Long-term proposal: proper asset tracking

[neroden]

So, things like city buildings, elevated way pieces, etc. all have prices, and values, but when you buy them they don't go on your financial  assets list.  They should.  This would finally make the simutrans accounting make sense.

Later, and this may be quite difficult to implement, there should be a way to sell infrastructure to other companies.  This would require a new UI implementation, where each piece of infrastructure was marked as "for sale to" one by one (with a special color highlight view, and the ability to "unmark" them again) and then the giver would specify a dollar amount and a recipient and push "offer" (and potentially withdraw it later), and then the recipient would have to push "accept" and it would be transferred.

This would allow for the modeling of all sorts of stuff which happened historically, spinoffs and mergers and sales and purchases of lines.

You could also sell things to the city government using the same interface, with a programmed set of conditions on what sort of things the city will accept (probably just houses and ground-level roads within its city limits for starters).  (Buying them from the city would probably have to work differently as it does now.)

If the "no owner" roads were replaced with roads owned by a "national government" company, then the same interaction could happen with the "national" infrastructure (roads, bridges, etc.)

But the first step is to start treating assets as actual assets, rather than just as things which cost money once.