New Idea/Feature - Train RnD

[doghousedean]

Im just getting into OTTD development and have a cracking idea or two.

My first one.

Train Development Yard.
- Train RnD funding, fund bigger and faster trains on your own
- Yard requires Cash, Coal, Steel, Goods (simulate furnishings) to produce research and build the prototype.
- Bigger yards = fast research times.

What are you views on this? is it good or bad?

[Archonix]

I quite like the idea. Until fairly recently most railway companies designed and built their own locomotives and rolling stock, or at the very least comissioned designs from companies that were very closely tied to the rail company.

I'd forget the research yard and just make it a dialog box. And it would have to be expensive to research, but the benefits of getting rolling stock and locomotive types far before anyone else would make it worthwhile.

[Lordmwa]

i like lots

would be another one of the things to make using trains harder

great idea

[doghousedean]

I like the idea of forgetting the yard first, give me a chance of getting in to programming for ottd. don't worry I've programmed a few games from scratch before!

how agout train upgrades, or waggon upgrades.

they would have to be extortionate or after a while u could afford anything.

[gkirilov]

Im just getting into OTTD development and have a cracking idea or two.

My first one.

Train Development Yard.
- Train RnD funding, fund bigger and faster trains on your own
- Yard requires Cash, Coal, Steel, Goods (simulate furnishings) to produce research and build the prototype.
- Bigger yards = fast research times.

What are you views on this? is it good or bad?

I am not sure this would be suitable for OTTD. Most (if not all) custom train sets follow a real life time line.
The only way to combine this idea with the vehicles is to have the same vehicles and improve their capacity and speed by doing RnD. The time of appearance is not influenced in this case.
In a way this could be even part of new indusrties.

[belugas]

In a way this could be even part of new indusrties.

I doubt that very much. newindustries deals with cargo. Management of cargo, production, graphics etc...

A new vehicle is hardly a cargo.
Unless you mean a new type of industry hardcoded in game.
Unless i didn't fully understood your post (which could very well be)...

[PikkaBird]

they would have to be extortionate or after a while u could afford anything.

There are real-world limits such as the current state of the art, and the laws of physics, which this system would have to acknowledge to be realistic. Since most vehicle sets give you what was in real life the cutting edge, any realistic "RnD" system couldn't give you better vehicles than you currently get; it would just be there to add some flavour to the game.

And it would have to be expensive to research, but the benefits of getting rolling stock and locomotive types far before anyone else would make it worthwhile.

Realistically, you wouldn't get things far before anyone else. As soon as you get something that works, they'll all want it too, and locomotive manufacturers like to sell as many units as they can.

[doghousedean]

Surely researching things changes the time line so you have an advantage, if it were to follow the release of trains as they were in our life time then there is no need for a RnD department. The whole point of it is to advance quicker and get an advantage.

So lets summaries.

- No new industry, keep it as a dialog box for simplicity
- Cost must be huge and rise exponentially with inflation

[DJ Nekkid]

well, one idea could be something like u can only spend research on one type of transport at once... for example per year u research on lets say aircrafts, you get the aircrafts 1 month earlier...

20 years and u get 20 months...

or something like that, needs tuning, but the idea is there...

[StopRightThere]

I think having upgraded locomotives would be better than getting them earlier. Let's say, for example, that a Gresley A4 will only reach 110mph with an upgrade or something like that. There could be a limited amount of them, each increasing the mph by 5 or horsepower by 50. Since the loco in real life is driven by drivers & firemen, the train could run better with better experienced crew perhaps?
This could apply to planes too, a better trained pilot could have a lower risk of crashing than an untrained one.

[athanasios]

OR no new vehicles available for testing without a 'development yard'.
Should availability of vehicles have a limit? So with a yard you place orders first and others have to wait.

[xmart2k]

it would be cool to upgrade the wagons, make them faster and maybe with a larger capacity

[Ben_K]

OR no new vehicles available for testing without a 'development yard'.
Should availability of vehicles have a limit? So with a yard you place orders first and others have to wait.

I think athanasios might be onto something - maybe we can use it to get the test pop-ups earlier? Maybe you could programme it to see what train are due in, say, the next 5years and then show them in a list. Each one takes a year or two research/resources and then you can start testing it a few years ahead of its release.

[doghousedean]

Benk_k and athanasios that sounds good, will have to come up with he finer details then get to work on it.

I think the dumping of resources is good but difficult to implement for my first patch. A simple gui, with buttons to increase and decrease research budget and what you can research will be a start then we'll see from there.

Thanks all for your input