Several suggestions: vehicle list, mapview, distances, vehicle profit/cost calculations

[stefan36]

Hello,

I have been playing TT back in the 90's and now for couple of years OpenTTD nad I find it really great since OpenTTD addresses really most of the issues that were problematic in the original TT.
However I still have some suggestions that I think could be useful for improving the experience further.

I play mainly big maps like 2048x2048 and build large networks of train/vehicle feeder systems for hub airports across the map. I miss the following functions:

Order preview in vehicle/train lists
When you open the vehicle or train lists from the top menu you do not see their orders. However you do see the orders on ships/aircraft lists. Is there any reason for that - I mean why orders are not shown in vehicle/train lists??


Mapview - town names toggle
Would be nice to have a switch to show names of stations that belong to different companies and town names where companies run business in. On large map and wide zoom when you turn on station names you hardly see anything. See picture. Would be nice to have some filter options i.e. show airports/stations names belonging to company X, show towns' names where company X operates



Mapview - Distance measuring tool
Since popular newGRF av8 includes range limitation for aircraft, it would be great to have some kind of Manhattan distance measuring tool in the map-view menu. For example it coudl open a mapview and they you select 2 points on the map view and a textbox displays the distance.
If this is hard to code then I would live with some kind of export function (even as a command line) from .sav file that would export stations coordinates to .csv or .txt file. Then I could manage that in Excel later....

Vehicle profit calculation
Correct me if I am wrong but I believe that vehicle's profit calculation is only showing if the vehicle is paying off its running costs?? But what about the purchase price?
I am wandering if there is any way to implement depreciation into profit cost calculations. I would like to know if the vehicle is paying off its purchase price OR what is the minimum profit it has to have to pay off its purchase price and earn for new one.
For example: Aircraft costs 100 000$ and has a lifetime of 25 yrs meaning it has to have profit of at least 4000$ per year to pay off (not considering inflation for simplicity). If it is less than 4000$ then it is earning money but not to the extent that will make this route really profitable.
As long as any kind of depreciation of purchase price is not included in the vehicle's running costs I guess it would be helpful to have some indication if vehicles are paying off themselves....

What do you think of these suggestions?


best regards
stefan36

[Pilot]

Order preview in vehicle/train lists
When you open the vehicle or train lists from the top menu you do not see their orders. However you do see the orders on ships/aircraft lists. Is there any reason for that - I mean why orders are not shown in vehicle/train lists??

Many people have trains or buses that have 80/90 different orders, so adding those onto the list would make that list so much longer, and difficult to follow.

Mapview - town names toggle
Would be nice to have a switch to show names of stations that belong to different companies and town names where companies run business in. On large map and wide zoom when you turn on station names you hardly see anything. See picture. Would be nice to have some filter options i.e. show airports/stations names belonging to company X, show towns' names where company X operates

Surely that would make the mapview so much more crowded and difficult to follow?

I don't really have much to say about the other two suggestions you've made.

[stefan36]

Order preview in vehicle/train lists
When you open the vehicle or train lists from the top menu you do not see their orders. However you do see the orders on ships/aircraft lists. Is there any reason for that - I mean why orders are not shown in vehicle/train lists??

Many people have trains or buses that have 80/90 different orders, so adding those onto the list would make that list so much longer, and difficult to follow.

Well maybe, but following your rationale I do no understand why aircraft can have its orders shown by default as they may have many orders too. I could live with a solution that this is made as an option in Settings "Show orders in vehicle list: on/off" because I believe there are also many people who have only few orders for vehicles.

Mapview - town names toggle
Would be nice to have a switch to show names of stations that belong to different companies and town names where companies run business in. On large map and wide zoom when you turn on station names you hardly see anything. See picture. Would be nice to have some filter options i.e. show airports/stations names belonging to company X, show towns' names where company X operates

Surely that would make the mapview so much more crowded and difficult to follow?

True if you are assuming that there are hundreds of stations - but if you can handle such amount without any overview of geographical spread then you do not need this feature.
In my view it has to be a filter with options to limit what is displayed on map and when you combine it with zoom ability of mapview it can work pretty well and without clutter. Since it is currently not possible to zoom out the main view far enough to see the whole 2048x2048 terrain then mapview is the best place to put such feature in, I guess...

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stefan36