Improved cargo ratings

[krtaylor]

That sounds like just what the doctor ordered!

[uzurpator]

Frankly, for me the ultimate game breaker is the requirement of vehicle speed. Not only slower locos are penalized, but really - coal does not need to be hauled at 250 km/h....

[Dave]

Well... Freight transport is a lot less relying on the actual cargo than passenger transport.

300 passengers can moan about a late train, but 300 tons of coal can't.

And it's not like half an hour matters to a big lumbering coal train.

EDIT: Maybe I opened a can of worms in my head with that... for I've had an idea.

Does the cargo depreciation rate (as seen in that table thingy) affect passengers/cargo just sitting on the platform? Or does it just apply to stuff that's been picked up?

[uzurpator]

Once the cargo was picked up - then it is considered transported (and the timer starts)

[Dave]

So... Could we not have a depreciation for how long passengers have been stood on a station? If that's possible?

Maybe, say, after 5 game days or whatever, incur a penalty of 10% per passenger.

Hmm... This wouldn't work for cross-continent expresses tho...

Just an idea.

[Csaboka]

Frankly, for me the ultimate game breaker is the requirement of vehicle speed.

Well, if I'm touching the rating calculation, I could modify this as well. This would make sense - passengers want fast trains; OTOH, coal won't spoil even if it's transported slowly, so speed can be ignored altogether.

We should be careful with the defaults, though; the game is already too easy IMO, and if we allow better ratings without extra effort, it would lose some of the remaining challenge.

[PikkaBird]

So... Could we not have a depreciation for how long passengers have been stood on a station? If that's possible?

There's already a penalty for leaving passengers standing on the platform - the station rating drops.

[krtaylor]

You could balance it out by lowering the cargo payment rates. I.e. the coal doesn't disappear and you can more easily pick up more of it, so you'll get more and have longer trains; but you get paid less per ton, so it cancels out. This would make it easier to have the wonderful huge long trains that many of us like.

[Csaboka]

It seems this feature wouldn't need a separate switch, but some new cargo GRF properties would be enough. This way, I wouldn't need to come up with default values, but people could create GRFs that set up things the way they like (increasing rating tolerance but decreasing payment for example, as krtaylor suggested).

Now all I need is to come up with a format in which GRFs can tell how the rating scores should be calculated. I think a callback wouldn't be good, since using callbacks would probably slow down TTD too much.

[Csaboka]

OK, here you are, callback 145, it will be available in the next nightly. Currently, it isn't as useful as it could be, but I hope this will change in the near future. If accessing the last visiting vehicle would be possible, you could check reliability or power, since these are more important for freight than maximum speed. For now, however, you can only use what TTDPatch gives to you: the time since the cargo was last picked up, the amount waiting, the class and max. speed of the last vehicle visiting.