Fixed costs, low frequency services and shunting

[Ves]

Ok! Maybe someone else have some more qualified ideas then :-)

[jamespetts]

Ok! Maybe someone else have some more qualified ideas then :-)

Thank you for trying: your replies are much appreciated. It is just that this is a very difficult area to deal with.

[Junna]

If only the goods worked more like they do in Railroad Tycoon 3, where wagons are formed by the goods waiting at a station, and whenever a train set to allow goods wagons will have them added to the train. This allows more complex mixed trains than the static standard of Simutrans.

[jamespetts]

If only the goods worked more like they do in Railroad Tycoon 3, where wagons are formed by the goods waiting at a station, and whenever a train set to allow goods wagons will have them added to the train. This allows more complex mixed trains than the static standard of Simutrans.

I always found that rather disappointingly unrealistic, as it imagined wagons materialising from thin air whenever they were needed.

[Junna]

I always found that rather disappointingly unrealistic, as it imagined wagons materialising from thin air whenever they were needed.

True, but the game's scale is a bit warped in that regard (the way the stations work and the lack of signal control is quite awful for example). But I like the way it allows for a flexible pick-up, as it were, rather than static wagon (I assume the assumption is that wagons are transferred to stations and loaded waiting for the pick-up). It's very hard in Simutrans, because goods do not travel on their own (the really good thing in RT3 is that goods travel without railways along rivers and similar via some crude calculation of the fastest path, which mean that even areas not directly served might ship some over the railway lines). In Simutrans, it is very hard to set up complex goods services, because you need to complete the chain, and it can be very extensive, and the locations of industries are often illogical. Once you have some basic things worked out it is a bit simpler, but running partial-load services (scheduled as opposed to on-demand goods) is often not economic with the default running costs, even if load is often near 30-40% both ways.

[jamespetts]

The running costs will need re-engineering certainly; but the complexity of industry chains is one of the interesting things about Simutrans. It may be difficult to connect them all to start with, but, once the game has been running for a while, it is more satisfying to have a complete chain fully served by player transport.

[knotwork]

Would it be feasible to have a goods-category ("trailers", "carriages" or somesuch) that would entail being coupled to the end of a "convoy" such as a train?

Then because it is a good, it will look for a route, presumably for a something-that-tows whose capacity of how many it can (or plans) to tow might not even be cared about by routing, just getting to where it can in principle eventually get towed might be enough to figure a route.

Presumably there would be a "shunting station" item one could deploy much like deploying a mail box or bus stop or whatnot to make a station-by-name have the ability to handle this new category of "good".

Maybe also an extended form of depot that like a factory can make orders for so many supplies of such goods, if the goods can have an empty vs full flag; but that maybe goes too far, maybe instead simply have factories that require a supply of "carriages of wheat" or "carriages of coal" or whatever and output empty carriages, and the depot would demand empty carriages or they'd go to recycling or somesuch.

It seems to me that the modern practice of "container shipping" presumably would be nice (?) to be able to simulate, yes? And would not moving containers around be much akin to the "passive" convoy-portions discussed in this thread already?

Ought containers of something be a good? Should they be loaded and unloaded or maybe go to a recycling factory to be recycled into new full containers? Presumably a recycling factory that accepts product X and empty containers and outputs containers-of-X (or full of X), another that accepts product Y and empty containers and outputs containers-full-of-Y and so on? Depending whether making a good be able to have other goods loaded into it is too onerous to code?

The code would need to allow a new kind of "loading", involving "loading" the empty capacity-it-can-tow slots/positions behind the tow-er.

It might even be worthwhile to actually treat the tow-er as if it always had that many carriages behind it, if a dynamic towing-capacity was used rather than a fixed capacity (which if present would be treated as maximum capacity not current capacity as in how many it is looking to tow for the next leg of its journey).

The potential advantage I am thinking these imaginary carriages behind it could provide is spacing, if things trying to come up behind it won't just crash disastrously into its (imaginary thank goodness) rear end; A lot of times I have read that vehicles often end up, undesirably, bunching up. Imaginary carriages could buffer that, but of course with a trade-off that everyone at crossings and junctions would have to wait for the imaginary carriages to go by before proceeding after the tow-er goes by.

This would need at least two capacities or at any rate numbers of carriages: the max number it wants to tow on next leg and the max number that number can be set to at all for any leg during the current schedule or maybe even at all based on make and model etc of the tow-er. Oh maybe also the number to imagine it is towing this leg of the trip regardless of how many it actually happens to be towing at the moment.

-MarkM-

[jamespetts]

I am not sure that I understand these suggestions as many of them appear to conflate entirely separate concepts. For example, it does not make sense to concieve a vehicle as a category of goods. I am not sure quite what you intended by this.

The plan for dealing with this has now been designed: work on implementing this started in 2018, but was put on hold because of a need to deal with various critical bugs. I am hoping to recommence work on this after the project to merge changes from Standard has been completed. See here for details.