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Multiplayer: Transfer Between Players & Share Stops and Ways with Other Players

Started by dannyman, February 16, 2016, 05:48:02 AM

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dannyman

I have enjoyed playing Experimental, though the complexity gets to be a bit much for me. Back to Standard. :)

A style of play I enjoy is single-user multiplayer: set up a transport company that serves one region, another company that serves another region, they come together at certain spots and can exchange passengers / cargo.  Over time, I can have fun seeing how say a bus strategy might fare against a rail strategy, or hauling different cargo, or whatever.

Two things I like very very very much in Experimental and would love to see ported over:

1) Passengers can walk between stations. So, a passenger could start on one transport network, ride to a station in a big city, walk over to the local municipal bus, ride across town to catch a train on another player's network.

2) Players can grant other players permission to access ways and stations.

Now, I totally get the "make public stop" thing ... its like if you want to share a stop you have to nationalize it. Okay, that is a bit of a hassle but can totally live with it, so, passengers walk between stations ... but I would really prefer if stations near or adjacent could exchange passengers.  (Maybe we already have this?) Would even be nice if say, adjacent stations could swap cargo.

What I would really like, though, is if a company could share, esp an existing rail line with another company. I guess I could nationalize the rail line, but that seems like so much trouble. The last game I played I had to have a company build a second set of tracks parallel to another player ... since the companies were not competitors this was wasteful ... then there's a transfer station at one of the towns where each of three companies have their own set of platforms, each kind of jumbled on top of each other with dedicated ways and elevated trestles. The town would really much rather have the companies share a union station, and would be happy even to set up a Joint Powers Authority player to build and maintain a shared station and let the different companies connect in and bring trains into the platforms.

I was in some discussion where a developer noted that walking should be pretty easy to do. In Experimental the "allow players to access ways" is some extra columns in the player select menu: ideally it should maybe be something within the player's domain of the user interface. For my purpose of single player with multiple companies, checking the boxes in the company list works fine enough for me.

Thank you for your consideration.

Cheers,
-danny

DrSuperGood

There have been numerous discussions about such features and how or if they should be implemented.

For example the walking between stops could be done as a special sort of implicit transport upon arrival and is factored into route finding. It could also be done with public stop by merging nearby "walking distance" stops manually with an explicit merge stop tool. One could try to create multi-owner stops, where by different companies can merge stops and retain ownership of the individual stop components.

The problem with way permissions is finding the right balance between what one can and cannot do. In multiplayer this is especially the case since unfortunately there are "troll" players out there. Personally I think some areas need to be relaxed a bit. For example building elevation over other peoples structures, placing waypoints on other player roads and tracks, bulldozing public stops on ways you own should be allowed. Other areas the strictness is not enough. For example merging other company roads into intersections should not be allowed.

Ters

I think walking between stations is one of those computationally expensive things that won't make it into standard "ever".

Giving other players access to ways is possible already, isn't it? What else would road toll be good for? But maybe you were thinking something more fine-grained, which unfortunately increases complexity significantly.

dannyman

Heya ... has this changed in Standard in the past half-decade? What is the best way to exchange passengers and goods between companies in Standard? Public Stops? Thanks!

prissi

1) Yes, public stations accepts from everyone and send to everyone.

2) You can run on other players rails. You need to have a public track where other players can connect. That way you are in control. However, in Standard only one route will server one destination so far. That means, that all passenger to town B will go over hub B even though it is hopelessly overcrowded and will not travel over hub C. That is a major limitation of the more dynamic routing in standard.

3) Depending on settings, even distant stops could join each other. Thus make a stop pulic and then join it with the other public stop. It requires setting allow_merge_distant_halt to value larger than the merging distance - 2.

4) Indeed, waypoints on other peoples tracks are not possible, because if you could force a stop at another players station, you would load there right now, and running into another players depot would allow the other player to sell your trains (and then crash the game currently). Thus the intend to only allow stops on public stations and waypoints on public or own ways. Maybe this needs to be relaxed, just adding more logic on arriving at stops and depots.

dannyman

Thank you for the comprehensive notes, prissi.

It would be neat if folks could walk between stations, but I understand that's a heavy lift.

What I used to do and look forward to doing again in Standard is pretend that the government has some say in what the different companies can do. The government will run some of these public interchange stations at a public expense, but the government mandates that the companies serve some of the more remote communities. The constraint invites some imagination that increases the realism in another domain: transportation industries have a heavy relationship with the government.

Example: RailCo builds a train station, and BusCo builds an adjacent bus stop. The Government will take over maintenance and join them into a single station because the passenger connection facilitates public journeys across these two networks.

Example: FooCo is granted by the Foo Regional Government a monopoly in the Foo Region, but in exchange, FooCo is obliged to provide service to all the remote farms and tourist abbeys, even if that service loses money.

Yona-TYT


Quote from: dannyman on October 28, 2022, 10:35:02 PMExample: RailCo builds a train station, and BusCo builds an adjacent bus stop. The Government will take over maintenance and join them into a single station because the passenger connection facilitates public journeys across these two networks.

Example: FooCo is granted by the Foo Regional Government a monopoly in the Foo Region, but in exchange, FooCo is obliged to provide service to all the remote farms and tourist abbeys, even if that service loses money.

I think there is a lot of potential in script API, there are many things that can be done with scripts so that the public service takes more prominence, unfortunately the potential of the API has not been used much I fear, except of course for the AI railroad @Andarix and the pak/pak128 tutorial that I think are the only relevant projects as far as scripts are concerned.