Warn if vehicle type not available at chosen start date

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Taschi
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Warn if vehicle type not available at chosen start date

Post by Taschi »

Over the last couple of days I have seen several people on the Steam forum asking why they can't buy trains / planes / ships / whatever, which is usually because they have chosen a start date before 1950 and don't have any GRFs enabled that offer that vehicle type at that date.

While this issue is easy-ish to avoid, I have also repeatedly started games and played for half an hour or so, only to realize that I don't have access to any ships and / or road vehicles because I forgot to enable the appropriate mods. That is always kind of a nuisance.

One nice quality-of-life feature would be to check on game generation if at least one vehicle of each of the major types (train, ship, road vehicle, tram, plane) is available at the game's starting point, and otherwise show a warning along the lines of this:

"No vehicles of the following type(s) are available for your chosen starting date:
Tramways (available after 1950)
Ships (available after 1950)

Proceed | Cancel"

potentially with an "Find new Addons" button next to it, which would lead to the NewGRF manager.
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kamnet
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Re: Warn if vehicle type not available at chosen start date

Post by kamnet »

It wouldn't make sense to add that within an active game, since you aren't supposed to add NewGRFs to a running game (it corrupts things).
Taschi
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Re: Warn if vehicle type not available at chosen start date

Post by Taschi »

kamnet wrote: 27 Apr 2021 17:35 It wouldn't make sense to add that within an active game, since you aren't supposed to add NewGRFs to a running game (it corrupts things).
I'm sorry if I was unclear - this check should be done at/before world generation.
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Re: Warn if vehicle type not available at chosen start date

Post by Taschi »

andythenorth wrote: 28 Apr 2021 10:07 Quite old, and would need a contributor to push it forward, but https://wiki.openttd.org/en/Community/E ... n%20Utopia
Yeah, that goes far beyond what my proposal but at least it shows that the idea isn't complete garbage.

I've set up a local workspace for OpenTTD and, no promises, but I'll see if I can create a functional prototype for my proposal - and maybe continue to add some stuff from Frosch's proposal if it turns out the code and me get along. (I've tried and failed to contribute to a half-dozen open source projects so far because I keep chickening out, so, again - no promises.)
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