Transport Tycoon Forums

I know they exist irl. Tunnels through hills and stuff with water at the bottom so that boats can drive through them. Why are not a thing yet? They’d be really useful for going through mountains without having to flatten them or dig cannals and use like 15 locks.

It's on a wish-list. It's not been implemented already because despite there being some interest in this, nobody has taken the initiative to work on both the code and the graphics. If you haven't already, you might want to read this conversation.

If you're familiar with C++ coding and are interested in contributing, that would be helpful.

Well I found graphics for water tunnels in an old thread, so that’s that taken care of, but someone would have to compile them into a NewGRF or something as I have no idea how. I’ve never seen any of OpenTTD’s code but I’ve done some simple mods using C++ before. I think the main problem would be solving that bug where ships clip into the terrain as they enter the tunnels, which to me seems like it could be solved by giving ships some extra frames where they only show half the sprite, or better, creating a system to block some parts of a sprite. Like you could place a tile that looks exactly like the tile after the tunnel but is actually not terrain and instead a higher-priority graphic that would cover up a ship as it entered the tunnel.

The most difficult aspect with a boat tunnel is the way how the boat graphics are handled - forget vanilla boats, how'd you make it work (or not work) nicely with FISH2 or Sailing Ships NewGRF ?

YNM wrote:The most difficult aspect with a boat tunnel is the way how the boat graphics are handled - forget vanilla boats, how'd you make it work (or not work) nicely with FISH2 or Sailing Ships NewGRF ?

Eh... boats already look rough when they overlap each other. I'm in favour of just adding a tunnel and letting players use it or not, as they choose. NUTS already has the graphics under a creative commons licence.

What I'd really like is a way for WETrails (part of NUTS) to be laid on the ocean, but that's another issue.

YNM wrote: ↑09 Dec 2018 06:52 how'd you make it work (or not work) nicely with FISH2 or Sailing Ships NewGRF ?

Sailing ships should be unable to use tunnels at all, and so should all the larger ships. This would be consistent with real life.

AFAIK the only boat tunnels that exist are canal tunnels, which allow only small barges. There is a project of a much larger tunnel, but nothing like that has ever been built.

... except the game has no comcept of what constitutes a "sail ship" or "large ship"

Well, if boat tunnels are ever going to be added, I guess the distinction between ship sizes can be added too. It could be just "small ships" and "large ships", like it is with aircraft.

I vote to have Ship tunnels for all types of Marine craft ......No matter the size , lets get the coding sorted ..
https://www.norwegianamerican.com/news/ ... ip-tunnel/

eekee wrote: ↑21 Mar 2019 11:57 Eh... boats already look rough when they overlap each other. I'm in favour of just adding a tunnel and letting players use it or not, as they choose.

EXACTLY !

Aqueducts (water-bridges) and even canals look not very realistic too (with their depth = 0). But we need them, use them and like them.

Ship tunnels - this is a great idea - this would be very useful.

(There is already a solution to the problem of graphics of input-output for the ship and the tunnel - this is a ship depot: to draw entrance and exit of the tunnel for ships similar to entry and exit of ship depot.
Water Tunnels Portal: ship depot or bridges over the tunnel entrance will hide any glitches.)

Allowing all boats to use tunnels without restrictions would enable the Ultimate People Mover — a port connected directly to the tunnel entrance. Thanks to the infinite capacity of boat routes (you can always add more boats and they won't jam like trains do), this setup will drain all the passengers of even the largest city at little cost and, more importantly, very small footprint. This is going to be a balance issue with any GRFs that have passenger boats, as any other modes of commuting (buses, metro trains) will become useless.

Hmm... the only good counterargument I can think of for that is to pull a boat collision patch into mainline, and have a single option which enables both collision and boat tunnels. Perhaps it can only be toggled in-game if there are no boat tunnels.

That would put a lot of strain on the pathfinder. If I'm not mistaken, path caching is one of the major improvements of ship pathfinding in 1.9.1. If the ships cannot follow the exact same paths anymore (due to breakdowns, speed differences etc.), the caching will probably become useless.

Unless boat collisions is enabled only in tunnels, which would in effect restrict them to be used by only one boat at a time. That would make sense and would avoid the balance issue, but in that case canal locks should probably get the same treatment.

This suggestions is IMPLEMENTED now (as prototype - DOWNLOAD .EXE file) ! - Look in the topic
IMPLEMENTED some suggestions - Independence day of Ukraine 20190824 release (viewtopic.php?f=32&t=85845).
There also is description, including "How to use?" and about some restrictions.
Be happy.

I want this I so MUCH want this!

Boat tunnels has been on my "Top 3 Most Desired Features" since I played OpenTTD for the first time a ton of years ago.