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Confort-reducing ways

Started by Ves, October 14, 2017, 01:10:53 PM

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Ves

The bad thing about simutrans is that you begin to see simutrans values everywhere in the real world :p
I'm currently sitting in a train in Sweden, trying to eat a small Risifrutti. The reason I am saying "trying", is because it's nearly impossible because my arm with the spoon full of risifrutti, as well as the rest of me and the entire train, is jumping up and down due to the rail being in such a bad shape.
Immediately I thought that this is not very comfortable, and tried to figure out a number for it, but then I realized it is not the train, but the rails that makes this not comfortable.

Thinking about it, all kinds of ways get uncomfortable to travel on when they get decayed:
Tracks gets small lumps and bumps, scratches in the metal as well as sun curves, all kinds of roads gets some kind of holes in them. Waterways would be the exception, since it don't decay. No vehicle, how comfortable the seats might be, can keep up with a road full of holes!

I don't remember if this was ever discussed before, but I could think of a comfort reducement percentage:
When way is in 100% condition, 100% of the comfort is used. When the way decades to, say 50%, the comfort starts to diminish and maybe ends at 70% of max comfort when the way has decayed to 0%. Does it makes sense?
The values could be set in simuconf.tab per waytype.

Even typing this post on my phone was difficult at times!

jamespetts

This is an interesting idea, although there are three principal difficulties with this, two conceptual and one technical.

The first conceptual problem is how it is made clear to the player what is happening and what the actual comfort of any given journey is. Currently, the player can work out the comfort of a journey (provided that it be not overcrowded) just by looking at the comfort of the vehicles. However, there would be no easy way of doing this as regards ways.

The second conceptual problem is the relationship between the degree of degradation and the degree of comfort loss. I do not think that one would simply use the percentage of degradation, since a way with 80% of its useful life left would not reduce comfort by 20%; it would be likely to be unnoticeably different from a way of 100%, so a much more complex formula would be needed, based on real life data; I do not know what that formula would sensibly be.

The technical problem is how, without consuming excessive memory bandwidth on extremely large maps with many thousands of vehicles, a convoy would store and process the comfort affecting degradation of each way tile over which it traverses, and then apportion that among all the passengers for each of their journeys, some of which may well have travelled on different parts of the route than others.

One might conceptualise the problem differently, and instead ask: what is the speed reduction from the way's normal top speed necessary to achieve a level of comfort approximately the same as the way in a good state of maintenance, and then impose a speed limit on degraded ways instead. This is already done (a speed limit is imposed on ways that are less than a certain percentage of their full state, but greater than 0%, at which point they become entirely impassable).
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DrSuperGood

It is not really realistic since road renewal and maintenance by definition means that all holes get fixed up before they become a major problem. Sure one could argue that there is a small decay in comfort however it is so small that people just learn to except it.

Unless of course the condition percentage is something totally arbitrary and not engineering related with 0% meaning the thing has literally become unusable.

Vladki

I thought about something similar when studying the rolling_friction model.

Different road surfaces have different friction, and that is also closely related to comfort. Think of dirt/gravel/cobblestone/asphalt roads. The difference is no so significant for railroads, but still you can distinguish continuosly welded rail to be more comfortable, than rail with joints.

If we consider that regular maintenance keeps the road in good shape, both could be a static values. If not then the comfort reduction (and friction increase), should not be linear. A well maintained road (surface) keeps its quality for long time, until the lower layers get damaged, when the road needs renewal. Something like:
condition/comfort: 100%/100%, 50%/90%, 25%/ 75%, 10%/50%, 0%/100%



Ves

I was talking about the comfort getting reduced only when the way is, say 50% condition or less. So between 50% and 100% there would be no reduce in comfort. I'm away with really bad internet, so I can't elaborate better currently.

Ves

So, back home again! ;D
Driving around in the woods of Sweden for the last couple of days made me think more about ways, and how they affect the vehicles. For instance, as DrSuperGood points out, the roads are constantly getting small repairs when needed, but I would still say that an old asphalt road with lots of patched repairs, along with bumps and lumps coming from cold ice and heating summers, is way less comfortable to travel on, even if the way has been maintained the best way possible.

Vladki, how does friction and comfort corelate? We now drowe on both gravel and asphalt roads in Sweden, two roads which we would say have different friction, but the comfort was mainly due to the humps and lumps in the old asphalt or the old gravel. Tbh, freshly laid out gravel feels exactly like asphalt!
Otherwise, you scale was about something like I was thinking of.

Another thing which came to my mind is this:
In Simutrans, when you decide to mothball a road, the road gets mothballed instantly. I get that the point is that you stop paying maintenance on the road, the maintenance stops, and the road is untravelable as a result.
However, in the real world, you stop paying the maintenance, but the road is still there! It will decay faster, obviously, but you would still be able to drive a truck or a train on it for the first couple of months, and then it might be in too bad condition to traverse.
What if the mothball tool did not mothball the way directly, but just removes the maintenance costs of it and letting it decay, say, three or four times, faster than normal? This way, if you have to heavily save money, you can do this and still have some months to use the network before you would have to either close it down or renew the way.

And lastly, in these days, having internetconnection is also a comfort issue...
I noticed that I accidentally created three copies of this thread, due to tapatalk not having good enough connection to work on during the train ride. :o Apologizes for that!

Vladki

Quote from: Ves on October 18, 2017, 07:20:28 PM
Another thing which came to my mind is this:
In Simutrans, when you decide to mothball a road, the road gets mothballed instantly. I get that the point is that you stop paying maintenance on the road, the maintenance stops, and the road is untravelable as a result.
However, in the real world, you stop paying the maintenance, but the road is still there! It will decay faster, obviously, but you would still be able to drive a truck or a train on it for the first couple of months, and then it might be in too bad condition to traverse.
What if the mothball tool did not mothball the way directly, but just removes the maintenance costs of it and letting it decay, say, three or four times, faster than normal? This way, if you have to heavily save money, you can do this and still have some months to use the network before you would have to either close it down or renew the way.

I second that suggestion.

jamespetts

As to mothballing ways, things are a little more subtle. Maintenance is not just about doing repairs from time to time, but carrying out regular inspections to make sure that the ways are safe. This is perhaps more important for things like railways than roads, but it is relevant to roads, too. If one stops spending any money on looking after a way at all, it will no longer be safe to use, not because it has definitely deteriorated, but because nobody is inspecting it regularly to make sure that it is safe to use.

Note that you can, of course, set the upgrade to a mothballed way so as to continue basic regular maintenance, but then refuse to renew the way when the time for renewal come, and let it descend to a mothballed status in any event.
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