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Fixed Vehicle Maintenace

Started by colonyan, April 15, 2009, 03:21:37 PM

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colonyan

   I wish there is a way to put a fixed maintenance cost for vehicles.
   I'm not asking it should be added to current pak sets but for future possibilities.

   By adding fixed maintenance cost for vehicles, pak designer can
   
   A.asks player to use minimum number of vehicles to pursue more efficiency (cpu wise too)
      edit:+ naturally preemptively avoiding vehicle congestion
   B.upgrading to higher track speed becomes more naturally given above
     (In practice, profit pursuer can use cheapest track with tons of signal to
      allow high vehicle density. In other word, storing more passengers on track)
   C.introduces more concept of time restriction
   D.tool to balance profit further more
   E.more vehicle type representation
   
  After all its up to pak designer to make it or not.
  But I personally request this feature for reason A. mentioned above.

  Thank you for your precious time.
   

jamespetts

I am not sure what you mean by "fixed vehicle maintenance" here.
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gerw

Maintenance, that is paid per month and not per km.

jamespetts

Would it not be good to have some combination of both per vehicle? That would be more realistic.
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gerw

I think, this is what colonyan meant.

prissi

This is extremely simple to program (just the creating and deletion routine need to add them to the player's account). But the real work would be to find sensible values for all vehicles in a pak set.

colonyan


      I think pak maintainer has choice to keep it simple.
      One can consider fixed fee for some kind of wage for driver/conductor and some other mechanical parts.
      For any vehicle with power, comparable fixed fee can be applied.
      If engine allows multiple engines, they can be lower.
      Passenger carrier car should have some cost for conductor for example.

      Just applying (game wise balanced) uniform fixed cost for all motor car can already make
      player use their vehicles as efficiently as possible.
     

jamespetts

It would, as Prissi said, be very easy indeed to add code to allow for a monthly cost for vehicles in addition to the per kilometre cost. Pak-set maintainers could then decide whether to use monthly costs, per kilometre costs, or (most realistically) both. That would mean that this item could be added to the code without disrupting existing pak-sets, allowing pak-set maintainers the flexibility to decide which to apply.

I am considering adding this to a future version of Simutrans-Experimental. If any such change would be seriously considered for the trunk, I could also make a .patch file for that purpose, although it would not be worth the extra effort of doing so over simply adding it to the Simutrans-Experimental code unless there was a high chance of such a feature being added to the trunk. (Of course, even if I did not produce a .patch file, trunk developers could easily copy my code in Simutrans-Experimental from Github and use it in the trunk).
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prissi

The worst effort would be adjusting the GUI to properly display both maintenance costs. I think, this can be considered for the next version.

jamespetts

#9
Thank you for that indication :-) I hope to be able to do that within a week or two, after I have finished debugging Simutrans-Experimental...

Edit: Actually, one question: does anybody have any views on what should happen about the monthly maintenance cost for vehicles in a depot? Should it be possible effectively to mothball vehicles by charging either zero or a reduced monthly maintenance if they are in depots? If so, by how much ought the monthly maintenance be reduced for vehicles in depots?
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colonyan


     @jamespetts
       
        Instincitvely, fixed monthly fee must be lower for vehicles in depot, I guess...
        They don't run, less maintenance. For reduction 1quarter or 1fifth is enough.
       
        Just a little thougt. Vehicle must be 100% in the depot to it to be claimed
        "at the rest" that month?

jamespetts

Colonyman,

thank you for the response :-) Yes, I agree that a vehicle must be in the depot the whole month to reduce the maintenance, and have thought of a simple way of achieving that in the code. Thank you also for your views on reductions in the costs.

Does anyone else have any views on reduction of costs?
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prissi

Vehicles in depot are not cheaper than the rest. They still need to be kept runworthy (i.e. boiler inspections etc.) and thus the fixed cost should be the same, as long as they are in a consist. When disassembling the consist (and thus they cannot immediately start again) I would consider charging maintenance. Because everything else (i.e. the actual running) is provided by the running costs.

jamespetts

Ahh, thank you, Prissi for your contribution, too: I had not thought of distinguishing whether the vehicles are in a convoy or not. My only concern with that is how that would easily be communicated to the player via the GUI.

I shall ask somebody who works in transport to-morrow his views on the question of reduction, and see what he says. In the meantime, any views are most welcome :-)
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kierongreen

I'd say no reduction. As it is at the moment vehicles are ready to go immediately from the depot. A reduction in maintainence would imply the cost of an overhaul before leaving, which seems like it'd be too complicated...

jamespetts

Speaking to somebody with detailed knowledge of these things this evening, Kieron is right - being in a depot does not by itself reduce the non-mileage dependant maintenance costs, unless the vehicles are properly mothballed, but that would be very complicated to implement.
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whoami

There is still the difference between fixed (or rather: time-dependent) maintenance costs for the vehicles on the one hand, and the time-dependent costs for operating a convoy on the other hand, the latter consisting mostly of paying the employees (at least one driver). Expenses for conductors/service personnel would depend on number/capacity of passenger wagons (and other factors, like difference between local and express trains). Multi-head trains would - in many cases, excluding e.g. steam locos - require only one driver (=> to be separated from engine costs), so operating costs would be lower here, when compared to splitting the train into several ones.

Quote from: jamespetts on April 16, 2009, 10:00:26 PMColonyman
Didn't he tell you already that his name is "colonyan"?  ;)

VS

#17
So you would charge
people + base per vehicle + per tile per vehicle?

Regarding colony(m)an: maybe it's a spell checker result- remember Sumatrans?

My projects... Tools for messing with Simutrans graphics. Graphic archive - templates and some other stuff for painters. Development logs for most recent information on what is going on. And of course pak128!

whoami

Quote from: VS on April 19, 2009, 08:42:19 AM
people + base per vehicle + per tile per vehicle?
Yes. People are the most expensive factor (at least nowadays), so it makes sense to charge for their time. The problem with time-based costs is just that they makes profitability calculation far more difficult. Currently, setting convoys to a certain load percentage guarantees a fixed, easy to determine relationship between costs and revenue.

prissi

Well people are not the most expensive costs, at least not for trains. The german railway have about 5000 people who could run a train but has nearly 100000 employees. Furthermore, running an engine that easily consumes 200 liter diesel per hour (or 2000kWh) the average salary is not a big factor. The maintenace for upkeeping the infrastructure (and thus the employees there) are with track maintenance. The salary for the driver is in the bill for the average cost per tile.

That said, a constant monthly maintenance cost could be also interpreted as the salary of the driver ...

jamespetts

Patch for trunk integration available here.
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colonyan

Oh boy it was 2009... 7 years!
Will we have this in standard sometime near future?
Seems like I can not see this parameter in tikiwiki article about dat files.

DrSuperGood

I keep hearing that it is in standard already.

Leartin