Topic: Factory Locations: Ports, Mills, Mines

[wlindley]

Currently a factory can be defined in its .dat file as having a location of land, city, or water. 

I propose adding the following, to make the maps more realistic and to fill the need for Ports.  Ports become especially important in the British pak, for example, in the late 1900s when domestic goods manufacturing should be replaced by imported goods; Ports would also be useful in a (hypothetical) American pak that begins in Colonial times when raw materials were exported and finished goods imported (by law, even).

The proposal.  Add:

• location = shore -- This would force an industry (like a Port) to be created on water that communicates with the edge of the map. (When creating such an industry, start on water at the edge of the map and move randomly until you hit land.)
• location = river -- Forces the industry to be built next to a river.  Early mills of all types would use this.
• location = hill -- Forces the industry to be built at or above the map's average land height. Useful for mines.

[Fabio]

• location = shore -- This would force an industry (like a Port) to be created on water that communicates with the edge of the map. (When creating such an industry, start on water at the edge of the map and move randomly until you hit land.)

it should be possible with climate=water

• location = hill -- Forces the industry to be built at or above the map's average land height. Useful for mines.

similarly, it should be possible with climate=rocky (although not all the maps have rocky height)

• location = river -- Forces the industry to be built next to a river.  Early mills of all types would use this.

this would be VERY useful!


VS -- how are they going, the efforts to create a new climate system not based on height?

[Zeno]

I like the idea also, but the shore option was discussed and it has a problem: rotations! You'll never know which part will be over the water on random rotation.
Nice idea for hill and river, but maybe river has same problem described above ...

[The Hood]

I support this.  I know the shore idea could be tricky to code, but is there any mileage in doing something like in the screenshot below?  How hard is it to require a "straight" edge of shore for, say, 2 tiles (as in the screenshot), and then build on top with artificial slopes (all done by the factory builder AI)?  Ideally, the AI would know which edge was closest to the shore so if it was a port, for example, cranes could be built on that side.

I'd also love the location=shore ability for attractions as well...

[VS]

Shore is in some form already possible with location=water...

[The Hood]

Doesn't location=water make it actually in the water, like a deep-sea oil rig?

[VS]

Hm... then I may have mistaken it for climate(s?)=water. Sorry. But I know something like that does already exist.

[Fabio]

VS -- how are they going, the efforts to create a new climate system not based on height?

[jamespetts]

This seems like a very sensible idea. It'd be excellent, as The Hood said, to have it for attractions, too: piers and beaches would be wonderful!

[VS]

VS -- how are they going, the efforts to create a new climate system not based on height?

Not going at all. I have a finished, deterministic recipe for one part of that, the humidity, which is (imho) the hardest part wrt. planning and testing. Making this into actual Simutrans code would require some serious number crunching with Fourier transform... I am not really sure how hard that would be. In the concept demo I used plain convolution which is of course easier to do... but infinitely slower.

Even once that is in place... I can't remember outright, but the other parts were also temperature, a GUI to control these parameters, and finally combining these two into new climates, which requires changes to drawing terrain.

[Fabio]

well, that's a pity there is no progress, i was really *looking forward* to this feature. it' would be awesome!
is there any chance to simplify the model, at the cost of losing some precision?

[wlindley]

What, no Simutrans weather forecasts? But seriously...

For river and shore --

I have looked at the factory builder code. The comments and symbols are quite a mix of German and English -- fortunately I can more-or-less read German, and I used to write C for a living in the 90s, so I could take a stab at this.

There is code for placing factories inside cities (and more specifically, right next to a road) but I don't see anything that would do the "shore" part.  I do imagine that "place a factory next to a river" wouldn't be too different from "place next to a street" although you'd probably pick a random point on the map and then search horizontally/vertically until you find a river, and then apply the "place along" bit.  For placing a factory with "shore" I imagine you'd pick a random ocean point on the edge of the map and then search perpendicular to the map edge for landfall, and then apply the "place along" bit.  

Does that sound logical?  

[Combuijs]

It sounds quite logical, apart from the last one:

For placing a factory with "shore" I imagine you'd pick a random ocean point on the edge of the map and then search perpendicular to the map edge for landfall, and then apply the "place along" bit.

There are also a lot of "lakes" on the map, e.g. a collection of water tiles fully surrounded by land. They won't be found in your algorithm. But you could probably take the same algorithm for rivers, and search for water instead of river.

In both cases you might want an upper limit of tiles to be searched and of course you should not look only horizontal/vertical but probably the area in a region around the random point. I'm sure there is code for that when  factories must be placed in a certain climate (=height). As a consequence finding a suitable tile might fail.

[Dwachs]

yes

There is also 'location=water' for attractions, check the light house in pak64. The corresponding check looks for tiles that are sloped and on water level (i.e. slopes on the shore). A place is accepted if all tiles are sloped shore tiles (which is fine for 1x1 buildings like the lighthouse).

The 'location=water' for factories works different, it is used for oil rigs for example.

[wlindley]

Yes, I was thinking of "Ports" which would necessarily be on water near the edge of the map.   A nuclear reactor, though, would often be on a lake as well, for cooling.  Maybe we need two kinds of "shore."

[z9999]

There is code for placing factories inside cities (and more specifically, right next to a road)

Yes, but it doesn't consider direction of building image, even if it has 4 direction images.
That is not a big problem if a building is square like as 1x1 or 2x2.
But if may have a problem if a building isn't square like as 1x2.

[dannyman]

NOTE: you can go to the trouble of finding water on the edge of the map, put a dock along the "ocean" and then later expand the map and find the "ocean" was just a large lake . . .

-d

[The Hood]

I think if people decide to extend the map manually they can learn to live with the consequences

[Fabio]

find the "ocean" was just a large lake . . .

this is a true gem of philosophy!

[whoami]

one part of that, the humidity, which is (imho) the hardest part wrt. (...) the other parts were also temperature, a GUI to control these parameters, and finally combining these two into new climates, which requires changes to drawing terrain.

When I read the thread regarding this, I already wanted to ask whether (or why) you (plural) want to make ST a climate simulator.
It might be easier to first prepare the actual new implementation of climates, and later introduce additional methods of simulating their natural distribution on the map.

For this extension request: The factory builder already has problems finding proper locations for all the factories in a chain, leading to incomplete (and therefore dysfunctional) chains, a problem still waiting for a solution. For attractions and foundation of cities, it would be easier to deal with the location preference.

[Fabio]

• location = river -- Forces the industry to be built next to a river.  Early mills of all types would use this.

Often features in Simutrans come about because of people drawing things, [...]the coding is more likely to be done for them.

 

well, thank you vilvoh for the quotation

[vilvoh]

Then, I must support it..

[wlindley]

This might be simpler than we thought.  Define a new Location= parameter, "water" which maps to the enumerated constant Fluss (are we continuing to code in German?):

Code: [Select]

diff --git a/besch/fabrik_besch.h b/besch/fabrik_besch.h
index a672728..f3d59f6 100644
--- a/besch/fabrik_besch.h
+++ b/besch/fabrik_besch.h
@@ -210,7 +210,7 @@ class fabrik_besch_t : public obj_besch_t {
        friend class factory_reader_t;
 
 public:
-       enum site_t { Land, Wasser, Stadt };
+       enum site_t { Land, Wasser, Stadt, Fluss };
 
 private:
        site_t platzierung; //"placement" (Babelfish)
diff --git a/besch/writer/factory_writer.cc b/besch/writer/factory_writer.cc
index ba84a67..5de002c 100644
--- a/besch/writer/factory_writer.cc
+++ b/besch/writer/factory_writer.cc
@@ -158,6 +158,7 @@ void factory_writer_t::write_obj(FILE* fp, obj_node_t& parent, tabfileobj_t& obj
                !STRICMP(placing, "land")  ? fabrik_besch_t::Land   :
                !STRICMP(placing, "water") ? fabrik_besch_t::Wasser :
                !STRICMP(placing, "city")  ? fabrik_besch_t::Stadt  :
+               !STRICMP(placing, "river")  ? fabrik_besch_t::Fluss  :
                fabrik_besch_t::Land;
        uint16 const produktivitaet = obj.get_int("productivity",        10);
        uint16 const bereich        = obj.get_int("range",               10);

Then in simwerkz.cc, in the definition of wkz_build_factory_t::work we have …

Code: [Select]

        if(fab->get_platzierung()==fabrik_besch_t::Wasser)
        {
                // at sea                 
…
        }
        else
        {
                // and on solid ground                                                                         
                hat_platz = welt->square_is_free( k.get_2d(), fab->get_haus()->get_b(rotation), fab->get_haus()->get_h(rotation), NULL, cl );

                if(!hat_platz  &&  size.y!=size.x  &&  fab->get_haus()->get_all_layouts()>1  &&  (default_param==NULL  ||  default_param[1]=='#'))
…
        }

        if(hat_platz) {
                // eventually adjust production 

Now, just above the final if(hat_platz) -- "has location" -- add a new code stanza that loops over the prospective factory's borders, looking at each tile that sits outside and immediately adjacent to the factory site, and checks that at least one of those squares is a River square; if none are, clear hat_platz. That's all that's required.

One catch might be that fabrikbauer_t::increase_industry_density has a "retrys" loop that counts to twenty, before giving up on building a factory.  If rivers are fairly scarce, that probably will result in no factories being built, although it's worth testing.  The constant 20 could be changed to "40 for river factories, 20 for all other."

Also, we might want the river square test to be true only for sufficiently large rivers: mills weren't built next to creeks, but at least moderately sized streams.

Can someone help me write the river-check loop?

A

[jamespetts]

This is very interesting. Industry requiring rivers would be a worthwhile development. I do worry somewhat that this suggested version of the code might make map generation take a long time, especially on larger maps, however, although it would need testing.

Water mills (and, for that matter, windmills, which require no new code) would be a most welcome addition to paksets that go to early times, such as Pak128.Britain, but even some modern industries (hydro-electric power stations were mentioned back in 2009) require a nearby river.

[Ters]

Some of these industries, like power stations (or strictly speaking their dams, the power station itself can be far away) and some (most?) mills, aren't really built next to a river, but on a river slope. They furthermore block that river for traffic.

[jamespetts]

Ahh, yes, I suppose that that must be right; different, I suppose, to a factory such as a tannery that would need to be beside a river for a constant supply of water.

[Ters]

Things like tanneries should also work at lakes (fresh water), but not the sea (salt water)?

[wlindley]

Perhaps the loop for creation, then, instead of "try 20 random tiles within the desired location radius" would be "start in the desired location, and proceed alternately north/south/east/west for some steps to see whether a tile of the required constraint exists, and if so build the factory there." 

The constraint being one of, say: sits next to river slope; sits atop river slope (e.g., dams, mills); sits next to lake or medium or larger river, not ocean (i.e., tanneries); within 2 tiles of major river, lake, or ocean (steel mills); is adjacent to several heavily forested tiles (sawmill)...

Would that work well?

[prissi]

It is: Try for 50 random location an area of 25x25 tiles for a match.

[Dwachs]

here is a quick patch. it adds the following options to the location parameter:

river: one tile of factory adjacent to river tile
shore: one tile of factory on a sloped shore tile
forest: more than X trees on the tiles covered by the factory, X=area of factory

Windows executables for patched version of simutrans and makeobj:
http://simutrans-germany.com/files/upload/sim-win-7003-factory-placement.zip

Edit: More on the implementation: No check whether the shore tile is connected to an ocean. No check for major rivers or lakes. Building dams is pretty tough code-wise.

If the factory site finder gives up looking for places with the right climates it still considers the location constraint. That is, a factory with location=river will only placed on rivers or never be built (if the site finder does not find a suitable spot). This can be changed ofc.

[jamespetts]

This is a splendid thing to have done so quickly - can really add depth to the game. One practical issue that has occurred to me is that network games often have no trees to reduce transfer times, which might make the forest setting undesirable in some cases. But, in any event, a splendid addition.

[prissi]

People also play without rivers. At a certain point probably these constraint needs to be lifted (or one has to live with incomplete chains).

[greenling]

Hello All
Those Idea it´s not good the bringing players in problems.

[Leartin]

shore: one tile of factory on a sloped shore tile

As in, it is buildt on land as usual, but one tile is a sloped shore?
Would it be possible to build it on water with one tile (or one side) on the shore, ideally with a proper alignment (so the artist knows on which side of his building the shore will be)?

[prissi]

THe only difference from shore and climate=water is that with the latter all tiles must be on a slope. If the building is 2x1, this will enforce that both are on the slope.

[The Hood]

This looks great - plenty of industries only get placed on shores or rivers. I'll look to include this into pak128.Britain soon with the new industries that I'm working on. Is this in the nightlies yet?

[Dwachs]

Not committed yet.

There is one question: if factory builder does not find a suitable spot (climates + position constraint), then what should be done? Ignore all constraints (climate and position) or only climate?

[Ters]

I think factories will most likely look out of place if location is violated, than when climate is violated.

[wlindley]

Agree, location is more important than climate.

Building a fishing port anywhere but on a shore would look wrong, but building a sawmill in a forest-and-tree-less network game might not be so bad. 

For the special case of the sawmill, would it be sufficient for a pakset to supply both a "forest-only" sawmill (presumably just the buildings) as well as a "doesn't-care-about-forest" version (presumably with its own 'fields' of trees)...?

If supplying two variations of the industries (one with, one without the location restriction) in a pakset is sufficient, then the solution is surely to ignore climates but not location when failing to find good locations.

[jamespetts]

I agree with Ters and W. Lindley for the reasons given.

[The Hood]

+1 to that.

[prissi]

The recently renovated version of the factory builder first tries to build for every factory (obeying the distribution counter) with all restrictions. Then, if no suitable place was found for any of them, the climate restriction is lifted in the second round. It is easy to add a third round, that would lift the locations restriction too.

[jamespetts]

It may be better to have fewer industries than the player asked for than to have industries in silly places.

[Ters]

The builder should rather try to build a different factory chain if location can't be satisfied.

[prissi]

Well, then you may up with almost no industries in many game, especially when the factory radius is set to 50 or so.

[Fabio]

And why not to lift the radius instead in this case?


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

[jamespetts]

If the player is notified about this, the player will understand what is wrong and be able to have another go with different settings.

[prissi]

Searching locations is very cpu intensive. Hence if during seeding of a new industry the computer grinds to a halt for several seconds, people may be confused or even suspect a crash. But you can already set the radius to whatever you like.

Even an industry at the waterside will still have its foundations. So the visuals are not 100% convincing. (And there are places like the Aral lake where the lighthouses are now surrounded by miles of desert.

to me, I think this should be rather a setting, if you want incomplete chains or non-matching graphics. (Especially remembering the many error reports about the game building incomplete industry chains when climates were introduced.)

[Ters]

(And there are places like the Aral lake where the lighthouses are now surrounded by miles of desert.

True, but I don't think they are still operating. If a fish farm ended up in the middle of the desert because the lake dried up, the fish farm would become a monument to the disaster that had taken place and not something that produced fish.

[jamespetts]

to me, I think this should be rather a setting, if you want incomplete chains or non-matching graphics. (Especially remembering the many error reports about the game building incomplete industry chains when climates were introduced.)

This seems sensible to me.

[Dwachs]

here is an update.

How should this setting be implemented to force location constraint to always be respected? a global pakset-wide setting? or per factory?

[prissi]

Probably a pakset setting: force_factory_maxradius, force_factory_cllimate, force_factory_location

The latter might also be used to prevent city industries outside of the city limits.

[wlindley]

For "city" factories, shouldn't the search zone be the boundaries of the city-limits?  So after picking a random location, determine which city it's in, and use the city-limits rectangle for the search zone.

It would be awfully nice if we could code for "shops" which would select their city as above, then find all shops (factories with no output goods) within those city limits, and build immediately adjacent to an existing shop (if there is one).  In the case of no free tiles next to an existing shop, demolish and replace an existing building less-than-or-equal-to the new shop's passenger level.  That would give us the long-desired "high street" effect especially in pak128.Britain.

[Ters]

Not all city industries are of the kind that naturally flock around existing stops at the core of the city. In pak64, most of them are of the type usually (at least where I live) built at the edge of cities.

[The Hood]

I like wlindley's suggestion but as Ters points out it doesn't suit all city factories. Perhaps an additional location parameter - "central" or "highstreet" or similar?

[Fabio]

I second The Hood's idea. And if it's not too far fetched, also apply this location improvement to attractions.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

[kierongreen]

So maybe a city centre industry location as well... (edit other people got there first!)

[wlindley]

Can we use the clusters= parameter to group factories?  In besch/writer/building_writer.cc:

Code: [Select]

        if (!STRICMP(type_name, "res")) {
                extra_data = get_cluster_data(obj);
                gtyp = gebaeude_t::wohnung;
        } else if (!STRICMP(type_name, "com")) {
                extra_data = get_cluster_data(obj);
                gtyp = gebaeude_t::gewerbe;
...
        } else if (!STRICMP(type_name, "fac")) {
                utype    = haus_besch_t::fabrik;
                enables |= 4;
        } else { ...

Make a copy of the extra_data = get_cluster_data(obj); line just before enables |= 4 and ... well, then we just need to handle that flag in the factory creation code.  extra_data isn't used by factories currently; this would make it parallel res,com,ind.

Happily, this way, we could force certain shops in Pak128.Britain to cluster with the row-houses that look the same way.

[prissi]

@Dwachs: Did you incorporated this patch? Or do you have it still somewhere?

[Dwachs]

I did not incorporate it. Have to look for it.

[Dwachs]

Here is an updated patch. Feel free to modify etc.

[Yona-TYT]

I really like this, I hope it will be implemented soon.

Regards.!

[jamespetts]

Interesting! I am not sure whether this patch enables something that I mentioned back in 2009, which is a constraint forcing attractions to be built on the shore, allowing for specific attractions such as pleasure piers and beaches that were important to the 19th century tourist industry?

This will certainly be useful for water mills, however (although does this force the alignment so that it is possible to make sure that the mill wheel always faces the river?).

[Leartin]

Interesting! I am not sure whether this patch enables something that I mentioned back in 2009, which is a constraint forcing attractions to be built on the shore, allowing for specific attractions such as pleasure piers and beaches that were important to the 19th century tourist industry?

This will certainly be useful for water mills, however (although does this force the alignment so that it is possible to make sure that the mill wheel always faces the river?).

Sadly, I don't think that works as such:

here is a quick patch. it adds the following options to the location parameter:

river: one tile of factory adjacent to river tile
shore: one tile of factory on a sloped shore tile
forest: more than X trees on the tiles covered by the factory, X=area of factory

The full factory would be on land, not in the sea, there is no hint that rotation would apply, and probably worse - since it needs to be a sloped shore tile, the building will not be at water level, but above.
This patch can not be used to tie building graphics to the surroundings, I'd say it's mostly a gameplay thing - eg. you can have a fish farm in water and the fish-canning-factory at a shore, that way you have a high chance that you can connect the two directly via fishing boat (if they are at the same body of water)

Though if you think of it as a step by step process, this patch is the step about location. Rotation towards things other than roads could be a second step. If then there was a way to have things on shore without building a basement, pleasure piers would be doable - even though every part in water would not actually be in water but offset-shenanigans.

[jamespetts]

Sadly, I don't think that works as such:

The full factory would be on land, not in the sea, there is no hint that rotation would apply, and probably worse - since it needs to be a sloped shore tile, the building will not be at water level, but above.
This patch can not be used to tie building graphics to the surroundings, I'd say it's mostly a gameplay thing - eg. you can have a fish farm in water and the fish-canning-factory at a shore, that way you have a high chance that you can connect the two directly via fishing boat (if they are at the same body of water)

This is already possible without this patch, and it is done in Pak128.Britain.

Though if you think of it as a step by step process, this patch is the step about location. Rotation towards things other than roads could be a second step. If then there was a way to have things on shore without building a basement, pleasure piers would be doable - even though every part in water would not actually be in water but offset-shenanigans.

This would certainly be a useful thing.

[prissi]

That patch was also sitting too long. It seems to cause no unexpected side effects, so it went into r8571 with a few bugfixes. On maps without rivers or forests, those settings will be ignored to still build those factories.

[Vladki]

Is there any summary for pak maintainers what are the new options? What was implemented, what was only discussed? How it differs from previous location = water, or climate = water?

[Leartin]

Is there any summary for pak maintainers what are the new options? What was implemented, what was only discussed? How it differs from previous location = water, or climate = water?

river: one tile of factory adjacent to river tile
shore: one tile of factory on a sloped shore tile
forest: more than X trees on the tiles covered by the factory, X=area of factory

The previous option (climate=water, location=land) didn't really work for multi-tile buildings, as all tiles would have needed to be on the shore, while the new option only requires one tile. It also allows for the actual ground climate to be set, which probably does not matter too much, but could become important if map generation changes such that climates are not dependent on height anymore, hence all climates would have shore access.

[DrSuperGood]

Forest based placement might need an exception if a map was created with no trees explicitly turned on. I know one does not really need to turn trees off anymore but some servers still like to do so to keep the save file size small. In such a case any place normally suitable for trees could pass the test even if there are no trees.

[Leartin]

Prissi already said that if there are no rivers or no trees, the locations won't keep factories from spawning.

I suppose one could save the information where forests are supposed to be in the map, and use that rather than an actual tree count, which would mean that whether trees exist as objects would not influence the factory placement, and they would not be placed randomly in climates that have trees everywhere; With a sideeffect of potentially allowing to have "no trees" as something that can be toggled during a game (destroy all trees / plant new trees in roughly the same locations).
Perhaps something to keep in mind if anyone is going to change how forests are distributed in the first place, but otherwise probably not worth it.