Mass orders/grouping interface

jabberwalkee_ · Post by **jabberwalkee_** » 27 Oct 2004 09:49

I have been milling over how to solve the problem of replacing vehicles (mostly trains) when they get old (particularly when you want to upgrade track types)

And in my (undoubtedly uneducated) opinion the best option would be to create an interface which allowed the grouping of vehicles and the issuing of orders to the entire group.

So the idea being when (for example) you want to upgrade your rail network to monorail you click on the new button and click on the group of trains on that particular network (an all trains button wouldnt hurt either) and issue a replace engines order (which could hopefully be implemented by modefying the current autoreplace orders), specifing the new engine in a pop-up and clicking ok. Trains head to Depots, replace their engines and off they go.

Likewise it would be useful to simply replace all old engines when newer ones became available (perhaps including the ability to select vehicles by model)

I anticipate that it might be nessecary to implement a "stop after" condition for each order in the case of track relacement.

A group orders feature could also be used to stop a group of trains to allow for risk free alteration of signals and construction.

I think the best ways (as i have mentioned a little through this post) of grouping the vehicles is by type (train, plane etc), cargo(es) carried, vehicle model and by an assignable group number (like in age of empires, warcraft and just about any other RTS)

BTW i am not a programmer and have no idea what implementing such an idea would entail.

jabberwalkee_ · Post by **jabberwalkee_** » 01 Nov 2004 12:24

was this really such a bad idea that no-one even replied???

Emeric Pro · Post by **Emeric Pro** » 01 Nov 2004 12:54

jabberwalkee_ wrote:was this really such a bad idea that no-one even replied???

The idea is very good IMO

Actually I often dreamt about something like this, mostly when it's time to upgrade to monorail, sending all trains to depot would be very interesting

jabberwalkee_ · Post by **jabberwalkee_** » 01 Nov 2004 14:58

it just needed a well disguised *bump* then! (i hope)

ThorRune · Post by **ThorRune** » 01 Nov 2004 18:44

It's just so well though thru that there is nothing to add

jabberwalkee_ · Post by **jabberwalkee_** » 03 Nov 2004 02:22

I got bored and Photoshopped a version of what i think this might look like

The buttons are mostly self explanatory

The Replace Button would open a prompt asking you which vehicle you would like to replace the current ones with.

Group Orders would not be particularly useful and may be difficult to implement considering you could put a bunch of random vehicles together and then attempt to edit all their orders at once.........

I would also add a button to the Vehicle window allowing the assigning of individual vehicles to a group there as well as in this window.

lasershock · Post by **lasershock** » 04 Nov 2004 13:42

this is a great idea

jabberwalkee_ · Post by **jabberwalkee_** » 06 Nov 2004 04:12

well i thought so, but judging by the lack of posting........

mexicoshanty · Post by **mexicoshanty** » 22 Aug 2006 13:33

This is exactly what i came to the forums to post about! I Also found this thread http://www.tt-forums.net/viewtopic.php? ... le&start=0 With some great idea's about statistics and all, never thought about those just imagined a 'routes' window with the ability to create a group, give it a name then be able to control the group, as in change the goto schedule, start, stop, goto to depo etc. Then in the goto part of a trains details the abilty to assign it to a goup. If you don't want it to be part of a group then leave it as none and set the schedule manually as normal.

This would be such a HUGE improvement. As it s*** me something chronic when i change the way a rail system works that i have to find all the trains that are doing a particular thing and change them individually!

As i only discovered OpenTTD 3 days go (was a huge fan of the original) excuse my ignorance if this feature is currently being worked on. Also would someone be able to point me to the road map, i haven't been able to find it.

DaleStan · Post by **DaleStan** » 22 Aug 2006 13:35

mexicoshanty wrote:it s*** me something chronic when i change the way a rail system works that i have to find all the trains that are doing a particular thing and change them individually!

Permit me to introduce you to a little trick known as shared orders.

mexicoshanty · Post by **mexicoshanty** » 22 Aug 2006 13:53

yeah i found out about shared orders while i was looking for threads relating to the grouping idea. IMO it's not very intuitive and also there are a lot of things that it doesn't do. Ie, abiltiy to easily find a particular group (when you have 50 trains travelling down a main line doing 20 different things at the moment it's rather tedious to try and find the a train with the shared order you are after), list all trains in a group, find out which group a train belongs to (all you know is that the orders are shared with other trains), start, stop and send all trains to a depo. I could think of a lot more possibilties aswell.

bobingabout · Post by **bobingabout** » 22 Aug 2006 14:53

whats with the jpg?

Bjarni · Post by **Bjarni** » 23 Aug 2006 15:30

I wonder about this. Now that we got autoreplace and shared orders, what would the usage for groups be... and I came up with this:

what if we assign a number to each vehicle (default 0=off) and then we can change that number to let it enter some group. Then we can sort like in the "screenshot", extend autoreplace to replace say engine x to y, but only for group 27 and so on.

This would allow people to say make all coal trains group x and that way only replace group x locomotives or something.

I think I know how to get this to work, but ideas are welcome. Specially an idea for how to get this to work in a GUI and other features such groups could be used for.
Also a new GUI for autoreplace would be needed. Ideas here are welcome too.

Last, the disclaimer: this is not a promis that it will be coded or added to the game. It's still on the idea level.

l_Blue_l · Post by **l_Blue_l** » 23 Aug 2006 23:37

Dont have groups of vehicles which you make yourself have groups of vehicles with the same orders or cargo type or train or by stations or by age or by anything els you can think off, please add your ideas (you dont need to add anything new variable just search all / most of the vehicles, and make your lists from that. To upgrade vehicles you would make a ghost train to which you want to upgrade it to. i havent played in ages but something needed to go with this would be a go to deport if close by.

I have started rewriting one of my patches and this time i hope to include something along the lines of groups of vehicles with the same orders to improve the performance of my patch. i doubt i will have anything along the lines of what you guys are looking for untill next year.

mexicoshanty · Post by **mexicoshanty** » 24 Aug 2006 06:02

I've done a mockup of what i was imagining. There could be a lot of extra things people may think of, like extra info in the route's details window.

When assigning orders/route to a train, when a route is selected the orders/buttons are faded as you can see in the picture. To add orders like normal assign the route '-- None --'. The default should be '-- None --'.

Oh and another thing. When people do the shared order command it creates a route under the name of the first train.

l_Blue_l · Post by **l_Blue_l** » 24 Aug 2006 07:24

intresting concept you got there. But What about use the vehicle sort window but just have different groups with a sub-vehicle sort windows for each vehicle in that group

Bjarni · Post by **Bjarni** » 24 Aug 2006 08:03

making a ghost train or an "out of vehicle" order is pretty hard with the current design.

MeusH · Post by **MeusH** » 24 Aug 2006 08:11

Excellent idea! Some suggestions from me:

I wouldn't force all vehicles in a group to have the same orders. It may be a feature that group has orders and vehicles of the group share them, but personally I'd make groups with vehicles of various sources and/or destinations (I'd make group of faster passenger trains and slower cargo trains).

We may take a look at Simutrans routes but I'm afraid some may think would be lame

Note to the attached picture: "Skip" window should be active all the time (unless there are no orders, of course).

mexicoshanty · Post by **mexicoshanty** » 24 Aug 2006 08:24

l_Blue_l wrote:intresting concept you got there. But What about use the vehicle sort window but just have different groups with a sub-vehicle sort windows for each vehicle in that group

Because then you couldn't mix transport types (eg. trains, ships, buses, planes). If routes had it's own window then you could have trucks come in and help transferer stuff from an overloaded train station going to the same destinations as the trains.

mexicoshanty · Post by **mexicoshanty** » 24 Aug 2006 08:32

MeusH wrote:I wouldn't force all vehicles in a group to have the same orders.

That's one of the main point of the routes, if we didn't have that feature we'd have to call it groups of vehicles or something. I guess this is an extension of the sharing of orders feature currently implemented but just in a way that is more informative and easier to manage.

MeusH wrote:Note to the attached picture: "Skip" window should be active all the time (unless there are no orders, of course).

Yeah good point

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Mass orders/grouping interface

Mass orders/grouping interface

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