Towns and Industries

[Trevbo]

I think it would be, nice when you start a new random game, if you could select the number of towns that are goin to be built instead of selecting low, normal, or high

The same goes for industries

[Vachu]

I agree. More than once I have started a game with both very low towns and very low industries and still thought there was too many of them. I guess for now we can at least manually add them in the scenario editor. But still, in random maps, it would be very nice.



Edit: I just tried to generate only 1 town. One problem that aroused was that the number of industries was way too high and the land generation was unable to distribute them properly since there was only one town. So I tried to change the number of industries but it's not as simple since the code is not like the one for the towns and I don't really understand the file yet.

I also tried putting only 5 towns, but it seems the way towns are generated they are always distributed next to each other and "fill" the map starting from one town. So in bigger maps, the towns are always near each other, leaving a large part of the map uninhabited.



Edit 2: And here's with 600 towns in a 512x512!

[lonewuhf]

I agree. More than once I have started a game with both very low towns and very low industries and still thought there was too many of them. I guess for now we can at least manually add them in the scenario editor. But still, in random maps, it would be very nice.



Edit: I just tried to generate only 1 town. One problem that aroused was that the number of industries was way too high and the land generation was unable to distribute them properly since there was only one town. So I tried to change the number of industries but it's not as simple since the code is not like the one for the towns and I don't really understand the file yet.

I also tried putting only 5 towns, but it seems the way towns are generated they are always distributed next to each other and "fill" the map starting from one town. So in bigger maps, the towns are always near each other, leaving a large part of the map uninhabited.



Edit 2: And here's with 600 towns in a 512x512!

That could be a fairly fun map to play on to be honest

[Trevbo]

If im assuming right(i dont know i haven't looked at the source code or coded anything in along time so i dont know for sure) then each grid square has a coordinate that correspondes to some information about whats in that grid... so might it be possible to randomly generate a number between say 0 and the size of the map to get a X and Y coordinate and do that as many times as needed for however many towns are specified to give a somewhat even spread(or at least a realistic maybe not even spread) of towns across the map

[Priski]

More than once I have started a game with both very low towns and very low industries and still thought there was too many of them. I guess for now we can at least manually add them in the scenario editor. But still, in random maps, it would be very nice.

I agree totally, also game generates towns too inconsistently, when generating low amount towns there may be over 5 towns packed very close to each other and there also are large "hollow" areas with no towns at all. Same goes to indrusties.

It would be so nice if I could set number of towns, and indrusties (per town and total) when generating random game. In multiplayer servers this would also be very nice feature. Also I would like some way of setting consistency ie. setting min distance between towns & indrusties or something like that.

[athanasios]

This has been discussed over and over...
Nevertheless for the time beeing we have to create a new scenario and place the towns manually.

[sc79]

also game generates towns too inconsistently, when generating low amount towns there may be over 5 towns packed very close to each other and there also are large "hollow" areas with no towns at all. Same goes to indrusties.

You mean like in real life? Towns and industries are usually clustered around resources (whether the metal/wood kind, or the valuable land/water/location kind), and avoid less practical areas.

That doesn't mean options to influence placements would be a bad thing though.

[nezzybaby]

After playing TTD for nearly ten years, more recently concentrating on openttd and playing with all the lovely new features put in the nightlies, i can say without doubt that this is the ONLY thing i still want for this game. I havent looked through any of the code for openttd, to be honest its far too daunting to try and work out how to do this from cold, but i cant imagine it being that difficult a challenge. Basically when i play i rarely attach more than 2 towns (unless i remove industries altogether). Every other town on the map just completely gets in the way. I really cant be bothered creating my own scenarios every time just for the sake of reducing the number of towns, but being able to select a physical number of towns would be perfect. I gather this is something that everyone in the community would love to play with by the fact that the question comes up again and again, who out there want to be our hero and sort out the last useful feature in openttd??

[Priski]

How about me or someone else would put feature request on OTTD bug tracker since it's the "official" (see EDIT below) place for them? As programmer (not OTTD) myself, I think that just about every wanted feature should not be put there without proper discussion first in here. It seems that nobody has requested that feature there; I did search on open and closed tasks fev times with different keyword.

I'm starting to be convinced that there is a lot of people that think same way. This is not only thread about this topic in this forum.

You mean like in real life? Towns and industries are usually clustered around resources (whether the metal/wood kind, or the valuable land/water/location kind), and avoid less practical areas.

Yeah it's that way more realistic but after several years of playing TTD this thing just starts to annoy, specially when building just one giant railway network. This because more space is needed, if you want effective and fine-tuned network.

EDIT: Actually I don't really know if bugtracker is somewhat official place for them, since there are page for these in wiki also. Maybe someone who knows better would like to give an answer, users, devs, ...?

[belugas]

Bug Tracker IS the official way of doing.
Both bugs and requests,
IT allows us to be able to keep track of things, which is merely impossible with the forums