"Don't overwhelm networks" option for Cargodist

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audigex
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Re: "Don't overwhelm networks" option for Cargodist

Post by audigex »

PikkaBird wrote:audigex's original suggestion seems to be simply to hide passengers who aren't transported. My question is what does this mechanism add versus, for example, just ignoring the extra passengers?
Actually, my original suggestion (/request) was "Give me an option to stop my network becoming overwhelmed"

I'm not an OpenTTD developer, I don't know the internal mechanics of the engine, and I wasn't particularly trying to give the full solution... I was suggesting a change I'd like to see :p I'm well aware that the line between "Trivial" and "Impossible" can be quite fine in game development, and if it never happens it never happens... the discussion after that was just vague throwing around of ideas of how it could be achieved.

Reduce passenger number patches work quite well later in the game, but I find they're a bit of a blunt instrument - ie if you lower game-wide pax numbers sufficiently in order to make the "core" of your network sensible, the rural areas become a complete ghost town. It works to an extent, but it lacks finesse.

What I'd love to see would be a huge overhaul of how passengers, trains, shared orders and "rail networks" (rather than a combination of lines) work. But all I'm really asking is that if a CargoDist link is running above 100% capacity, people stop trying to take that link, so that we never see huge numbers of passengers waiting at a station.

In the real world, people stop getting trains when they hit a stupid level of overcrowding: I'm just asking that if I forget to check a station for a while and haven't upgraded the trains, I don't return to find 2,000 waiting passengers. One thing that does help to an extent is turning off the ability for towns to build roads, but it doesn't solve the problem, only prevents it getting horrendous. And it means that the game doesn't develop naturally, I have to become the city planner.

As someone said, it currently feels like OpenTTD is Tetris: it eventually just becomes a neverending torrent of blocks tumbling towards you.

I guess I'd just like to see network capacity factor in to town growth and passenger production to a greater extent. It seems a lot of us like to play in a "realistic" game style, and this would help. I don't want everywhere to need a 4 track mainline with 10-car duplex high speed EMU's.... I like little rural lines too, but they quickly become impractical.
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Re: "Don't overwhelm networks" option for Cargodist

Post by Sylf »

audigex wrote:I guess I'd just like to see network capacity factor in to town growth and passenger production to a greater extent. It seems a lot of us like to play in a "realistic" game style, and this would help. I don't want everywhere to need a 4 track mainline with 10-car duplex high speed EMU's.... I like little rural lines too, but they quickly become impractical.
Give my town growth limiter script a try. With that script, unless you provide X% of passenger/mail transport demand, the towns stop growing.
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Re: "Don't overwhelm networks" option for Cargodist

Post by audigex »

Although again I think that could help a little, I don't think it solves the same problem..... presumably towns will presumably grow until they overload the network capacity, then stop growing... but by that point it's too late.

eg while I'm transporting 100% of the passengers (capacity > demand) the town will grow... but when that drops <100% (demand > capacity) it will continue producing passengers and it will continue to grow until I'm transporting <89% of passengers before stopping. At that point, I will be transporting 89% of pax, so the other 11% will slowly stack up in my stations, with me being unable to move them along. It would be slightly better if I could set the minimum amount transported for growth to be 100%, but I presume that could cause other problems (ie it doesn't ever actually hit 100%?)

It also doesn't relate to capacity out of the town, presumably? So as long as my trams are picking the pax up, they will continue to be taken to the main railway station. Therefore requiring me to carefully balance my feeder routes to be slightly lower capacity than my other routes.

I'm more thinking that when Pax choose a destination, they should check the capacity of the route.. but I don't know to what extent this data is available. I know Cargodest (note dest, as in Destinations not dist, as in Distribution) used to hold some information about route demand vs capacity, but cargodist may work in an entirely different way
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Re: "Don't overwhelm networks" option for Cargodist

Post by Eddi »

audigex wrote:It also doesn't relate to capacity out of the town, presumably? So as long as my trams are picking the pax up, they will continue to be taken to the main railway station. Therefore requiring me to carefully balance my feeder routes to be slightly lower capacity than my other routes.
cargodist has a feature that drops the rating of the origin station if cargo from that station is piling up on an intermediate station.
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Re: "Don't overwhelm networks" option for Cargodist

Post by Cadde »

Sorry to revive this topic 2 years later but it's very much relevant to my problem with CargoDist at the moment.

It's not so much that i care about having to expand my capacity city -> city. But the fact that i cannot expand my capacity towards an industry that accepts a limited number of passengers etc.

So i currently have 3,000 passengers waiting to enter my ECS vectors Fishing Grounds. That's fine, i can just transport them there anyways and they'll vanish into thin air. But the problem is i need to ensure the Fishing Grounds has at least 96 passengers in it's internal storage at all times. It has 3 slots for passengers and a max capacity of 192 passengers. It needs at least 96 passengers for the 50% bonus in productivity and the slots cycle once every 8 production cycles.

So i have a small vessel servicing the Fishing Grounds with a timetable to ensure i always deliver and pick up passengers in such a way that the slots are always occupied. If i deliver all other passengers waiting i run out of my buffer and the industry stops producing yummy fish in the quantities i need.

Of course, this wouldn't be a problem for me either. 3,000 passengers is small change in the economy as a whole. Except for the fact i periodically check my stations waiting cargo value to see where i need to upgrade the capacity of my network. And these buffer passengers always ends up on the top of the list of stations with poor capacity.

So, i would very much like it if CargoDist has a feature that would at least try and not feed passengers down a link that clearly doesn't have the capacity to handle several hundreds of passengers every month. Instead looking to send those passengers to other more capacious routes.

... Unless i am missing something here...?
But no, it's not a matter of changing the "saturation of short paths" setting in CargoDist as there's only one path to take and the end destination is what's really bottlenecking. It accepts passengers at all times, it will just void any extra passengers.

Oh and by the way, disabling stockpile limits in ECS vectors does nothing. I would assume it's related to the game difficulty being "CUSTOM" rather than easy, medium, hard. ECS vectors ignores parameters when difficulty is set to "hard". The "custom" difficulty returned carries a value of 3 and the hard difficulty carries a value of 2. Three is greater than two so i would think that's why the parameters are ignored.

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Re: "Don't overwhelm networks" option for Cargodist

Post by Simons Mith »

I have a standing interest in this too, from a game design perspective. So, I hope no-one minds but I'd like to store my thoughts here too.

If I was to fiddle with this area, one of the things I'd especially look at is the town growth mechanic. Simply, four stations will cause any town to grow at max rate. If that's four bus stations, that's just four tiles. That seems generous. Great for growing a small town quickly, but also has the side effect of magnifying the problem. My feeling is that town growth should be proportional to the number of station tiles. To take an overly simplistic case, perhaps towns should need 1 tile of station per x population to grow at certain rates. 0 tiles, base-rate growth. 1 tile per 1000 population, growth increase by a small amount. 1 station tile per 100 population, growth is high. And so on. You'd have to tweak the numbers. But that kind of setup would mean that as a town grows, the rate of increase tails off as the town outgrows its transport facilities. By the time you have a city of 40,000, 4 bus stops are a drop in the ocean and should do nothing to increase the growth speed, but if you've got several big intercity rail stations, 4-6 platforms of 6-8 tile trains, that's the level of service the city needs and that does help its growth. But for maximum growth you might need even more; I think the rough rule for simulationist players would be 'all trains pretty much full = town growth stable', and only 'trains half full = room for growth'. That's close to the reverse of how OTTD currently does things.

So possible tweak one: even when stations are present, they need to be proportional to town size (or even over-sized) before they give significant benefits.


The other thing is, how do you fit thousands of people, or thousand of tons of materials, into one station tile? At present the game causes *old* cargos to decay, but if there was a maximum capacity per tile those preposterous quantities of cargo would only appear in the first place where the stations were big enough to handle them.

So possible tweak two: as well as or instead of cargo decay, a maximum station capacity, which might be very low for rural stations. That way a two tile train can serve several stations over a much onger timespan before it gets overcrowded and has to be upgraded. Maybe even its the introduction of new faster rolling stock that's the trigger? That way the old 40mph steam loco serves 40 passengers each way for donkey's years, but when the new 120 passenger DMU comes online, more people start using the service and the towns grow to 100 passengers each way before things re-stabilise.


In fact for those who want to use OTTD in modeling mode, I'd advocate setting the parameters such that growth is next to zero unless a station has _over_-capacity, and is otherwise stable. The means you can run small trains along rural routes and they'll tick over indefinitely, but once you provide a super high-speed service those towns start to prosper and they'll grow _into_ the new service rather than constantly outgrowing the service they currently have. That lets the player influence growth rather than forcing them to constantly play catch-up.
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Re: "Don't overwhelm networks" option for Cargodist

Post by YNM »

Speaking from someone who really liked cargodist since I knew it (wasn't in trunk but quite developed back then, still have the saves), I'd say that this "overcrowding" behaviour probably came from the fact that they don't really have an effect on ratings, and ratings really don't have an effect on the passengers that it generates. If they do, for example, the passenger cargo would starts to decay more rapidly; after a while passenger production would be halted; then after the whole lot becomes clear again (like, 0 pax waiting and production off), production could start again. I do know for a fact that passenger production in OTTD is just like industries, so there's no absolute limit on how much could go, nor differentiation on how and where to go for each cargo (unlike say, TF's crazily persisten pax/cargo system, which game crashes every so often on my laptop now).

TL;DR if only crowding of lines could really affect the amount of cargo generated !
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Re: "Don't overwhelm networks" option for Cargodist

Post by sootynz »

I'd like to add my support for not overwhelming networks.

currently, towns grow more rapidly if you increase the number of stations, until you reach five, trivially easy if you like trams as I do. After that increasing the number of stations makes no difference. I'd like to see town growth and supply of passengers respond to what proportion of the town is covered by station catchment area and what proportion of passenger supply is transported. Wouldn't this be relatively straightforward to implement, and hence reduce the potential of overwhelming networks?

Also, could I repeat an earlier suggestion that a simple "one-click" on a town produce a visual of the current catchment area covered by stations, and another one-click on a town displays all its stations' waiting passengers/cargo rather than having to click on each.
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