FIRS Industry Replacement Set - Development

[FooBar]

How can I have waste chain?

Not. This is a development topic, not a place to ask obvious questions, but a place to see what's going on, a place to compliment the developers, a place to suggest things that could be done better or different, a place to let the developers know there is a bug somewhere.

All features that are not enabled by default are documented in the documentation. Since there are no such features yet, there is no documentation either.

[andythenorth]

How can I have waste chain?

Use an older nightly, probably around something around 433.

Waste might not be in final FIRS. Would it be missed?

[NekoMaster]

How can I have waste chain?

Use an older nightly, probably around something around 433.

Waste might not be in final FIRS. Would it be missed?

I liked waste, cause its realistic, there are such thing as waste trains, even in america

[FooBar]

We can do a waste-chain addon, eventually.

[andythenorth]

We can do a waste-chain addon, eventually.

I was thinking the same thing. We have the sprites.

Somehow I think it would be better done outside of main FIRS. There's something weird about it that doesn't quite work for me. I first added it because it was a common suggestion in forum threads. I even wonder if it's better be done by house sets ??

[Eddi]

in the chat, the idea of ports popped up, after a little brainstorming this could be a basic outline of the feature:

Tropic: Tropic maps should represent third world (developing) countries who start being exploited and slowly build up their own economy. The map starts with primary industries and ports, which accept primary items and give little amounts of secondary cargos in return. secondary industries that have a better conversion ratio do not appear automatically, but have to be founded by the player
Temperate: Temperate maps should represent european countries who are usually low on ressources but densely populated and export processed goods. Mines in temperate climate get exhausted or increasingly inefficient in later years, so ports are the only way to get a steady supply of primary ressources [ore, oil, ...]. ports should be fewer than mines, so these might get transportation bottlenecks.
Arctic: Northern countries like Sweden or Canada are usually low on population and very export oriented. Farms should produce only food during a short period in summer, so when you want to supply towns with food in winter, they have to be imported through a port

these might or might not be useful ideas that could be explored further

[NekoMaster]

Pie

[andythenorth]

FooBar, others....to let you know, I've planned some changes to cargo IDs (cargo bits). This should have no effect on vehicle set coders who have a cargo translation table, but I thought I'd mention it. http://tt-foundry.com/sets/FIRS/schema/cargos

Summary of changes:
some cargos no longer 'core' to FIRS. These would appear only in some economies, in one of the 'reserved' slots. (Waste, Fish, Sugar Cane)
Wool and Cotton no longer share same ID
Grain and Sugar Cane no longer share same ID
There's an extra 'reserved' ID (now four in total)

I moved Sand from a shared slot with Water a while ago, when I eliminated Parts and Packaging and introduced Manufacturing Supplies.

Eddi - ideas are interesting. FIRS treats game climates as 'just a choice of background tiles and town behaviour'. The FIRS 'economies' feature offers a better way to provide gameplay variety. Some of the ideas you posted could be accommodated, this way.

Variations in industry behaviour will be limited though - I'm trying to avoid adding specific production code for an economy, they will make debugging harder and could make the set fragile.

cheers,

Andy

[ISA]

in the chat, the idea of ports popped up, after a little brainstorming this could be a basic outline of the feature:

Tropic: Tropic maps should represent third world (developing) countries who start being exploited and slowly build up their own economy. The map starts with primary industries and ports, which accept primary items and give little amounts of secondary cargos in return. secondary industries that have a better conversion ratio do not appear automatically, but have to be founded by the player
Temperate: Temperate maps should represent european countries who are usually low on ressources but densely populated and export processed goods. Mines in temperate climate get exhausted or increasingly inefficient in later years, so ports are the only way to get a steady supply of primary ressources [ore, oil, ...]. ports should be fewer than mines, so these might get transportation bottlenecks.
Arctic: Northern countries like Sweden or Canada are usually low on population and very export oriented. Farms should produce only food during a short period in summer, so when you want to supply towns with food in winter, they have to be imported through a port

these might or might not be useful ideas that could be explored further

I like that!!!

[FooBar]

FooBar, others....to let you know, I've planned some changes to cargo IDs (cargo bits).

Sounds a sensible thing to do. Good thing we introduced these variables in the code

Eddi - ideas are interesting. FIRS treats game climates as 'just a choice of background tiles and town behaviour'. The FIRS 'economies' feature offers a better way to provide gameplay variety. Some of the ideas you posted could be accommodated, this way.

There could be things like a 'third world' economy, a 'European' economy, a 'Scandinavian' economy possibly even differentiated from a 'Canadian' economy, things like that.

In the end I think that we as FIRS developers are not inventing all these economies, but if there are user suggestions that we think could work, they can be implemented. In that case you cannot invent industries yourself, you have to pick them from the list of available industries. Please don't start suggesting things like this right now, please be patient and wait untill a FIRS release which actually has a working economies feature.

[Zutty]

Straw poll: what do you think happens if Manufacturing Supplies are delivered to this industry?

manufacturing_supplies.png

Ooooh, clever. However, as freaking awesome as that is though, as an AI author is makes me nervous. I dont think there is any way for an AI to know this.

I can think of a few options, in descending order of complexity (please note, I know almost nothing about the NewGRF spec)...

1) Make callback 18 more sophisticated, so that the NewGRF can tell an AI how to service each industry, not just which type of station to build when it has already chosen what to build.
2) Add some kind of machine readable flags to the NewGRF spec. Some spare bits in action 0, maybe? Its meaning need not be absolute... it could be context specific. e.g. when an industry type is part of the FIRS set and some_flag=1 then an AI should transport manufacturing supplies to it.
3) Expose those strings in the UI to the NoAI API so they can be parsed in Squirrel code and have each AI figure it out in its own way (if at all!)
4) Dont worry about it!

I imagine 3 would be the easiest to implement, and rock the boat the least!

Im not expecting any kind of action, by the way. You guys have enough to do already! It'd be nice to get some discussion going though. If you browse the NoAI forum, you'll see that a recurring problem with AI development is coping with the various quirks in each NewGRF. If PBI threw us off (AIs dont understand stockpiling) imagine what FIRS will do!

[andythenorth]

If you browse the NoAI forum, you'll see that a recurring problem with AI development is coping with the various quirks in each NewGRF. If PBI threw us off (AIs dont understand stockpiling) imagine what FIRS will do!

The main problem might be getting the AI to understand stockpiling. If that can be covered, then everything else should just work ok.

On the delivery side, Manufacturing Supplies is just another cargo to the AI; as long as it doesn't over deliver that should be fine.

On the output side, I have no idea what an AI does with differing output levels...

[Zephyris]

As andythenorth says all a newgrf industry would need to report to an ai is some standardised value for maximum cargo acceptance, eg. units per month...

[planetmaker]

If you browse the NoAI forum, you'll see that a recurring problem with AI development is coping with the various quirks in each NewGRF. If PBI threw us off (AIs dont understand stockpiling) imagine what FIRS will do!

The main problem might be getting the AI to understand stockpiling.

Wait... but FIRS has no limit on the stockpiles, does it?

[andythenorth]

Wait... but FIRS has no limit on the stockpiles, does it?

It does for production boosting supplies. Not for any other cargo.

[NekoMaster]

Wait... but FIRS has no limit on the stockpiles, does it?

It does for production boosting supplies. Not for any other cargo.

Though you should try to make it so that as production increases with good service, the limit will rise, since to help produce more, you need more supplies to produce or process more cargo

[andythenorth]

Though you should try to make it so that as production increases with good service, the limit will rise, since to help produce more, you need more supplies to produce or process more cargo

Maybe in real life, but not in FIRS

Stockpile limits that move up and down will just be annoying

[Voyager One]

A question related to the previous two posts: Is it possible (and would it be interesting above all) to make stockpile limits manually adjustable? (i.e. like the manual industries NewGRF).

[andythenorth]

A question related to the previous two posts: Is it possible (and would it be interesting above all) to make stockpile limits manually adjustable? (i.e. like the manual industries NewGRF).

You can change it yourself if you wish You simply check out the source code, change three numbers, then compile.

Sounds complicated? Trust me, it really isn't

The lines to change can be seen in this repo file here (lines 464-466):
http://dev.openttdcoop.org/projects/fir ... .pnfo#L464

The url to check out FIRS is listed here:
http://dev.openttdcoop.org/projects/firs

Compiling is one line in a shell prompt: 'make'.

The only bit requiring effort is installing mercurial (hg), which isn't hard...

[Voyager One]

Thanks Andy.