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Bug? Ships and rivers

Started by AP, February 12, 2012, 03:47:21 PM

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AP

Me again.

East Indiaman (only passenger ship capable of sea and river transport in the 1820s) will happily traverse "wide river (navigable)" tiles which have the "Waterway" tag, but not "river (navigable)" tiles which have both the "waterway" and "small waterway" tags. Both tiles also have the same 50km/h speed limit and the same 1000t weight limit.

I suspect the ship is intended to be able to go upstream until the weight limit (ie river draught) prohibits it? Maybe there's an inclusive-exclusive-OR thing going on with the waytypes.

I don't know if the other vessels have a similar issue (they haven't appeared in my game yet due to timeline).

jamespetts

AP,

this is working as intended: the East Indiaman is a large vessel, and as such is too large to fit down the smaller rivers on which, say, a Humber keel or a canal barge might fit, which are marked with "small waterway". It is more a matter of size than weight, which is why weight limit is not used for this purpose. The "small waterway" is a prohibitive way constraint, so only ships marked, "MAY USE: Small waterway" may use it.
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AP

I see. I understand the logic of constraining vehicles to certain waytypes, but the manner in which it's done needs to be transparent and intuitive, and I fear this ... is neither.

All the rivers in question have the same waytype "waterway", the same weight limit and same speed limit. Wherein is the clue that a ship will sail on one tile but not on another? ( I assume the "MAY USE" entry is in the code somewhere).

There's nothing in the depot except weight (which meets the route's requirements), it doesn't tell you waytype restrictions when purchasing vehicles or setting up routes.  How is one to tell that "small waterway" is a prohibitive way not a permissive one? It doesn't tell you that on inspecting the tile in question.

An average player, or worse a novice player, who has not been responsible for building the game mechanics, needs to be able to see intuitively where they can and can't send vehicles, preferably before they bankrupt the company building impossible networks.

Especially since, as in my test game, the network does function perfectly, appears perfectly possible, until after several months of gameplay when ships to get far enough upriver to encounter an unexpected roadblock and it all falls apart. I don't mind personally (that's what play-testing is about), but there was nothing to suggest the problem ahead of time, and that, I suggest, may be a problem worth considering.

I don't know whether the route should be 'checked' for impossibility when applying it to a vehicle/convoy? Or whether the vehicles entry in the depot needs more data, or both.

I also think a reduction in weight limit worthwhile on the smaller rivers - the very fact they are the identical suggests ... they are identical.

jamespetts

AP,

thank you for the feedback. Checking the routing ahead would require a rather major change to the code, which at present would go to the back of a very long queue of other priorities related to game balancing. I am reluctant to change the weight limit, since canals do not, in themselves, care  how much that a load weighs - size is more important than weight on waterways. I wonder whether something could be done for way tiles with prohibitive constraints to make it clearer; perhaps "ONLY ALLOWS: %s vehicles" where "%s" is the name of the constraint? So, "ONLY ALLOWS: small waterway vehicles" when one inspects a small river? Another question is how this might be represented in the purchasing menu...
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omikron

Hi James,

I fell into the same pitfall in one of my games. I bought the East Indiaman, it went to the dock and filled up with passengers, but refused to leave for the next dock, since it coudl not find a route. I needed quite a bit of investigating, until I found the 'may use: small waterway' info on some other ships, and inferred from that, that this might be the reason. I think the purchase window for ships should tell which waterways it is able to use, since there are only four (?) types of navigable waterway: sea, wide river, small river (navigable) and canal. listing which ones a vehicle may use in the purchase window would be a better option than mentioneing it only when the small navigable river is useable.

omikron

AP

#5
six at least

ocean
wide river (navigable) 1000t 50km/h
river (navigable) 1000t 50km/h
canal 80t 45km/h
small river (navigable) 25t 10km/h
stream (navigable) 1t 0km/h

I think there needs to be a 7th - a "ship canal" - at some future point.

I do agree that there's no point having "river" and "wide river" if they are functionally the same, but would suggest  the mere "River"s 1000t-50km/h be changed to 900t (or 500t) 45km/h or something, it would be one more little thing suggesting there's a difference to players, and at the present there is a huge difference between wide river and small river. If weight matters not, there shouldn't be a weight limit on small river, the waytypes should do the job (?). Also, whilst size of vessel matters I agree, load is proportional to one of  draught or width, or both, so it wouldn't be unreasonable.

Your suggestion for the tile to state what can and can't use it seems very sensible, but I think it's critical to state it in the depot as well. If that means every vehicle needs a MAY USE and MAY NOT USE entry, that might be what it takes (there may be a graphic/UI way to do it better than a mere list...).

On reflection, I suspect similar issues apply to trains, trams, trolleybuses etc, with regards electrification, or undeground loading gauge, although that's a bit simpler since the electrified track manifests itself more visually in-game.

jamespetts

Hmm - remember, there can be eight different way constraints of each type (permissive and prohibitive), and the depot window does not know which ones happen to be used in the pakset or not, so, if there was a system that stated the absence as well as the presence of way constraints, there would have to be 16 lines of text relating to way constraints the depot window for every vehicle (including some which would read something like: "MAY USE: Prohibitive constraint 7 (unused)"). I don't think that there's space in the depot window for that...
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jamespetts

I have made some changes to the GUI in the 10.x branch to make prohibitive way constraints clearer, which I hope will help to deal with this issue. Any comments welcome!
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