r11216 - moving objects

[Andarix]

The flock of sheep apparently does not want to get its feet muddy and walks along the road.

[Yona-TYT]

The flock of sheep apparently does not want to get its feet muddy and walks along the road.

Just like the old days, so nostalgic... although I must admit it does add a touch of realism to the game

[Isaac Eiland-Hall]

Someone needs to implement road rage

[Yona-TYT]

It would be interesting to maintain this mechanism, although of course, we should prevent the sheep from obstructing traffic for extended periods, perhaps by assigning a maximum time limit for way obstruction in dat file. 😉

[victor_18993]

I had a look at the code, and the sheep are innocent of any recent regression. 

The title points to r11216, but that revision is unrelated. This behaviour is old: sheep have been allowed onto country roads since 2011, and moving objects blocking road traffic goes back to 2008.

The funny part is that they are not actually "following" the road on purpose. They simply keep their current direction for a few steps, and on a diagonal-looking road that happens to mean walking along it.

The less funny part is that the engine then treats them almost like a road vehicle: they block cars and convoys, cannot be overtaken, are considered stuck, stop traffic completely, and do not even trigger a warning. So the sheep are not just sightseeing — they are effectively holding an unannounced rural protest.

I have not reproduced it in-game yet; this is source reading against r12116. I am also not proposing a patch yet, because the intended behaviour is a design choice: keep them off roads, let them cross but not follow them, or keep the behaviour with a maximum blocking time.

I can test any of those options if useful.

[Isaac Eiland-Hall]

Well, in some countries, definitely in rural and not high-speed highways, of course farmers will drive their sheep on the road from place to place, although I'm sure that wold be from field to field and so not far.

I've always wished Simutrans was full of rural farms and occasional houses and such. It would be awesome to have sheep being driven from field to field occasionally, but I suppose such a thing is a couple of orders of magnitutde too much. lol.

But I suppose the real question is how often something like this happens.

I do like having the slight chaos of having vehicles have to deal with occasional animals in the way. I suppose it would be nice to have a limit on how long they could do so, if it seems worth the effort and CPU to track that.

[Andarix]

Well, I know there have been occasional problems with sheep on the roads. And to my knowledge, attempts have been made to minimize that.

But these sheep are behaving like day trippers just wandering around on the road.

As far as I know, sheep aren't supposed to be roaming around in cities.

[edit]
The issue with the cities is that the city streets were built over by the (AI) player. That's another point. I think city streets should always remain city streets, even if they're built over by the player.
[/edit]

Savegame
Simutrans 12116
pak64 124.4

[prissi]

Sheeps do not like to go into woods, so they have to follow a road through the woods.