Transport Tycoon Forums

Please check the new post about the economic value chain of P1SIM. Any thoughts are welcome. Here and on the website.

People with anomalous colour vision will need some alternative representation.

damerell wrote:People with anomalous colour vision will need some alternative representation.

... which is also an aspect further reducing the color related possibilities.

problem: the crates are only 8x8 pixels big. (inclusive 1 pixel border on each side). thus i cannot write anything on them. but i will find alternativ visual options.

Perhaps use numbers (1, 2, 3, 4) rather than symbols to indicate stages of processing?

Supercheese wrote:Perhaps use numbers (1, 2, 3, 4) rather than symbols to indicate stages of processing?

Think of map rotation. Rotating the map would lead to a rotated number and thus it would be hard to read the crate numbers.

3 of 4 symbols I selected look the same in all rotation steps. And the "line" symbol is also easily "readable" when rotated by 90 degrees

smallfly wrote:Think of map rotation. Rotating the map would lead to a rotated number and thus it would be hard to read the crate numbers.

3 of 4 symbols I selected look the same in all rotation steps. And the "line" symbol is also easily "readable" when rotated by 90 degrees

Is it not possible to have the numbers follow the map orientation? Float them as a separate sprite or something?

Alternatively, implement the symbols as you currently have them and then have a more explanatory pop-up on mouse over or click?

Supercheese wrote:Is it not possible to have the numbers follow the map orientation? Float them as a separate sprite or something?

Of course its possible. But I wouldn't like it, since the number layer and the map layer wouldnt act the same way. The user wouldnt get the feeling that the numbers are printed on the crates. It would just look like independently floating sprites.

Supercheese wrote:Alternatively, implement the symbols as you currently have them and then have a more explanatory pop-up on mouse over or click?

Of course I will implement features like this to help the user identifying any object on the map.

Will you be able to transport passengers? If so, how will that system go about?

thphwh wrote:Will you be able to transport passengers? If so, how will that system go about?

The player will also be able to transport passengers. For the details I will open a new thread soon.

//edit: details available now. please visit this thread

Ok. Thanks. Once again I commend you for taking on such a large project.

thphwh wrote:Ok. Thanks. Once again I commend you for taking on such a large project.

As do I.

Can players own industries and retail shops? Do you plan some competition in retail and a more sophisticated demand system?
One feature I liked in capitalism2 is the aspect of low/high quality and that you can buy/sell or research technology (although this may take up a lot of time, but this way you would have one more variable for competition in sales apart from the price.
I don't know how many products or what kind of industries you want to have in the game, but it would make sense to keep the number of industries rather low, because otherwise you wouldn't see any competition and the mapsize is another limiting factor. Towns could have some basic demand for rawmaterials like coal, wood, wheat, oil or even steal (for construction of buildings, bridges ...), this way you could easily get startet with primary industries and than slowly expand with secondary and tertiary industries (like for example the automobile industry).

robo wrote:Can players own industries and retail shops?

Yes.

robo wrote:Do you plan some competition in retail and a more sophisticated demand system?

Yes. And these are the levers you can use to improve your position against competitors.

robo wrote:aspect of low/high quality (...) buy/sell or research technology

Check out P1SIM's philosophy. One aspect says "Only Visible Features Are Fun - P1SIM concentrates on visible features, since these are the only ones which are fun." Product quality and research technology are not visible for the P1SIM player. Thus I wont implement product quality/technology differences.

BUT you can strengthen your competetive position by improving logistics quality (i.e. seamless transport flows) and logistics/production technology (amount of intra logistics vehicles, amount/length/type of production lines etc.).

robo wrote:I don't know how many products or what kind of industries you want to have in the game

Check out this topic and you will see that there are 7 x 4 = 28 different transportable goods types. The number of industries is much higher but undefined, since you can build any factory with any output combination you like. Just build the corresponding production lines in your factory and take care the inbound/outbound logistics work.

The end customer (consumer) does not always request the same goods. The consumer demands change over time, which will keep the game challenging the whole time.

I'm not sure if I should like the idea of producing and transporting "only" coloured boxes , but this idea may have some advantages.
But I think you could get some more customers in the boat by using more realistic products and at the same time make the game more accessible. Locomotion already had a quite good choice of industries, which could be improved for secondary/tertiary industries (think for example of the automod or canned food, which would play quite different with storage and a more sophisticated demand model.) Industries could slowly improve their outputs or upgrade if their are many customers or greater demand, but instead of random outputs as in locomotion outputs should keep high and the challenge would be to keep an industry profitable by high plant utilization.

robo wrote:But I think you could get some more customers in the boat by using more realistic products

I will test the advantages of the "only colored boxes" system first. At the moment Im pretty sure that I cannot name the boxes "coal", "chemicals", "wheat" etc. since this would break the concept of changing production technologies:

While the blue end product today is created by a yellow pre-product and a pink raw material box. Tomorrow a new technology could be invented where transforming other crates would be cheaper for a factory. Hard to explain, but I hope you get what I mean.

Another thing which may be interesting, could be a difficulty setting from easy to challenging for infrastructure costs of railways or operating costs of industries, because people have different playing styles and this way everybody may be satiesfied.

1.5 years have passed and I saw this screenshot: http://www.tt-forums.net/download/file.php?id=177483 which makes me think, you made up your mind about raw materials. I'm guessing the resources (in English they're actually spelled with one s only ) could mean something like CP = Copper, IR = Iron, CL = Coal, OI = Oil and some more, that I cannot identify!? That'd be pretty cool, as realism would be higher. I could be wrong though ...?

LocoMH wrote:1.5 years have passed and I saw this screenshot: http://www.tt-forums.net/download/file.php?id=177483 which makes me think, you made up your mind about raw materials. I'm guessing the resources (in English they're actually spelled with one s only ) could mean something like CP = Copper, IR = Iron, CL = Coal, OI = Oil and some more, that I cannot identify!? That'd be pretty cool, as realism would be higher. I could be wrong though ...?

Why gold?
I know some (not so serious) commercial railroad games have this ressource, but it never made any sense to me. (Just take a look at the largest gold mines with a gold production of only a few tonnes per year.) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Largest_gold_companies

Alright, thank you, for me the question was mostly about whether you left the idea of having unspecified goods