Mainly driven by the ships I'm drawing for pak128.Britain, but could have other uses too...
Imagine a large ship (particularly in the olden days) which would be equally at home transporting wood (long goods), books (piece goods), meat (cooled goods), livestock (unique) or even possibly bulk goods. In real life, such a vessel could be used to transport one type one way and another on the return journey, or even multiple goods types on each run, owing to the large multi-purpose holds in the vessel.
Unfortunately in simutrans we have to code a separate vehicle for each type of cargo. This is sensible in some cases (e.g. different trailers for trucks or railway wagons), but not in this case. So my request is this: can we have the option to allow the SAME vehicle to load (say) either 100 crates of piece goods OR 100 head of livestock? Possibly harder to do would be to allow 50:50 at the same time, but this would also be desirable.
The Hood
Your idea like i.
I have often the Problem to get Ship full with freight.
Unfortunately my solution for this (hierarchical goods categories again, possibly on steroids this time) screws up a basic underlying concept which a lot of other things are based on.
I suggested something on the topic one of the first days on the forums:
http://forum.simutrans.com/index.php?topic=10494.0