Revisiting Plane Crashes

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Ketsuban
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Revisiting Plane Crashes

Post by Ketsuban »

I enjoy DavidXNewton's series of deep dives on various facets of OpenTTD gameplay, and the recent video on plane crashes came away slightly baffled at just how nonsensical they actually are. I've attempted to distil the points brought up in the video into a series of bullet points.
  • A plane's reliability score has no effect on its propensity to crash.
  • Crashes only occur during landing. There are no consequences for an airport close to a built-up area or plane journeys crossing a mountain range; planes don't collide with buildings or terrain.
  • Planes check for a crash every tick while a plane is on the runway but moving faster than the taxiing speed, but they stop abruptly upon reaching the target location at the far end of the runway with no negative repercussions. This makes airports with shorter runways paradoxically safer to land at than larger ones, and causes planes whose speed is reduced due to being broken down to be less likely to crash than fully-functioning planes.
  • The destination point for landing at the City airport is misplaced by approximately one tile, resulting in planes making fewer crash checks than either the Commuter or Metropolitan airports.
  • Helicopters can never crash.
In the spirit of the thread "What does a good company shares system look like?" I'm curious to know: can we do better, and if so how?
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Re: Revisiting Plane Crashes

Post by Redirect Left »

Ketsuban wrote: 27 Oct 2024 10:26 I'm curious to know: can we do better, and if so how?
The issue with better is, at least on most of your points above. Planes will crash more often, which players probably aren't all that into. Especially in the early game where planes are rather expensive to replace should random chance decide that all the pilots quite like the mountain ranges in your map. That could be resolved with checks for if a plane has crashed in the last x months or years, reduce or entirely stop the checks for crashing more planes.
Crashes only being checked for on landing is semi-realistic to be fair. The majority of real crashes occur on landing, rather than in the air or on take off.

So can we do better (in terms of 'realism' at least), yes. Is it a good idea, well that is a different matter that is subjective to everyone. There is also the potential for accidental emotional damage or revisiting emotional damage, especially for crashing around airports near a city. It's all fun & games, until a plane crashes into a tower that was built next door to the airport, again through random chance, as the player has no control over city building choices. Such an event would also probably be better as one of the random disasters rather than part of the regular crash checks/accidents.

I do agree though, that helicopters having a get out of crash free card would be nice to rectify, but then you might need everyone to redraw sprites for a crashed helicopter. I don't actually know how crashed sprites are built, if its in the .grf, or if the game just applies a black/white filter and a random direction to the normal sprites in a crash, so maybe, maybe not. Helicopters (again on average) do crash more frequently than airplanes, but that is probably due to the instant critical failure nature of an engine on one, and the lack of gliding a failed chopper can do, compared to an airplane, although autorotation on the blades does semi-resolve that, hurray for physics.

Also I guess if the destination point is skewed by 1 tile on some airports, unless its for some game reason or compatibility reasons, that could probably be resolved easily enough, although fixing that bug may lead to more crashes, so maybe related to non-fixed?
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odisseus
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Re: Revisiting Plane Crashes

Post by odisseus »

The plane crashes come in two kinds, and serve two different purposes in the game. The short runway crash (5% probability) is meant to deter the player from using large planes on small airports. Thus it is completely avoidable, though in some cases the savings in property maintenance make it worth the risk.

The random crash (0.07 %) is so rare that it doesn't really set the player back. When it happens, just fund an advertising campaign to restore the station rating. Its effect becomes significant only in long multiplayer games: if you leave your company unattended for 10-20 hours, you are guaranteed to lose all your aircraft. For better or for worse, this kind of crash can be turned off.

All those details are curious, but relatively unimportant. The annoyance factor of crashes fades in comparison with breakdowns. Imagine a supersonic jet dragging across the map at 321 km/h, just because it happened to have a breakdown shortly after the take-off. This can happen even with very high reliability.

There has been a number of ideas about overhauling the breakdown effects for aircraft and other vehicles; some of them were even implemented as patches. However, they probably won't ever be merged into the core game, so I won't expound on that topic.

There is an easy way to make the aircraft breakdowns much less annoying though. Instead of continuing towards its destination, the aircraft should make an emergency landing at the nearest (company owned) airport which has a hangar. This is also what a real-life pilot would do if the speed of his vehicle were reduced by more than a half.
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Re: Revisiting Plane Crashes

Post by Redirect Left »

odisseus wrote: 28 Oct 2024 04:12 There is an easy way to make the aircraft breakdowns much less annoying though. Instead of continuing towards its destination, the aircraft should make an emergency landing at the nearest (company owned) airport which has a hangar. This is also what a real-life pilot would do if the speed of his vehicle were reduced by more than a half.
Not even company owned. After declaring an emergency a plane basically has permission (implied or explicit) to land anywhere they please (preferably tell ATC first). You can even land at Area 51 (sorry, 'Homey Airport'), although you'd be in trouble with the authorities as you probably ignored some NOTAMs if that was the nearest airport. Which would act as an interesting side to OTTD, if it happens give the player / company owner who rescued the plane a £1k good guy bonus or something. Something fun to consider if anyone ever takes on and reboots the aircraft workings in OTTD.

I have noted that the aeroplane crashing in AI tests is a bit confusing at times for them, some of them end up with 0 planes through crashes. I'm not sure if its because the game doesn't provide an easy hook for "OnPlayerPlaneGoOoops()", or if AI creators don't think of it often. So that may be something else in regards to planes to consider in future, although then you open a can of worms with the AI landscape again.
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