ECS vectors v1.1.2 (by George) 19/06/2011

[George]

Does it happen in new random game? If yes - it is a bug in GRF. If in saves and scenarious - than there is cht: purgeindustries in TTDP, I do not know what to do with OTTD2:Belugas?

If you are referring to the purge industries cheat, i don't think we have one in OTTD.

What to do with scenarios that were created with old industries or outdated GRFs? How to replace old industries with new ones?

[George]

Should power plant transform to energy:
1) Oil
2) Refined products
3) Petrol
4) Oil or Petrol
5) Oil or Refined products?

[wallyweb]

Should power plant transform to energy:
1) Oil

And coal too.

[George]

Should power plant transform to energy:
1) Oil

And coal too.

As you can see I did not suggest all of them, because industry can accept only 3 cargoes. That means first slot is coal, and what to put on the second and third slots?
Could you please give some answers on the previous questions?

[wallyweb]

Should power plant transform to energy:
1) Oil

And coal too.

As you can see I did not suggest all of them, because industry can accept only 3 cargoes. That means first slot is coal, and what to put on the second and third slots?
Could you please give some answers on the previous questions?

Well, just because there are three slots, it does not mean that all the slots must be used. Other than coal, the only other logical fuel would be oil. For the third slot, if you want to use it, a power station always needs maintenance which means new machinery. In your industries you have used vehicles in places where machinery would be more logical, so why not have the power station accept vehicles?

[Villem]

Here in Finland power plants also use peat for fuel.

[Korenn]

In the openttd challenge spinoff, I made power plants accept coal, oil and water, water on the basis that most (if not all) powerplants generate power using steamdriven turbines, which requires lots of water.

Because water was already a type of cargo for water towers, it was a simple addition.

[wallyweb]

Here in Finland power plants also use peat for fuel.

I don't know that George would have room for a peat bog industry. He already has quite a few to contend with.

... water ...

which is fine for the Tropic climate, but how would George be able to make room for water in Temperate and Arctic?

In both cases it would probably be best to draw on the cargoes that are already offered.

[blitzkrieg]

How about --> Oil well & oil rigs produce oil & natural gas (transported as liquified natural gas [LNG], thus no need to draw new vehicle's) & LNG can be used by power stations..
We have gas powered turbines producing power in my country!!!

[George]

How about --> Oil well & oil rigs produce oil & natural gas (transported as liquified natural gas [LNG], thus no need to draw new vehicle's) & LNG can be used by power stations..
We have gas powered turbines producing power in my country!!!

and what cargo would we drop off?

Because nobody answered, I'll count that power station transforms
1 ton of coal to 7.5MW/h
1000 litres of oil to 10.3MW/h

[wallyweb]

How about --> Oil well & oil rigs produce oil & natural gas (transported as liquified natural gas [LNG], thus no need to draw new vehicle's) & LNG can be used by power stations..
We have gas powered turbines producing power in my country!!!

and what cargo would we drop off?

Logically oil wells and platforms would produce Natural Gas (Label NAGA?) which would be shipped to the refinery and converted to Liquefied Natural Gas (Label LNGA?) but are you able to add more cargoes to your ECS industries?

Because nobody answered, I'll count that power station transforms 1 ton of coal or 1000 litres of oil into 1 MW/h

That sounds good.

[michael blunck]

Back in the 1970-80s, "incinerating plants" were very much en vogue. So, "waste" comes to mind as an additional source for energy (once again ... <arrgh>).

regards
Michael

[bulb]

Now that OpenTTD finally got support for newindustries, I tried playing with ECS. And I have a serious problem in the early years.
The industries in ECS only grow if they have 75% cargo transported. However, that is impossible to achieve in OTTD with early vehicles, especially when using the UKRS set with wagon speed limits.

In OTTD, quite significant portion of the station rating is the speed of vehicle last servicing it, counted as (speed - 85mph) / some-factor. Now in the begining of the game, cargo wagons are limited do 72mph, 88mph or 96mph (depending on type, but coal is the slowest one). Result is, that coal loading station, once the new vehicle bonus expires, never has more than 61% rating!
Obviously road vehicles are no better and using aircraft (impossible with AV8 anyway) would be just weird.

Does anybody know, what are the factors affecting station ratings in TTDP? I think best solution would be to change the OTTD algorithm, but to propose that, I'd need to know what would make sense.

[electricmonk]

Unfortunately I can't speak for OTTD, but under TTDPatch, the rivers do indeed count as water and George's ECS industries that require placement within a certain distance of water do as well with rivers (and canals) as they do with the sea.

Excellent! If that's the case, then the industry placement for food-producing industries is fine with me. I just hope that rivers above the snowline don't freeze over, and that if they do, they can still be used by the food-producing industries.

Incidentally, I have proposed an idea about advance warnings for industry closure. Perhaps if this was implemented, industry closure wouldn't be such a pain.

12 months is good - it's the same ammount of time that subsidies are on offer for, so it's probably the best value.
I only know little about GRF files, but I would have assumed that in order to implement the advance-warning, you would have to modify TTDPatch/OpenTTD to implement it - as advance closure warnings would also be useful for the regular industries in games without any NewGRFs.

Does it happen in new random game?

This happens in the scenario editor when I create a completely new scenario and then populate it with random industries (I remembered to refresh my grfs before I created the new scenario). There is no bank in the "fund new industry" dialog. Have not tried a new random game and am only using 0.6b2.

But, AFAIR, electricmonk only uses Beta2, thus not the fixed version.

And so, my dirty little secret is exposed to the world .

If you are referring to the bank stuff, IIRC, it has been corrected in nightlies.

I'll bear that in mind...

What to do with scenarios that were created with old industries or outdated GRFs? How to replace old industries with new ones?

I just play my current savegame using old versions of the ECS vectors. It would be a good idea if there was a changelog that mentioned which changes made the new ECS vectors incompatible with the old ECS vectors - that way, I know which ones to upgrade and which ones not to upgrade. But I agree - OpenTTD should have an equivalent to TTDPatch's Purge Industries cheat.

Should power plant transform to energy:

I think Oil and Petrol. If I'm using the standard town graphics instead of TTRS - I have nowhere to ship petrol to. The powerplant should accept Oil as well because otherwise, there would only be one type of industry that accpts oil.

Incidentally, are closure rates (or earliest closure time) for secondary and tertiary industries the same or different? I notice that primary industries close down less frequently.

Also, it would be nice if the closure-message could distinguish between an industry closing down due to supply problems and an industry closing down due to not enough cargo being shipped.

AE.

[electricmonk]

The industries in ECS only grow if they have 75% cargo transported. However, that is impossible to achieve in OTTD with early vehicles, especially when using the UKRS set with wagon speed limits.

In OTTD, quite significant portion of the station rating is the speed of vehicle last servicing it, counted as (speed - 85mph) / some-factor. Now in the begining of the game, cargo wagons are limited do 72mph, 88mph or 96mph (depending on type, but coal is the slowest one). Result is, that coal loading station, once the new vehicle bonus expires, never has more than 61% rating!
Obviously road vehicles are no better and using aircraft (impossible with AV8 anyway) would be just weird.

In my current savegame (ca. 1945 - using UKRS), the fastest locomotive abvailable is 115mph, but the slowest wagon has a speed limit of 45mph. I'm servicing an Iron ore mine with two trains (the distance between them is such that one of the two iron ore mines is usually at the loading station), yet the station's iron-ore rating never seems to rise above 69% even if my station is surrounded by trees.

If the OTTD station-rating algorithm does not take wagon speed-limits into account, perhaps the ECS GRFs should have a paramater that specifies the minimum percentage required to increase production.

[bulb]

In my current savegame (ca. 1945 - using UKRS), the fastest locomotive abvailable is 115mph, but the slowest wagon has a speed limit of 45mph. I'm servicing an Iron ore mine with two trains (the distance between them is such that one of the two iron ore mines is usually at the loading station), yet the station's iron-ore rating never seems to rise above 69% even if my station is surrounded by trees.

If the OTTD station-rating algorithm does not take wagon speed-limits into account, perhaps the ECS GRFs should have a paramater that specifies the minimum percentage required to increase production.

Hm, our numbers for the speed differ (but maybe I mistakenly said mph when I should have said km/h -- I played it some month ago). However, even if OTTD does not take wagon speed-limits into account, it does not make sense to use a faster locomotive when it won't go any faster with given train anyway. UKRS has quite high running-costs and slower locomotives run much more cheaply, often even when they have a higher tractive effort.

The minimum percentage parameter would indeed make sense (as a knob for tweaking the difficulty), but I would still be interested in some improvements of the rating algorithm.

By the way, when I recall playing TTD years ago, I believe it was possible to get a bit higher than it is in OTTD (additionally in TTD the AI seemed to cheat, often getting to 100%, but that's another story).

[Korenn]

that's just a percieved difference, ratings work exactly the same.

Well, there's definitely a problem with iron ore mines (and farms) closing down prematurely in OTTD. I can manage to get the production up to 200+ tonnes produced at over 70% transported, but the mine in question still suddenly closed down just like all the others on the map.

ofcourse I don't know if it's a problem with the set, ottd, or ottd's implementation of new industries.

[George]

that's just a percieved difference, ratings work exactly the same.
Well, there's definitely a problem with iron ore mines (and farms) closing down prematurely in OTTD. I can manage to get the production up to 200+ tonnes produced at over 70% transported, but the mine in question still suddenly closed down just like all the others on the map.
ofcourse I don't know if it's a problem with the set, ottd, or ottd's implementation of new industries.

the mine should close as soon as you've harvested all the ore. It displays amount of ore harvested and total. The farm should not have this problem. Please provide more info about the problem.

[Korenn]

ah, now I understand what's happening. that feature isn't described anywhere.

How can I turn it off? I like to build networks, I'm not interested in having industries disappear like that.

[michael blunck]

I´m with the idea behind, but I´d prolong the time frame.

regards
Michael