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Idea: River Names

Started by The Hood, November 03, 2009, 11:29:31 AM

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The Hood

I've had an idea about rivers which may make the game more interesting - give rivers names, so you could have the River Thames, River Trent, River Mersey etc in Simutrans (sorry for my anglo-centric geography there!).  Just like cities are named from citylist.txt, rivers could be named somehow from a riverlist.txt.

I have no idea how easy this would be, or even if it would be worth it, but I think it might be a nice touch.  Anyone else agree?

Combuijs

What you are actually asking is that Simutrans should know the concept of a river as a set of river-type tiles. At the moment this is not the case. So I think that is a lot of work to do, which might take up some considerable storage space as well (note for example that a city is not a collection of tiles, but a rectangle, so 4 numbers suffice to store the city). And what to do when a user removes part of a river and replaces it by a channel?

Apart from these considerations, you could take this concept further. Create the possibility to attach a name to a collection of tiles. With this you could name not only rivers, but also seas, lakes, forests, mountain ranges, counties, roads, streets, channels, railways etc.

I like the idea, but I have my doubts if it's worth the development capacity and the amount of storage needed.

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vilvoh

I think the approach would be similar to giving names to streets, that was discussed here. At first sight, seems easier to implement as the amount of rivers available in a map is clearly limited.

P.S: After reading Combuijs reply, now it seems much more complex than I thought.

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The Hood

I was hoping it would be rather easier to do as rivers are generated on startup only, and are purely linear:
- when the map generator builds one river from source to estuary, give it a name
- build another river from source to estuary, give it a name
     * if this river "ends" at the first river and feeds into it, just name the first part, it is a triburary of the other river

Maybe even just as simple as adding a sign on map startup (of course I can do that manually). 

But if it is really hard, then it wouldn't be the end of the world not to have it :)

Dwachs

Yes it would be relatively easy to generate signs along the river.

However what would be the purpose of this?
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The Hood

Quote from: Dwachs on November 03, 2009, 01:33:06 PM
However what would be the purpose of this?

No functional purpose - just for fun really.

skreyola

It is already possible to add signs if you want your rivers named.
I'd vote that the maintainers put this near the end of the list of priorities, because while it would be neat to have river names, it's likely to be a lot of work, and there is already a way in place for the probably very few people who would want the feature.
Cheers.
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sojo

Quote from: Dwachs on November 03, 2009, 01:33:06 PM
However what would be the purpose of this?

Mayby, stops next to a river can named. Lake side "Themse" stop. Or so.
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Isaac Eiland-Hall

I like the idea of being able to associate a name with a group of tiles, especially if the system is group-based rather than tile-based (that is, a tile may belong to more than one group; rather than a restriction of one group for a tile).

If anything, it should be veyr very low priority... but for scenarios, for example - the city code could add city tiles to the proper city; you could generate regions/states/countries; rivers, districts... Once scenarios are developed, it would be cool to have things like "X amount of some good to X city/region/district/whatever".

And just like you could outline stop coverage, one day you could outline city coverage, rivers, whatever, maybe hooking into this system.

It's way in the future... but it seems handy. Of course, it may be way in the never, i.e. never happen. :)

skreyola

Regions? Like in Railroad Tycoon II?
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Isaac Eiland-Hall

Regions could be somewhat like that - like the Territories, I suppose. May be what was inspiring me - I liked that part of RT2 :) Rise of Nations also has this concept, and it's very cool there.

But of course cities could exist, or even streets, for that matter. Any sort of sets of tiles :)