Sal's Canalboats

[Electricfox]

Thank you for the feedback. Your points are well taken.

The real goal of the speed increase was to reduce the number of boats clogging the canal. Another solution would be to change the capacity. Right now it's set at 30 tons, which is actually a realistic value. With a corresponding cost increase to both vehicles and the canals themselves, I wouldn't mind increasing that significantly, say to 60 tons? How do your horse cart capacities compare to the real world?

I am also considering a move to road vehicles, as has been discussed above. I welcome any thoughts on this.

Road vehicle pros:

• Better visuals thanks to collision detection and driving in lanes; no clipping through each other
• Supports articulated vehicles for better-looking horses
• Flat drive-through station tiles instead of docks
• One-way roads
• One-tile locks easier to fit than three-tile locks
• Tunnels!

Road vehicle cons:

• Players might build regular canals by accident
• Other boats can't use the canals later

And if you don't mind, I can draw and push a canal type for it (with pathways and bridges* at crossings) to my WWAY set

Did you end up drawing these? They weren't in the 0.3 source in your thread, but there are nice towpaths and a horse in your screenshot. If I move from canals to WWAY roads, I'd like to include a suitable roadtype in my set. It could disable itself if a player has your full WWAY set.

Yeah, I think that you're probably better off going with the road vehicle option, it's not ideal in terms of keeping things seperate, boats, trains, road vehicles, etc, but for canals it just seems to operate better that way and TBH, in reality canals are fairly restrictive in what boats can use them, you don't often see a large oil tanker powering up the Grand Union canal for example.

This I think would be better dealt with by an industry GRF to have correspondingly lower outputs for primary industries early on.

Now that would be an interesting grf, an early industries one, how would one go about simulating cottage industry in OTTD though. I think the Improved Town Industries is a step along the lines towards this, I will have to get a early start game going with it on and give it a whirl.

[Amak]

blah blah

real boats get no love . Maybe a 'sea version' (proper boats) and a 'wway version' (fake boats)?

Love sending the canal boats out to fishing industries they look like little fishing canoes.

[2TallTyler]

Once I add horses, they won't look right outside a canal anyway. I don't believe there's a way for ships to check the type of water they're using, so I couldn't unhitch the horses and raise sails.

A better solution would be an actual ship set. Squid Ate Fish has a cargo barge which is fairly small, but it's not available as early. I usually use Sailing Ships in early games.

[kamnet]

You can set independent speeds if the boat is on river/canal or on sea. You can set the sea limit to something ridiculously slow.

I'd be happy to see you make them for both canals and wway, and players play with whatever they're comfortable with.

[2TallTyler]

You can set independent speeds if the boat is on river/canal or on sea. You can set the sea limit to something ridiculously slow.

Unfortunately these are properties, not callbacks, so I can't use them to detect the type of water and change the sprite accordingly. This means we'd all experience the miracle of horses walking on water.

[kamnet]

But horses do swim!

[Andrew350]

Once I add horses, they won't look right outside a canal anyway. I don't believe there's a way for ships to check the type of water they're using, so I couldn't unhitch the horses and raise sails.

Not directly, no, but with a bit of trickery it is possible to do this By setting different max speeds for canals and ocean tiles, you can then check the current_max_speed variable via callback to change the graphics. I did this to make the submarine in my (long-dormant) ferry set surface while travelling in canals; the same idea should work here The horses might look a bit odd going through normal locks though...

[Kruemelchen]

It's great to see some development towards road vehicles I can't wait to see where you're going with this!

Will you make the boats compatible with WWAY, too? (without horses & slow speed, less power)
I thought about implementing this "compatibility feature" for simulating boats travelling "with the current" of the river, as in reality boats were usually drawn against the current, not with it, I guess

Did you end up drawing these? They weren't in the 0.3 source in your thread, but there are nice towpaths and a horse in your screenshot. If I move from canals to WWAY roads, I'd like to include a suitable roadtype in my set. It could disable itself if a player has your full WWAY set.

I drew the path and bridges (only mud/wood finished) for the towway and it's in a ingame workable state. Albeit I held it back for a future release, since there is no real purpose for it yet, as I haven't finished drawing/coding of boats. I'll PM you the source code and my future plans
PS: the horse I took from McZapkie's polroad set.