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Save the trees!

Started by Fabio, February 09, 2012, 01:19:32 PM

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Fabio

Quote from: Memzeron on February 09, 2012, 09:46:53 AM
Save the trees!

I know, Germans are crazy treehuggers, but the trees always have been something special to me. They were simulated life in an otherwise quite plain and technical world. I don't know the current state of the code, but the trees have been real simualted life which is born, bears offspring, and some day dies.

It made me sad to see the option added to have no trees on a map by default, and it makes me sad to degrade the trees to purely decoration, simplified to a few billboard graphics  :-[

In my home town there is a movement going to preserve trees which are about to be taken taken down by the DB AG to make building a new central train station easier. To understand this you need to know that these trees survived two world wars, and that people who were freezing in cold winter did not touch htese trees because they felt them to be important, more important than sitting in a damaged home and freeze. And now DB AG wants to kill those trees almost without a real need - trees which have seen 6 generations of citizens grow up and die, which survived one revolution and two world wars ...

If you can read German or want to try google translate, here is a link for starters:

http://www.bei-abriss-aufstand.de/

I _strongly_ will try to hinder all movements to kill the trees in Simutrans. The "no trees" option was made when I was away, and couldn't do anything about it, but now I'm here and I will.

I want to follow Memzeron/Hajo's plea with an extension request. It will probably be hard to code, but maybe he could give it a try himself. ;)

Trees could work as a collective attraction, made by all contiguous tiles with one or more trees on it. To avoid exploitations, it should work as factories: if one tile with trees falls in a station catchment area, all forest tiles will be considered in the catchment area of the station. Every 12 trees in the forest there will be 1 level of pax (no mail though ;)). This number makes a 2x2 forest with 3 trees on each tile behave like a level 1 attraction, an 8x8 forest like a level 16 attraction and so on. Could it be non-linear, it would be even better.
Making it work like a factory will prevent too many stops being built in uninhabitated areas, and consider hikers and treehuggers coming to visit the forest and trek on foot for miles within it.

A player would then think twice before cutting a whole forest in two laying a new way.

Spike

Quote from: fabio on February 09, 2012, 01:19:32 PM
I want to follow Memzeron/Hajo's plea with an extension request. It will probably be hard to code, but maybe he could give it a try himself. ;)

Trees could work as a collective attraction, made by all contiguous tiles with one or more trees on it.

Very nice idea. And I think I can do it, even with my current skill level in C++/Simutrans coding. I'll think a while how to do it best and then go and do it. I like this idea a lot, and it will open a whole new branch to transportation, holidays and tourist trips to forest regions. Thanks a lot, Fabio :D

Isaac Eiland-Hall

This is an excellent idea. :)

Perhaps there could also be more randomly-generated houses in rural areas, too - that would be a related issue - rural areas do have people in them; maybe forests could sort of work together and make empty terrain somehow less empty....

(these randomly generated houses, and even maybe farms, wouldn't have passenger levels; just be eye candy; but I still think it's somewhat related to the idea of giving forests passenger levels... hope it makes sense)

prissi

You can have random houses; code them as groundobj.

The city algorithm could generate passengers to any tile of the map. Also to tiles within forests. But then you have to build a station with a catchment near this tile.

An_dz

That's a really nice idea. This will give attraction number for "beautiful" areas. I thought for more options, but couldn't find any that could have a good behavior.

Carl

Quote from: prissi on February 09, 2012, 03:04:51 PM
You can have random houses; code them as groundobj.

I've been looking into this, and relatedly wanted to dig out a very old extension request -- timeline for ground_obj: http://forum.simutrans.com/index.php?topic=420.0

If houses can be ground_obj then it makes sense to allow one to specify when they should be built from.

Spike

For the current Simutrans releases it's still not a house, but just a map decoration ...

Roads

As I posted sometime ago requesting a change in the sign graphic (which I got! :) (addon), to allow me to keep trees on the map, I love having a tree or two next to buildings.  The idea of using trees outside of the cities instead of  a tree plantation is really great.

Also I think a house scattered here and there would be nice.  However, when used for more than a map decoration there was a problem in the old great game Railroad Tycoon, much like the problem suggested earlier in this thread.  You needed to build stations to pick the passengers up and eventually the map got really ugly and messy.  One solution might be to attach "land ownership" to each house, simply an internal thing and figure x number of passengers from each house to the nearest station regardless of the distance.  The reason I said land ownership was to prevent the houses from getting too close together.

As for the rural areas looking bare, I have thought about starting a thread called "Did 'ya see that deer?"  I think it would be fine to add animals to rural areas - you could even - and please don't - add an element of difficulty...by allowing vehicles to have accidents by hitting deer or bears or whatever in the road.

Ters

There are animals in Simutrans with pak64 at least. When they move onto roads, they slow down traffic. (They used to enter cities and create mayhem there too, but they have relatively recently been told to avoid urban areas.) Graphically they are flocks, not individual animals, but technically just some moving object. They can't move through trees, though, so I have lots of sheep trapped on one or two tiles surrounded by trees. That should be changed IMHO.

Roads

The thing about animals causing accidents or wreaking havoc in a city is, at least to me, a problem of novelty.  The first time it happens, it's pretty cool.  Soon it gets to be just an annoyance.  I actually wouldn't mind if it happened rarely, in fact it would make the game more interesting, but by rarely I mean it would never happen in most games.  Same with deer or other animal sightings.  I live in a rural area in the woods and occasionally deer will come and graze in my yard.  If they happen to show up over the Christmas holiday when the kids are home, it is always, "hey, look!  Come see the deer!"

What I meant about land ownership of houses is that each house should be assigned at a minimum four squares from, more at times from each other and the distance should be random.  They should appear only when cities appear and a min and max distance from the city hall.