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Maintenance and a couple of ideas

Started by bigliettiperfavore, January 31, 2013, 08:43:34 AM

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bigliettiperfavore

I'm a fan of trains.. and would love to see more realism in the game (even though simutrans is the most realistic game of its genre atm, one of my top 3 games of all time). I jotted down this yesterday, and as I have restricted knowledge of what is doable in the game, with the current engine and such, this might be silly :S but here goes:

'Realistic construction time' - when building roads and railway tracks you first do it in a 'project mode'(not really a mode but you do it in a sandbox thingie, where you are building things like now but it won't cost anything until you are done planning.. or maybe there should be a smaller projecting cost, like in real life - varying with the size of the project/stretch being built), then building will commence when you are finished. The player must buy [or rent] equipment and machines for this. Roads or tracks must be present at a neighbouring tile of the the site/stretch to be built, otherwise it has to be constructed. If you have construction vehicles running on rails (another idea) that are connected to the railway line being built, building of a service/works road is not required. Types of road/tracks have various quality, like now.. and depending on this also have various amounts of time it takes to be built (higher quality=longer time) , also resources have to be aquired (higher quality, more consumption of resources) which again have to be transported from factories/steel mills/quarries and so on. Tunnels and bridges take longer time to build than ordinary tracks and roads, and often have higher costs, like now. When building tunnels, stone is 'produced' by the drilling/blasting and has to be carried away.

Roads and tracks get worn realistically and speed restrictions are placed accordingly. (a combination of time since last maintenance and usage[convoys passed total]) Track switches have a higher probability of failure.

Maintenance of roads and tracks also requires machines and equipment. Maintenance trains have a designated 'home yard'/siding while vehicles have a depot/building of some sort. Maintenance is not completed by the click of a button but the nearest (??) maintenance train/car is directed to the stretch or site that is to be performed maintenance upon.
A train yard (or several) - at least a siding, can be built for storing of maintenance rail sets and also spare multiple units/trains/locomotives or other.

Maintenance buildings and cleaning/washing equipment.. Units get worn out and filthy as time passes (I remember the message 'XXX has broken down' to be a bit of a nuisance in Transport Tycoon, where units broke down when they reached a certain age, receiving loads of alerts when you had a lot of buses etc :D) Units have to be performed service upon at a maintenance building/depot when it reaches XX% (user defined?) - Maintenance will take some time, so service on the line the unit is assigned to will be restricted or temporarily unavailable (spare units have to be available, like mentioned above..) otherwise it will break down. I havent figured out what the dirtyness factor will have an impact on yet..Grafitti happens randomly (although not as often in rural areas (places with xxx inhabitants more likely).

Depots increase in size (currently only one tile) - so that it can handle (produce & and perform maintenance) trains as long as the depot. (e.g. depot
2 tiles long cannot handle train of 3 tiles length)

Train categories: Passenger; Local rural/Commuter/Express and so on..
Passengers are divided into subcategories of 'goods'..for the journey that is to be made (similar to cities in motion) - holiday, commuting/work/business travel, school/students, and the train categories mentioned are adjusted to this somehow (have not figured this one out yet)

Scenic rail routes (or road stretches) - that go by the sea/fjord/river or on valley sides /across mountains etc will generate a higher number of 'holiday' passengers (lines or routes get a factor of 0-10, similar to Roller Coaster Tycoon). Passengers will be attracted to the line as an attraction (if possible) - passengers can in theory travel on the line without having a destination (if the terminus station in an unlikely event is without a connection to a settlement/attraction/interchange station they have to travel back again).

Just a couple of chaotic notes.. Will try to rewrite more detailed, feel free to comment :) (also hope it's in the right section..)

prissi

About all on the top half was requested often, please search for it.


Ters

Note that for every feature requested, there is usually a request for exactly the opposite.

Fabio

Many nice ideas, but most would require an unacceptable amount of micromanagement.

Some concepts could be used though in an abstract way to mimick the strategic choices in current framework.

greenling

bigliettiperfavore
some of your ideas gives in Simutrans exp and some Ideas not.
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