FIRS Industry Replacement Set - Development

[Alberth]

Is it a limitation of Openttd? That industries can only be replaced instead of adding more additions?

OpenTTD has limits of 32 cargoes and 64 industries, if I remember correctly. Other than that, OpenTTD has no problems with a NewGRF that adds industries, or even combined industry NewGRFs. You'll have to check the number of industries and cargoes, but if they are within the limit, there are no technical objections against merging FIRS with the default set. You can code a NewGRF for it, I suspect.

So far however, there is no industry set that extends the default set by a considerable number of new industries, or allows other industry sets to be added.
The problem is probably in the set design. Making every industry useful is already difficult. If you also want to combine two sets, they both have to have some advantage in gameplay, or everybody will just ignore the set without advantage.

If that happens, a much simpler solution is not to load the industries that nobody uses.

[andythenorth]

FIRS replaces the default industries. You can't have both in the same game.

In theory, a reduced number of FIRS industries could be used alongside default industries. I won't be re-coding FIRS to do that.

If you have players who don't like FIRS, simply remove FIRS. It's not for everyone.

[aantono]

Question about production changes. Does FIRS follows the same pattern as default OpenTTD Industry Set, where production increases if the rate of cargo delivery increases and station rating improves. I.e overtime, Coal Mine starts producing more and more coal? Or is it purely and completely controlled by the various "Supply" cargo deliveries, and unless those cargoes are delivered, production won't ever increase (gradually) on its own?

[Sylf]

Question about production changes. Does FIRS follows the same pattern as default OpenTTD Industry Set, where production increases if the rate of cargo delivery increases and station rating improves. I.e overtime, Coal Mine starts producing more and more coal? Or is it purely and completely controlled by the various "Supply" cargo deliveries, and unless those cargoes are delivered, production won't ever increase (gradually) on its own?

It's the latter case. Unless you provide the engineering or farm supplies to the proper industry, they will never increase their production levels. And if you stop providing the supplies, the production level goes back to the original, low level.
Fishing grounds never increase their production levels.

[planetmaker]

Makes me wonder how much attention the best readme in the whole OpenTTD universe might get...
http://bundles.openttdcoop.org/firs/rel ... arted.html

[aantono]

Makes me wonder how much attention the best readme in the whole OpenTTD universe might get...
http://bundles.openttdcoop.org/firs/rel ... arted.html

To make you feel better, I actually did look at the read me document and even went on to read the source code in the hopes of deriving the answer. I guess I wasn't looking hard enough or the information wasn't clear.
I did see the part saying

Deliver supplies to primary industries regularly to boost production.

, but maybe it would be helpful if it would explicitly state that, unlike default industries, the production growth for primary industries will never occur on its own, regardless of the delivery rating and frequency.

[aantono]

Fishing grounds never increase their production levels.

Specifically sad about the Fishing Grounds. There is no way to boost their production, since they don't accept any boosting supplies, but their generally-low production levels, makes playing with SHIPS or Squid not as attractive. How can one use the huge Riffer ship, that is specifically designed to haul fish, if it would take forever to get 1000 tons of fish...

[andythenorth]

Feeder service. Fishing grounds occur in clusters. Use small catcher boats to feed the reefer. And build more fishing grounds.

[chuggles]

Are there any plans for FIRS coming up? Has anyone expressed an interest in drawing new coal mine graphics?

[leifbk]

Are there any plans for FIRS coming up? Has anyone expressed an interest in drawing new coal mine graphics?

I think the coal mines are beautiful. In my opinion, pre-1900 graphics for several industries, like the Sugar refinery, the Cement plant, the Fertilizer plant, and the Textile mill would be a lot more pleasing.

[ISA]

Has anyone expressed an interest in drawing new coal mine graphics?

There was new one drawn by Dan?
Edit:

I also once try! Now it sits in my folder... Also I have some kind of working grf

[kamnet]

Are there any plans for FIRS coming up? Has anyone expressed an interest in drawing new coal mine graphics?

I think the coal mines are beautiful. In my opinion, pre-1900 graphics for several industries, like the Sugar refinery, the Cement plant, the Fertilizer plant, and the Textile mill would be a lot more pleasing.

All it takes is for somebody to start drawing it. As an example, here's an artist's sketch of the St. Louis Sugar Refining Co. in 1875.

[aantono]

I've been trying to implement the Feeder service as per andythenorth advice, but found it a bit difficult. Here is the issue I've ran into:
Current mechanism of delivering farm and eng. supplies to primary industries is a bit cumbersome if supplies are produced far away in the map (which it is in my case). To run a train that hauls only 60 units of Farm Supplies half-way cross the map is very expensive (60 units is about 2-3 cars only), so it forces to go into the local stockpile/feeder mode with running a much larger train that delivers about 6-8 cars (about 160-180 units), which is about a 9/month supply for a Gong-Ho production at 56 units delivered every 3 months.
The problem with that is the feeder transfer fee. It is very difficult to set the % such that it properly balances the income given to the train and the local delivery trucks, especially if you also have the other feeders where local trucks deliver cargo to a feeder station later to be picked-up by a single train.
I've tried a number of different modes, with different % settings, with CargoDist on/off, but still almost always end up with one part of the feeder being in the negative (especially since the cargo sits and the distribution storage station for a few months, before the trucks finally deliver it, so the payout on that is very poor, even though it actually made it pretty much all the way).

I would propose to solve it in 2 different ways:
1. Introduce support for supplies stock-pile, so that if 180 units are delivered at a time, every 3 months only 56 units are being subtracted and whatever is left, gets carried over. (I've looked at the NML to determine the feasibility of this, looks like it might be possible with the STORE_PERM calls)
2. Prorate/extend the delivery window, and make it instead of 56 units every 3 months to be 112 every 6 months, or maybe even 168 every 9 months. (This seems to be possible via just adding 3 or 6 more storage variables for the last months deliveries)

I feel that it will make management of the industries a lot more realistic and economic, and maybe an optional property setting could be added to enable/disable stockpile mode.

P.S. I've opened an issue ticket for this enhancement as well - http://dev.openttdcoop.org/issues/7089

[kamnet]

There's only two reasons why a vehicle shows a loss instead of a profit:

1) You feeder service paid too much to another vehicle;
2) You took too long to deliver cargo and now it's worth less than what it cost you to ship it.

If your issue is #1, then it doesn't matter, because you likely still mae a profit altogether. If it's the latter, step up your deliveries.

[aantono]

For #1, it could be the case, but it is still very annoying to get a notification about vehicles loosing money at EOY, plus it makes it difficult to try to determine if it is a real money-loss, or a perceived one. (I tried a variety of settings from 25% to 80% with an increment of 5% and in EVERY setting I end up getting some "false-positive" money looser).
For #2, you can't really step up the delivery because you only need 56 units of supplies every 3 months, so delivering more often does not make any sense (if you do that, you might as well just unload the whole train load right at the mine/farm, why even bother with the Feeder system)

I guess my question is - what is the downside of having this functionality added? For those who want to do the feeder system and all that, they still can, for those, who want to make more "simple" delivery flow, this would enable that as well. Don't see any negatives myself, so was wondering for feedback as to why this would be a bad thing to add.

[keoz]

For #2, you can't really step up the delivery because you only need 56 units of supplies every 3 months, so delivering more often does not make any sense (if you do that, you might as well just unload the whole train load right at the mine/farm, why even bother with the Feeder system)

Use cheap engines with low power and low maintenance cost. That's exactly a case for which they are useful. You can perfectly carry only 3 wagons with a low/medium engine and earn money. That's what I do for deliveries of farm/engineering supplies.

Also note that if you want FIRS primary industries to have full production all the time, you need to deliver your 56 FMSP (or 84 ENSP) each two months, not each three months. That's because an industry always considers deliveries over three months including the current month, which means that they always consider only deliveries of the previous 2 months.

[aantono]

For #2, you can't really step up the delivery because you only need 56 units of supplies every 3 months, so delivering more often does not make any sense (if you do that, you might as well just unload the whole train load right at the mine/farm, why even bother with the Feeder system)

Use cheap engines with low power and low maintenance cost. That's exactly a case for which they are useful. You can perfectly carry only 3 wagons with a low/medium engine and earn money. That's what I do for deliveries of farm/engineering supplies.

If you carry supplies all the way across the map, you need the train to move on the main-line, thus it has to be fast. Have not been able to find an appropriate engine that would be fast (not at 80km/h) and capable of hauling 3 wagons with profit. (Any suggestions for the Rail Set to use? My current favorite is URKS2, as it does not have 200 engines, but offers enough variety to choose from).

But back to my previous question - what would be the downside of making this enhancement?

[andythenorth]

But back to my previous question - what would be the downside of making this enhancement?

It misses the point of supplies. It's not an enhancement. Figure out how to build better networks.

[aantono]

But back to my previous question - what would be the downside of making this enhancement?

It misses the point of supplies. It's not an enhancement. Figure out how to build better networks.

Not sure I understand the broad statement of "building a better network"? I've tried a lot of different permutations and I don't think the problem is with the inefficient network, but at the heart of how OpenTTD does feeder payment distribution, which causes vehicles/trains to false-positive reporting of running at a loss. I simply suggested an improvement to the GRF that, IMHO, would help to compensate for this issue. But I would love to hear some suggestions as to what network setup, train/vehicle grf sets to use to make it work "properly" for long-distance supply delivery (I think this would not be a problem if the supply production is near by, then the distance/time factor becomes less important)

[keoz]

If you carry supplies all the way across the map, you need the train to move on the main-line, thus it has to be fast. Have not been able to find an appropriate engine that would be fast (not at 80km/h) and capable of hauling 3 wagons with profit. (Any suggestions for the Rail Set to use? My current favorite is URKS2, as it does not have 200 engines, but offers enough variety to choose from).

I also use UKRS2. You don't have to use engines originally intended for freight transport. Some general purpose or even express engines (the ones mostly used for passengers) can perfectly be used for that - they fit perfectly for that, since the weight is light. I often used the 2-6-4 Suburban, for example.