Shared/Nearby stations

[Vladki]

Hello all,

I know that when playing with AI or multiplayer, public stops can be used by all players, and passengers and cargo will transfer from my trains to AI's busses and vice versa. But in RL people are used to walk a little from bus stop to train station, so I wondered if this works in simutrans as well. Do passengers transfer between stations that are in each other's coverage area? Or at least if they transfer from bus stop of one company to train station of another on adjacent tiles. Or is making the stop public the only way to get passengers from one company to the other?

Vladki

[Combuijs]

Hello all,

I know that when playing with AI or multiplayer, public stops can be used by all players, and passengers and cargo will transfer from my trains to AI's busses and vice versa. But in RL people are used to walk a little from bus stop to train station, so I wondered if this works in simutrans as well. Do passengers transfer between stations that are in each other's coverage area? Or at least if they transfer from bus stop of one company to train station of another on adjacent tiles. Or is making the stop public the only way to get passengers from one company to the other?

Vladki

Public stop is the only way. Stations within each other coverage area are not connected. Simu's hate walking when transferring it seems...

[Carl]

Foot connections between stations which are fall into each others' coverage areas are allowed in Simutrans Experimental, and this seems to work pretty well. Has this feature been considered for Standard?

[Ters]

I seem to remember that it was discussed a while back, probably this year.

[prissi]

No it was no considered, and according to my memory it was also never discussed for standard. It also somewhat defies the purpose of a transport simulator to do the transport on its own.

What has been discussed and what actually made it into a patch was an alternativ routing mechanism to split stuff between two routes based on the "route time".

[Ters]

It also somewhat defies the purpose of a transport simulator to do the transport on its own.

I don't agree. People are not fully dependent on a bus, train, ferry or airplane company to move them around. Having passengers do some limited self transportation would add another aspect to the challenge, not work against it. Players would no longer be able to lock passengers onto their network, but have to deal with the fact that passengers freely can switch to another player's service half way if it is better.

One of the Railroad Tycoon games even had goods flowing on its own accord, but for Simutrans, I would rather see an undergrowth of smaller transport companies for anything like that. But this might be harder to get right, and somewhat different and separate from passengers.

How this added complexity would affect performance and system requirements is another matter, but I don't think it should be too bad.