Re-Imagined Roads

[giladteller]

The roads in TT are very boring, here are a few things that will make them much more interesting:
1) Traffic! private cars will use the roads and cause traffic jams that will decrease with more public transport.
2) The game will begin with all cities and industries connected to each other by roads.
3) Introduction of highways
4) Player cannot build roads on his own free will.
5) Local authority can commission road building in two ways:
*Bid for a certain road to be constructed, the player the winner gets money from the local authority and has a certain amount of time to complete
construction.
*The local authority asks the player to build a road but instead of giving him money, the player will build the road on his own but will earn from toll.
the player's vehicles will not pay toll on his own roads, but will pay toll on other player's road, private cars also pay toll.

Who would like to play with these options? What do you think of this?

[Wintersoldier]

Traffic! private cars will use the roads and cause traffic jams that will decrease with more public transport.

Traffic jams in general are bad. More public transport also doesn't always mean increased passenger transport.

The game will begin with all cities and industries connected to each other by roads.

Why? One of the points of the game is building your own routes wherever you want.

Player cannot build roads on his own free will.

Please explain this...it doesn't make any sense to remove one of the most important features.

[planetmaker]

The roads in TT are very boring, here are a few things that will make them much more interesting:
1) Traffic! private cars will use the roads and cause traffic jams that will decrease with more public transport.
2) The game will begin with all cities and industries connected to each other by roads.

Use some AIs. Especially StreetTraffic and TownCars AIs, but also NoCAB are very good (and the first even designed for this means) in order to populate towns. The first two AI are designed to work with the GenericCars vehicle newgrf.

[XeryusTC]

1) As planetmaker said, there are AIs for this.
2) Could be nice, although I would only do it for cities as connecting everything to everything at the start of a game would make the game very boring.
3) We already have one way roads, with those you can make highways quite simply. Actually they were partly introduced because of that very reason.
4) Why remove a game feature?
5) Toll has been discussed in the past but there was decided not to implement it. I can not think of the exact reasons why though.

[giladteller]

Here are some clarifications:
Road construction will be limited to only as a project for the local authority. since it require all industries and cities to be connected from the beginning, these option should exist only in specific maps that need to be prepared.
The player will be able to build roads after winning the bid from the local authority.
These option are intended to create a more realistic environment for the transportation. Another thing I believe should exist is Local authority controlled airports. After all, transport companies in reality don't build their own roads and airports.

If anyone thinks some of these are good ideas and wants to implement them, go ahead (just please give me the credit ).
I don't have the time to do these things, I am currently a student, I study Transportation engineering.

[russkie12]

I think starting with everything inter-connected... maybe we should implement nations instead. Also, removing the ability to build your own road on your own will is just... No, just no.

[Zuu]

As for point 2, there is an AI, PathZilla which at the start of the game creates a plan of how to connect all towns and then as it builds connections it builds necessary town connections from this plan. As time goes on it will make nice town connections.

Using the money cheat and a special AI you can probably build a such network in rather short time.


As for TownCars AI (and StreetTrafficAI 1), they are per default configured to be used with the GenericCars grf, but you can set up the settings so it builds other road vehicles as well based on their cost/capacity etc.

[Dragon]

2) The game will begin with all cities and industries connected to each other by roads.

3) We already have one way roads, with those you can make highways quite simply. Actually they were partly introduced because of that very reason.

There is one problem with these things above. I like to create a nice (sometimes realistic) landscape or make my own scenario from scratch and to connect the cities by road to each other. Te problem now is that cities build next to roads, so after a time al the roads are sided by houses (wich I don't like). A new type of road (highway if you like) where cities are not allowed to expand next to would be an sollution for this.

Or (thinking out of the box here) maybe we should introduce a road type that is a kind of 'city-road' where cities are only alowed to expand through, making normal roads the highway-type. I can imagine this makes more sense to newbees and town roads maybe more interesting for graphics designers.

just my 2cents (euro's that is...)

[Freak_NL]

This reminds me of SimCity where highways could be built as 2×2 blocks (where normal roads are 1×1 blocks just as in OpenTTD). To make highways interesting from a game perspective, how about the following?

An idea for Highways in OpenTTD

• Highways are built just like normal roads, but when you build two strips of highway next to each other it should look like a 2×2 lane highway (automatically draw them like dual carriageways).
• Highways provide a speed boost of 50% to all vehicles. A truck that does 50km/h normally, does 75km/h on the highways. A bus that goes 80 km/h will do 120 km/h.
• Highways should be very expensive. You don't build them unless you have the funds and the need for them. 20× the normal price of roads perhaps?
• Normal roads can be connected to them.
• Towns don't consider them as roads to build houses by (just like railway track).

Of course, this is just thinking out loud. Technically this may be quite infeasible.

For now this'll have to do:

[Eddi]

Here are my thoughts about the future of roads, they are basically split into four separate parts:

Part 1: Roadtypes.

With the advent of Roadtypes (same as railtypes), a NewGRF could introduce a system of technical improvement, e.g.:
(* = see below)

dirt road (15 km/h, *) [very cheap]
paved road (30 km/h)
asphalt road (50 km/h)
asphalt road, one-way (70 km/h)
country asphalt road (90 km/h, *)
country asphalt road, one-way (110km/h, *) [very expensive]

Part 2: City Growth.

A NewGRF flag for road types is added, that towns may not grow along a road with this flag set. In the above list, the roadtypes marked with (*) have this flag set.

The town growth algorithm is adjusted, so that additionally to the current actions "build a house next to a road", "build a new road" and "build a new road and a house", another action is added "replace an existing road with the best-available town-allowed roadtype". This way, a town can slowly replace paved road with asphalt road once it becomes available, or it can replace country roads with town roads, so it can grow there in the future.

Part 3: City Connection.

A new algorithm is introduced to connect towns with the best-available non-town roadtype at game start. this gives an advantage to road vehicles over rail vehicles, because the player does not have to invest in a lot of infrastructure.

Part 4: Smooth Curves

This is unarguably the most difficult part, so this might or might not ever come.

Current roads have the problem that all curves are 90° on one tile, this causes a lot of slowdown. to simulate highways properly, smoother multi-tile curves must be introduced that cause less slowdown. In theory, this could also be used for onramps and higway-cloverleafs, and could protect an inner-city "highway" from being replaced with a town road.

[Freak_NL]

Eddi:
Introducing that many road types might make it all a bit too complex for road vehicles. Diagonal roads (only for the highway/high speed roads) would be nice though.

[Eddi]

those aren't "many roadtypes". it can be condensed to 4 types, if you consider one-way roads are just a modification of normal roads [need a separate property for the speed limit]

also, you can scratch the early roadtypes (dirt, paved) and have only two different road types (town, country)

[Voyager One]

This is something similar to NuTracks made for trains. http://www.tt-forums.net/viewtopic.php? ... it=NuTrack

Very interesting Eddi.