Improving the process of selecting station names

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Ketsuban
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Joined: 30 Jan 2016 16:56

Improving the process of selecting station names

Post by Ketsuban »

Currently the process for selecting a station name is hardcoded and slightly baroque, with some unintended consequences.
  • Proximity checks use a fixed distance from the home tile of the station rather than the station's catchment area, which can mean (e.g.) a station right next to a mine doesn't get the Mines suffix because it's a long train station with the home tile at the far end.
  • A station is eligible for the Lakeside suffix if it's adjacent to water less than twenty tiles from the edge of the map (not scaled with map size). This made some sense in the original Transport Tycoon where the edge of the map was always water (although even then the edge of the map is less "lake" and more "coast") but with OpenTTD's more freeform map generation this is likely to overlook very lake-adjacent stations.
The improvement I suggest is that, rather than picking just one name with no user involvement, the game should present a dialog box (similar to the "join station" window) from which the user picks the new station's name from a list of all valid possibilities for the station name, with the existing special cases recast as filters for whether their suffix appears in the list. This has the added advantage that the game doesn't need to attach the station to the nearest town, since all nearby towns (that is, the towns whose Voronoi cells border the station's) can be included in the list.
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