this issue? I can't seem to reproduce it.

Me neither. Maybe forgot to refit? Passengers aren't wastelanders!

Meanwhile I went bankrupt after every town I touched disappeared from existence,

It always goes like this: I bring them water or irradiated food or both and they start flattening their rubble. However, they barely ever build any shacks in their place. There's never enough shacks in one place to even consider bringing clean food or building materials.

It sounds to me like maybe you're not delivering both cargoes at the same time or just not delivering them frequently enough. Both cargoes need to be delivered in the same ~2 month period, otherwise just delivering 1 cargo will in fact cause the town to shrink. It is a bit counter-intuitive though, maybe I'll investigate whether I can halt town shrinkage until both cargoes are delivered without disrupting the other mechanics.

If that's not the problem though then I'm not really sure what's hanging you up.

Town shrinkage is by design? Not sure if I like. Thought it was so older buildings get replaced, but that's not needed at such early stage. Although I have to say I honestly like the part where bringing stuff in via trains is useless, I just wish I were told earlier. Makes trains not rule the game nearly as much, if you really do wanna bring stuff in via train you better get inventive and transfer onto trucks for that steady flow and such. There should be a prompt somewhere in the game to tell you to deliver faster rather than more!

Eventually there's not enough ruined houses to accept irradated food and water...

This should never happen ever, there should always be enough houses remaining to accept cargoes no matter what, and if not then shack houses should start appearing on their own over time. I don't really have time to test this at the moment, so would it be possible to post a savegame where this has happened/happens so I can check?

This happened with the largest town on the map. There were actually like 3 ruined houses left, but it was impossible to reach all without station walking. Not sure if there's anything you can do, but as I said, I'd prefer if towns only began to destroy stuff once they had the resources needed for renewed housing.




And finally, there's this.

http://fallout.bethsoft.com/

If that doesn't get you playing this mod, it at least gets you to play the game that it inspired. For war, war never changes!

[colossal404]

(and none of the raw material producing industry accept wastelanders :S )

Are you sure? Is anyone else having this issue? I can't seem to reproduce it.

Sorry, my bad, I was an idiot enough to test it with truck stations to see what is accepted in the coverage area

[Andrew350]

Woohoo, another wall of text!

Made a test save with only trucks and 3 test towns. One got only water, one only rad food, one both. The two towns with partial service slowly shrunk, with only the one receiving both commodities grew shacks. Every other town on map with no service stagnated, which is what I'd also expect from towns receiving partial service, alas, that is not the case. It's a bit annoying as if you don't have both water and farm within reasonable distance of a town you might as well generate a new map since delivering only either will bite you later when the town shrinks so much it stops accepting stuff and you go bankrupt.

As I mentioned, towns destroy buildings if you provide only one type of resource. I'm certain you kind of meant for them to remove buildings and at the same time build shacks as both food and water are provided, however, I'm not sure if that's also a correct approach from both aesthetics and gameplay standpoint. Not sure if it's possible to delay the building destruction, but if it is, it should happen only by the time that renewed buildings come to be so you don't come to the point that town is full of shacks and doesn't accept irradiated food anymore too soon. The clean food chain takes the right amount of effort and time, but by the time you get there the town will stagnate for a considerate amount of time. In addition, it makes little sense to destroy perfectly fine ruins to build your tiny corrugated metal shack. I'd imagine there'd be ruins in the center with shacks making up the suburbs.

What you describe here is a result of OpenTTD's town growth mechanism, not necessarily something I implemented on purpose. I'll do some investigating to see if I can delay town shrinkage when just one cargo is delivered, but I'm unsure if I can do that in a way without creating a sort of 'loophole' where towns never shrink in that situation. It's a delicate balance, after all; I'm trying to do something the game wasn't really made for

As far as keeping ruins in a town instead of overbuilding them right away, that is certainly do-able. You make a good point about aesthetics, but I wonder if it would only exacerbate another issue you mentioned about houses becoming too spread apart?

Also would have to share Dave's sentiment, seems there are too many road vehicles at the moment. There's a couple for each year and for the most part they're more of the same! Also a personal pet peeve, I'd hoped we'd have crazy Mad Max-esque battle truck designs, at least from the very start, although Fallout bus is very welcome.

Perhaps I can spread the introduction dates out and exaggerate the stats a little more to compensate? It would have the added bonus of stretching the existing vehicles past 100 years and also loosen the clutter.

As for the graphics...I know its pretty basic right now. Mad Max-like stuff is definitely in the pipeline, just takes time to make it

Having both seeds and irradiated food seems redundant. The former becomes useless as soon as you develop all nearest towns past the stage that they accept irradiated food, the latter continues to be useful throughout the game. I'd remove seeds and use irradiated food in their place as a component for clean food (the food is likely to contain seeds that rad-free food can be grown from so it makes sense).

If you remember (it's on the website, on the industries page) there's a few additional industries I was considering adding (which I'm now 99% sure I'm going to add) which would give irradiated food a little more purpose. It's a valid point though, I'll certainly consider it.

I get the idea that when you deliver resources to an industry, they patch it up and start up production, but if you take time between deliveries the thing just falls apart again and it's really funny. It's like there were little peons holding up the roof who just gave up and went home with everyone else. I think it'd be cooler if the thing remained partly destroyed as it produces stuff initially, only patching itself up over time as you keep providing service (similar to self-upgrading power plants in ECS).

I like the idea, it sounds like the way I originally envisioned it, but the way I coded it was somewhat simple, and limited to only two months of service. I'll see if I can make something more complex, but I'm not the greatest coder

Also, renewed offices are, as I understand, restored ruins, so if the townsfolk destroy all their ruins there's not much left to restore.

Well, I guess "renewed" might not be the best word since they're not technically supposed to be rebuilt ruins (at least in my eyes), but rather just more improved buildings than shacks which resemble pre-war buildings. Dunno if that makes sense, but I had a hard time thinking of a better word to describe it.

Self-sustained offices also seem a bit too much of a leap at first. Self-sustained shops would be more fitting at first, maybe more post-apocalyptey still as they'd perhaps look more like military bunkers (even after decades of intense rebuilding, you can't trust the world to be perfectly civilized, and who knows what kind of weather conditions and mutated wildlife are out there?). Office blocks seem to me like far-off endgame stuff.

Remember: the buildings in place now are merely placeholders, not intended to fully represent the final product. There will be lots more variety eventually. Whether or not I can successfully implement such a succession of buildings within a class like you describe, we'll see.

Town shrinkage is by design? Not sure if I like. Thought it was so older buildings get replaced, but that's not needed at such early stage. Although I have to say I honestly like the part where bringing stuff in via trains is useless, I just wish I were told earlier. Makes trains not rule the game nearly as much, if you really do wanna bring stuff in via train you better get inventive and transfer onto trucks for that steady flow and such. There should be a prompt somewhere in the game to tell you to deliver faster rather than more!

Like mentioned above, the town shrinkage is a result of OpenTTD's town growth algorithm, not mine. The only time when town shrinkage could be considered a feature is when you're siphoning off wastelanders from a town without supplying any cargoes in return. But again, that's merely a side-effect of the game's mechanics, not necessarily designed behavior (but that in particular is behavior I do like!).

As far as adding prompts to the game: it's been on my wishlist since I first envisioned this set to also have a GameScript to go with it that helps explain the general background and gameplay information. Alas, my brief adventure into GS coding ended miserably, so unless someone more able than I takes it up, it's unlikely to happen.



I like the ideas so far, it's definitely making me think of some improvements that can be made!

[Drury]

Yeah I'd be fine with towns shrinking only when siphoning them. Too bad it can't he helped, but it's fun nonetheless if you play it the way it's meant to be played.

It was very counter-intuitive when I gave them water, they said the town was growing, while it was in fact shrinking. A notification of some sort in the town window that you need to deliver all cargos at once would be helpful (much like the food lab, that I had no trouble understanding right off the bat), I thought I broke the thing somehow. Even thought prompts aren't possible, it might be possible to add something to the town's window to say "We don't care how much water and food we get, but please send it often!" or something to that effect.

The case with spread apart houses - this was an issue when I hit the 3-house limit on the largest town, there was one ruined house in each corner and it was impossible to catch them all with one station. When it comes to shacks, they usually spring up all over and there's up to tens of them. The way I see it, if the ruined houses in the middle remain intact and shacks only spring up on the edge of the town, there would soon enough definitely be enough of them to catch in one station. Would be certainly worth a shot, if you find a way to do it that is.

Yeah a bit exaggeration would help on RVs. I can't say I quite get the idea of different classes and propulsion types, they seem very alike. You mentioned earlier that nuclear vehicles would have lower maintenance costs, yet higher purchase costs, which is one thing I also noticed in-game, but the difference isn't exactly astronomical. As for gasoline versus electricity, I'm baffled.

The "useless" industry chain is exactly what this needs, I very much approve. So far it seemes very strongly geared towards road vehicles, not only since towns require frequent service which trucks are best suited for, but also the flexibility of road network relative to rail. It doesn't take much effort to connect a town into an existing network and send all trucks to dump resources in order to revive it. I love how you finally gave road service a real purpose with this grf. However, rail network I find to be utterly useless as of now save for handling industry-to-industry cargo transit. A dedicated industry network in a general TTD sense would make trains more worthwhile. Also, since there's an oil rig, it'd promote ships and helicopters/airships/gyrocopters as well.

Speaking of trains, I notice there are two railtypes, scavenged and normal. Scavenged depots build scavenged vehicles, whereas normal depots build new vehicles. Am I to look forward to each depot building a different type of vehicle?

Rather than re-newed, how about rebuilt? Implies they destroyed some houses, then decided they looked nice and built new ones like them.

[Buzzito]

Hi, after a few hours testing, here is my feedback.

I tested it with openttd1.5 + wasteland 0.2 + wasteland town names
Settings in default. Breakdowns to none. no inflation, runing and construction costs in low, only trucks.

In 128x128 maps with high industry only 1 water pump is created. so is really easy to bankrupt. with bigger maps and water to towns or food plant chain is easy to make profit.

I always loose money with gravel and minerals.


As was mentioned the towns will shrink if you deliver only 1 cargo (food, water)....but they wont dissapear they remain with 3 people, and once u deliver the 2 cargoes it grows ok.


To get wastelanders I deliver only clean food and water to a town and it keeps growing only yellow tiles.




Once all the town is blue, stations wont accept food or water, only passengers.
I noticed that if you dont start with passengers and keep delivering food to a station, the station wont accept the food but the town keeps growing (once every 20-25 days)
when passengers are delivered, growth rate is (once every 5-10 days)




I hope it helps you. sorry for my bad english.

[Andrew350]

Yes thank you, you're feedback is invaluable to me

Even thought prompts aren't possible, it might be possible to add something to the town's window to say "We don't care how much water and food we get, but please send it often!" or something to that effect.

I'm almost positive I can't do that via NewGRF, only GS's have control over the town window. Heck, I can't even change the name of the cargoes shown in the town window, you'll notice it still shows Mail instead of Wastelanders. I put in a request to be able to change that a while ago, but I don't know if anything will ever come of it.

Yeah a bit exaggeration would help on RVs. I can't say I quite get the idea of different classes and propulsion types, they seem very alike. You mentioned earlier that nuclear vehicles would have lower maintenance costs, yet higher purchase costs, which is one thing I also noticed in-game, but the difference isn't exactly astronomical. As for gasoline versus electricity, I'm baffled.

I intended to have the difference between classes be a bit more noticeable, such that one could easily identify a new vehicle by class based on general performance. If the vehicles are too much alike though, then such a system is pointless, so I'll definitely work on making them more unique. As for propulsion types, I mainly just threw that in there as an extra thing, right now it doesn't really affect the stats at all. Nuclear vehicles versus gas/electric should make some difference, maybe not enough to sway you one way or the other, but it's something I'll work on to see if it can add another element to choosing a vehicle. Certainly I think trains will benefit more from such propulsion differences I'm thinking I won't even use a class-system for trains since there won't be as many of them, but we'll see. I'm still working out the best way to approach these things, since it's my first big vehicle set. If it becomes too difficult or pointless to use both systems in a meaningful way then I'll just get rid of one altogether.

The "useless" industry chain is exactly what this needs, I very much approve. So far it seemes very strongly geared towards road vehicles, not only since towns require frequent service which trucks are best suited for, but also the flexibility of road network relative to rail. It doesn't take much effort to connect a town into an existing network and send all trucks to dump resources in order to revive it. I love how you finally gave road service a real purpose with this grf. However, rail network I find to be utterly useless as of now save for handling industry-to-industry cargo transit. A dedicated industry network in a general TTD sense would make trains more worthwhile. Also, since there's an oil rig, it'd promote ships and helicopters/airships/gyrocopters as well.

I agree, I think the next big release I'll try to include them.

Speaking of trains, I notice there are two railtypes, scavenged and normal. Scavenged depots build scavenged vehicles, whereas normal depots build new vehicles. Am I to look forward to each depot building a different type of vehicle?

Possibly. I haven't worked out the specifics yet but I believe that was my original intention way back when I first laid that out.

In 128x128 maps with high industry only 1 water pump is created. so is really easy to bankrupt.

I'll mess with the building probablity a little bit, but the intention is that water pumps are a little more rare than other industries. If it's too difficult to make a successful company though, then that's definitely a problem.

I always loose money with gravel and minerals.

I sort of intended certain cargoes to be more difficult to make money with than others, but losing money might be extreme. I'll look into tweaking costs a little, and it might mean tweaking the road vehicles as well.

By the way, how is the overall profitability of your typical network? I honestly just completely made up values for the road vehicle costs, so I'm interested to see how hard or easy it is to make money with them.

[kackofant]

greetings!

at first i have to admit, this set is a great addition. i tested it a bit with one of the last iron horse nightly builds and the new tropical/south american roster and it played smoot up to one moment:

is it intended that citys grow up to a point where they only acceppt clean food and then start to shrink if clean food is not delivered? is there any chance that this behavior could be changed? it was very difficult to manage the supply of the town, due the next facillity which provides this good, was simply to far away, to usefully provide my city with the wanted goods. a parameter which changes the station-rating, like in firs, would also solve the problem. but i think it is better, if cities simply stop growing if clean food is missing.

(i think, the problem is also described some posts above)

[piratescooby]

Enjoying the Wasteland grf ,need help ,Which cargos go to the food lab,how about a flowchart for the cargos.A suggestion how about solar/wind farm these can be connected to the towns with the pipe grf,I use this grf for oil/chemicals/water .A hydro power plant could be another industry.For the survivors a water treatment plant a hydroponic farm [mars industry's] , farm based around a green house [fruit and veg],Futuristic vehicles also solar/wind powered ,steampunk airships come to mind .Commercially a tourist entertainment center,hotel shopping complex [requires passengers/wastelanders produces happiness].Thanks for the great GRF keep up the good work.

[Andrew350]

is it intended that citys grow up to a point where they only acceppt clean food and then start to shrink if clean food is not delivered? is there any chance that this behavior could be changed? it was very difficult to manage the supply of the town, due the next facillity which provides this good, was simply to far away, to usefully provide my city with the wanted goods. a parameter which changes the station-rating, like in firs, would also solve the problem. but i think it is better, if cities simply stop growing if clean food is missing.

(i think, the problem is also described some posts above)

Yeah, that's pretty much the same problem as described above. Once you start delivering only one of the required cargoes, it causes the town to shrink, which is not intended, instead the town should simply stop growing. I'll be investigating a way to change this behavior soon

In the mean time, as a workaround, if you stop delivering ALL cargoes at the point you describe then the town should remain stagnant until you can set up the required cargo chain.

Enjoying the Wasteland grf ,need help ,Which cargos go to the food lab,how about a flowchart for the cargos.

Here's a crude flowchart. As for your suggestions: probably not in the main set, but definitely some ideas for an add-on set

[piratescooby]

Which vehicles transport Gravel ,cant find any even for refit ?

[Andrew350]

The hopper vehicles refit to gravel (the ones at the bottom of the list).

[Mizari]

I don't see any rail (the railway button is greyed out)?

[Andrew350]

Sorry, only road vehicles have been implemented so far, no trains yet. For now you have to use another NewGRF such as OpenGFX+ Trains if you want them.

[Dave]

I refuse to let this fall off the first page of GFX development

What's the score at the minute Andrew? Have you any other goodies for testing!?

[Andrew350]

Ah, I'm glad you reminded me Dave, like a total slacker I completely forgot to upload the newest version! I guess I've been busy with work and fun and stuff, I'm really bad at that.

I blame the nice weather.

------------
Unfortunately no major features added this time, just a bugfix release fixing some of the issues brought to my attention earlier, such as the iron ore mine producing the wrong cargo, station names being 'wrong', and difficulty making profit with some cargoes/industries.

I haven't made any changes to vehicles though since I haven't had a chance to play a proper game yet, also I'm unsure if changing introduction dates and whatnot will affect savegame compatibility, so I've decided to err on the side of caution and not include those changes in this release.

Also as a sidenote: you'll notice in BaNaNaS that the name will still say Wasteland 0.2.0 even though the version is actually 0.2.1; this is because I screwed up when uploading the initial file and included the version number in the file name, which is a bad idea because that name can't be changed. I don't know what I was thinking, but there's not much I can do about that now; just trust me that the newest version has been uploaded when I say it has

-------------
But anyway, in other news I'm also starting the initial work on trains/planes, so stay tuned for that in the coming weeks

[YanDeJin]

Recently I started to play OpenTTd again. TT was my second computer game i Tried in the 90ies

I also tried wateland but i do not suceed and would like to know wheter it is my fault or a programming error.
I played Wasteland 0.21 with openttd 1.51
I started to delier clean food, water and bulding materials to a city.
In a loop the follwing happens
----------
-City builds 4 renewed buildings
-City grows to around 100 people
- Two renewed buildings are destroyed
- City shrinks to about 60 people
-Cycle retstarts
---------------
I hardly make any profit.
Can someone check wkether it is the games or my fault

[Andrew350]

Hello YanDeJin

I've looked at your savegame and you appear to be doing everything right. There seem to be occasional periods where delivery of building materials becomes too infrequent either due to jams and/or breakdowns which could explain the ups and downs in town growth you explain, and also there's just a bit of randomness in the way towns grow that could cause it as well. That being said, it isn't exactly desired behavior to have towns shrink like that, and it seems to be the biggest problem players run into while trying to grow towns.

In other words - it's the games fault In fact, I've already fixed this issue in the upcoming 0.3 release which will prevent towns from shrinking due to infrequent service, as well as many other improvements that will make growing towns a little easier

[trainman1432]

Chem plant isn't producing chemicals.

oh... and I have a couple AI's running too.

my newgrfs:
town names
wasteland
ISR
Modern Waypoint
Modular loco sheds
BK enhanced tunnels
HEQS
eGRVTS 2
Hover Bus
Hover vehicles
2cc trains in NML
and my save file:

Reconstruct and Co., Mar 14th, 2086.sav

The save!

(540.37 KiB) Downloaded 117 times

also, if you need on of the grfs I'm using, just ask.