Thinking about the way Simutrans gives money to transport companies, I came to the savegame I have attached (it is small). There, you can see a small town with only two passenger stations. In order to make more money, two additional stations are added: PING and PONG. When going from one passenger station to the other, passenger busses do several PING-PONG bounces before reaching their destination. It is fun to see it in Fast Forward mode. You can see how profit is made after some time in the second savegame.
I thought about an easy to program workaround for this. Instead of paying every time a vehicle reaches a station, Simutrans could pay every time a passenger or piece of goods rides the vehicle and proportional to the distance from that station to the destination station. That way, in the savegame, the buses will only get revenue in A and B and proportional to the distance from A to B. That way, a company can be rewarded if it builds a direct route in place of a snake-like old road with lots of stations.
However, the problem with such workaround is that circular lines wouldn't be so profitable. What do you think?
There is a patch which smoehow does this (although the patch was more elaborate). Using the difference in tiles between last station and current one to next via/destination seems a very easy, performance friendly suggestion, worth thinking of implementing.
EDIT: This will not work anymore in nightly 2071
How nice! It works!
Let's hope there aren't any unforeseen side-effects.
Since it only affects the next transfer stop and not the finaly destination, it will not affect normal gameply much in my tests.
Sorry for response for old topic, but I have a question.
What is the merit to calculate negative income ? :question:
I mean ...
If there is no people getting off at PING and PONG, they don't need to calculate, isn't it ?
Why does it need to calculate all people who don't get off ?
The income is calculated before the vehicle unloads, i.e. for all stuff on the vehicle. Then only it is checked for loading and unloading and the new origin is set.
Quote from: z9999 on November 05, 2008, 07:33:56 PM
[...]
If there is no people getting off at PING and PONG, they don't need to calculate, isn't it ?
Why does it need to calculate all people who don't get off ?
Besides, I think that the info for a certain piece of unloading goods or passenger
doesn't include the station where it/he got in. That makes impossible to calculate
the revenue when they get off. The calculation is done between station stops for
all load (unloading or not).
Not storing the origin of every piece of goods seems pretty reasonable. That way,
a lot of possible combinations of origin-destination can be grouped together and
a lot of memory is saved.
Thank you for explanation. Maybe I understand now. :)
But I think new system is difficult to comprehend by player, even if total income is the same.
Many player think they did someting wrong or it is a bug when they get negative income. It is not fun as a player.
But when you run an empty bus, your income is negative too. Negative income is not really new.