Micheal Blunck's big seaport concepts

[Born Acorn]

I think we should implement his ideas (of big seaports with converged railway freight stations) into OTTD, I know it may be loads of coding, but It could be slowly worked on over 3-5 releases.

It would be grounbreaking and just look amazing to have such large seaports.

His graphics look so original too, and since we can use all of his graphics, I think we could use them.

[Bjarni]

he did those in photoshop only, so we would have to talk to him again, since we are only allowed to use unmodified files.
it would be a cool thing to add, but I think it might need too much to get it done in the near future. Other tasks are more important

[charlieg]

For the benefit of those who are neither psychic nor familiar with what you're talking about, are there any links or images that would be appropriate?

[spaceman-spiff]

For the benefit of those who are neither psychic nor familiar with what you're talking about, are there any links or images that would be appropriate?

Look here and check the puzzles !
http://www.ewetel.net/~michael.blunck/ttd/

[pasky]

I fell in love with those but if we were to rely on MB's art for this the art would have to be GPL'd so that we can distribute it along OTTD. And I think that's a no-go for him, so...

Well making support for this wouldn't be impossible. In fact, I don't think it would be that hard at all, because it just consists of supporting several smaller things:

• differentiated cargo
• custom stations (*shudder*)
• showing waiting cargo on platforms (or on stations in general, waiting people at bus stations caught my eye on Locomotion screenshots)
• making certain platforms dedicated to one type of cargo (automatically?)

Perhaps the user would choose the "target cargo" when building a station, and with the general station the capacity for each cargo type would be limited by some reasonable amount (say, 200 units); also when you would be unloading more than 200 units there at once, unloading would be noticeably slower. But you can already extend one rail station by another, so you would just first build rail station for cars, then adjectently rail station for livestock etc - they would form one logical station.

Similar concept could be used for the docks.

[Archonix]

The art wouldn't have to be GPL. It could be released under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License. That way, nobody can modify his work without his permission, but it remains GPL compatible.

*edit* of course, it's up to him in the end... */edit*

[Villem]

He didnt mean the graphics, he meant the concept of that you could make harbots combined with train and truck stations, but with overall more area than 1 dock can offer.

[Archonix]

but if we were to rely on MB's art for this the art would have to be GPL'd

No, I think I was right...

Anyway, the point is, the GPL isn't the be-all and end-all of open source software. Technically, art can't fall under the GPL anyway, since it's geared toward software rather than general copyright...

I think it'd be great if someone could incorporate a feature like this. It would look a *lot* better than the current docks, and would mean greater visual integration between the rail and shipping networks. Hell, you could have huge truck bays as well... I just wish I were capable of working in C++. I'm still a n00b when it comes to anything beyond server-side scripting.

[pasky]

The art wouldn't have to be GPL. It could be released under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License. That way, nobody can modify his work without his permission, but it remains GPL compatible.

That's essentially a licence he is using now, isn't it? And it's no way GPL compatible, unfortunately :-(.

Of course we could make a support for it and tell the users to download the graphics separately if they like it. It definitively somewhat lowers the motivation, though.

[pasky]

He didnt mean the graphics, he meant the concept of that you could make harbots combined with train and truck stations, but with overall more area than 1 dock can offer.

Yes, I somewhat misunderstood what did you mean, sorry.

This isn't a bad idea at all and I tend to like it, but it indeed needs quite a some coding. First, station has to be made a much more general concept than it's now, with the possibility to have more "terminals" of the same type (like several bus stations, docks etc).

Then, there could be a specialized "station builder". It would be independent of the means of transport, instead you could plant some kind of that dark gray platform on a tile and cargo would get delivered there - a set of adjacent station tiles would then act as a single logical station.

A station tile would be either:

• A regular tile with nothing else on it - then it would act as a storage area. Each such a tile would either serve as a "general cargo tile", then a rather limited amount of any cargo would fit there, or "specialized cargo tile", then a considerably larger amount of a certain cargo type would fit to that tile.
• A shore tile - then it would act as a bay loading area. It would have a quite small capacity and generally would contain all that loading equipment. Cargo specialization of the tile would affect loading speed - it's possible to load given cargo tile only at a tile specialized to that cargo type or on a general cargo tile (but with half the speed).
• A rail tile - then it would act as a train loading area. Same concerns as for the bay loading area. But at which tile would the train stop? You would either place a regular (1x1 would be enough because it wouldn't affect loading speed) rail station and then the engine would stop at the end of its platform, or it could stop at that tile so that the maximum number of tiles have the suitable cargo type specialization (tile type, on which the particular wagon stands, counts).
• A road tile - then it would act as a truck loading area. Same concerns as for the train loading area.
• Airports - I don't know yet. I think cargo jets aren't so widespread and the loading usually happens on an airport anyway? So just building an airport adjacent to the station could do for now.

Now how to load a cargo? (We'll speak about trains but it's similar for all the other types.) Let's assume we're loading goods to the two wagons standing on the goods station tile. So first all the goods waiting on this tile is loaded, then the four adjacent tiles (tile radius 1) are searched, but stuff from there is loaded slightly slower. Then tiles in radius 2 are searched, even slower. Etc.

And how is the cargo distributed? To the most frequent tiles - each tile has an amortized counter how many times did anyone load cargo from there (if there are multiple candidates, the non-regular tiles win; if there are still multiple candidates, the one nearest to the factory wins). This means that a lot of cargo will go to the rail tiles with our goods train going there frequently. However if there are two good trains going equally frequently to the station and each has its railroad on one side of the station, the winner tiles will be in the middle, so that both trains can take the goods from there - when this common area is filled it will go to the rail tiles.

What do you think? I think it'd be quite realistical and also similar to the MB's puzzles, while managing good gameplay properties.

[Villem]

Evil and bad system, what OTTD got now would work with harbors fine.

[pasky]

Evil and bad system, what OTTD got now would work with harbors fine.

Hmm, would you please care to be more constructive and specific than "evil and bad"?

What I tried to model was such a model which would be as similar to what MB got on his pictures as possible. That's apparently not what do you want, so could you please explain us your idea how should it work?