News:

Simutrans Tools
Know our tools that can help you to create add-ons, install and customize Simutrans.

Passengers walking to circumvent various features [BUG] or unexpected behavior

Started by Mariculous, May 19, 2020, 12:38:33 AM

Previous topic - Next topic

0 Members and 1 Guest are viewing this topic.

Mariculous

Passengers walking in between stops is a great feature.
However, passengers seem to abuse that feature to create jump gates and to avoid overcrowded stops in a quite stupid way.

Stops have a much smaller internal transfer time than actually walking that distance would take, especially if the stops terminals are placed in a straight line, thus passengers will use such jump gates to travel around the world in a quite fast way without actually taking any public transportation.
Apart rom being weird, this could be abused to get a fairly fast feeder "service" sparely settled areas where an actual feeder service does not run profitably.


The second issue with passenger walking is overcrowded stops.
When a stop is overcrowded, pasengers cannot originate from it, but a stop can get over capacity due to transfers.
Thus, if a stop is overcrowded, passengers will simply walk to another nearby stop, just to walk to the overcrowded stop, instead of originating directly from it.
Stageposts with 1076 waiting passengers were already sighted on Bridgewater.
Effectively, stop capacities are more or less useless in early years. You can either spend a few cents in a nearby "feeeder stop" and accept an increase of journey time of roughly 10 minutes, which is not much in early years, and even a little bit compensated by the jumpgate glitch, or you can spend a lot of money in stop capacities, which will also increase internal transfer times of that stop, although not that much.

Overcrowded stops internal transfer times increase, I guess to prevent such crowding.
That does not work quite well, because there seems to be an upper limit to that increase.
Said staging post with 1086 (it just increase while writing these few lines), has an internal transfer time of only 9 minutes.


So my thoughts on how to fix both of the above issues is the following:
1. disallow passengers to walk more than one hop in a row. Walking includes the way from their actual origin to the first stop and from the last stop to their destinaton.
2. remove that transfer time increase cap.

jamespetts

No. 2 may be workable, but no. 1 would, if I recall correctly, require more or less rewriting the entire passenger/mail/goods routing algorithm from the ground up, as there is (if my memory serves me correctly) no storage of the data representing the number of previous walking transfers when calculating routes; indeed, routes are standardised for all passengers arriving at any given stop by any means, so it is impossible without a total rewrite to treat passengers arriving in one way differently for routing purposes than passengers arriving in another way.
Download Simutrans-Extended.

Want to help with development? See here for things to do for coding, and here for information on how to make graphics/objects.

Follow Simutrans-Extended on Facebook.

Vladki

And what about setting the transfer times to be equal to walking between furthest points of the station?

Mariculous

Not a good idea imho.
The issue is again grapics scale vs economic scale.
Internal transfer times are rather related to graphics scale, walking times are related to economics scale.
Changing either of these will result in
a) Passengers running very fast, in early years even faster than any horse pulled coach could move or
b) Passsengers on stations need plenty of time in rather small stations already. A 6x1 station, which is meant to represent a single track of 180m length will already result in transfer times of 9:18.