Feature request: unique industry names

[Matthew]

James, you requested that I mention the industry naming problem here.

This is  in relation to the Freddy's suggestion of changing messages.

In the first post of this thread, it says "Players will not be able to rename towns and industries, as this is not appropriate for a multi-player game"

t would be very helpful if industry names could refer to towns, whether automatically or by editing

As well as Freddy's point (that it is difficult to interpret messages about industries closing or upgrading), when you are trying to make connections you are often confronted by multiple (sometimes dozens) of possible connections with identical names

Stop names are differentiated, so (at least for me), it's not too difficult to remember that "Lytingcombe Railway Station" is my stop but "Lytingcombe Gate" is Prominster's.

But trying to remember whether "Vegetable farm (8747,1785)" or "Vegetable farm (8723,1727)" or "Vegetable farm (3742,1927)" or "Vegetable farm (6742,1927)" is the one that is closest to my rail line is much more difficult.

This is definitely not my highest priority for feature extensions. But since Freddy has already raised the issue, I hope this helps understanding of it. And I know that James is keen for B-B players to experiment more with industry; this issue is a small barrier to me doing so.

[jamespetts]

I have split this from the Bridgewater-Brunel server thread as that is not the place for feature requests.

The proper solution to this is for a full automatic unique industry name system in the same manner as stop names. However, this will be a substantial project, and I cannot prioritise this over balancing at this time.

If anyone else would like to implement this, I should be happy to integrate it, providing that the code works.

[209CATrus]

For some unknown reason i count on Ranran eventually coding up a snippet to pick out closest city from the (future) industry location, then adding the city name in the form of "Vegetable farm (Vegetableston)" on construction. Not exactly helpful for the densely-packed industries like farms, but better than coords.

I believe a harder to code solution would be indexing each industry of the same type, producing something like "Vegetable farm #1 (Vegetableston)"

[FLN]

I believe a harder to code solution would be indexing each industry of the same type, producing something like "Vegetable farm #1 (Vegetableston)"

This is an approach, I think of as simple and effective, IMHO without including the nearest city name though, as when placing a halt/station it will combine the industry's name and the town's name anyway.

But having a unique number for every industry, that isn't just the cumbersome coordinates, would be great!

I currently number the halts/stations manually, as I build them, like "Coal Mine 1", "Coal Mine 2" and so on.
And I do have this topic on my 'request list' for standard Simutrans as well.