UFO warnings.

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mauried
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UFO warnings.

Post by mauried »

When a UFO lands, the news advisor tells you that it has landed and shows you where.
However when the UFO blows up and destroys whatever is around it , the news advisor doesnt let you know , which can be a real problem on a large map with lots of transport infrastructure.
Usually the only way to find this out is when your transport network starts having lots of vehicles getting lost.
Even a simple warning like a UFO has been reported exploding would help.
A related question , is there a limit on how many UFOs can be on a map at any given time.?
tnx
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PikkaBird
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Re: UFO warnings.

Post by PikkaBird »

mauried wrote: 10 Oct 2022 02:26 A related question , is there a limit on how many UFOs can be on a map at any given time.?
It's generally 1 I think, and its landing spot is not very random (you'll find they land in the same place over and over).

Most people just play with the disasters turned off. They're not very interesting.
mauried
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Re: UFO warnings.

Post by mauried »

Thanks.
In multiplayer mode where the map is divided up into separate areas, one for each player. the UFOs are quite fun as theres always lots of speculation where its going to land and which player cops the disaster.
The map Im playing on is 8000 sq long from west to east and 4000 sq from north to south with a large ocean in the middle, so each player is initially isolated from the other players by the ocean, and the UFO usually starts somewhere on the western side and travels NE towards the east randomly landing on someones infrastructure, but it does seem quite random where it lands.
Never seems to land in the ocean or on any body of water, only on the land.
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odisseus
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Re: UFO warnings.

Post by odisseus »

The path of the UFO is not completely random. For one, it always lands on a railway track. The details are described in the Wiki.

However, after the UFO has landed, you can change the terrain around it. For example, you can remove the railway track and build a road in its place. Interestingly, the road will not be destroyed by the blast.
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Eddi
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Re: UFO warnings.

Post by Eddi »

the way the UFO is picking a rail tile "randomly" is very biased, as it uniformly picks a random tile on the map, and then looks up the next rail tile from that point. so large parts of the map will usually result in the same rail tile being picked. so a handful of rail tiles that "stick out" are extremely likely to be picked, while others are very very improbable.
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jfs
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Re: UFO warnings.

Post by jfs »

It might be "more interesting" if you were building small-ish point to point trains instead of large networks with trunk lines. I think when the disasters were designed, there wasn't much thought to how they'd behave after 5-10 years of players optimizing everything.
mauried
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Re: UFO warnings.

Post by mauried »

The disasters add an extra layer of complexity which makes the game a bit more fun and adds more issues that the players have to deal with.
The Coal mine subsidance is a good one .
Another disaster which would be worth adding is floods, which simply make the rivers,lakes and oceans rise a bit on a randow basis for a period of time flooding nearby infrastructure.
This functionality seems to exist in the game already as its possible to have infrastructure like railway lines washed away from nearby waterways if the water is a higher altitude than the track.
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odisseus
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Re: UFO warnings.

Post by odisseus »

Here's a life hack for you. When you spot an UFO landing, open a viewport and center it on the UFO, then continue whatever you were doing. It is worth pinning the viewport so that you don't close it by accident. When the blast happens, you will immediately see it in the viewport.

P.S. The thing that's really annoying about UFOs is not their mere existence (they can be disabled after all), but the fact that it takes an eternity for them to reach the landing spot on a large map.
mauried
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Re: UFO warnings.

Post by mauried »

Thanks, I should have thought about that option.
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