Topic: Landlocked Fishing Ports

[dave62]

Whist playing my latest game of Experimental 10.3 with Pak128.Britain-Ex v0.8.2, I noticed that some Fishing Ports are placed at the edge of a small depression with a tiny bit of water at the bottom but with no access to any river or to the open sea.  Picture uploaded here http://simutrans-germany.com/files/upload/LandlockedFishingPort.jpg.

Of course the player could connect a canal between the Fishing Port and the open water and I wonder if this is what was intended or whether it is a bug.

It appears in both Standard and Experimental.

David

[The Hood]

While this is not ideal behaviour it is not strictly a bug either.  It is actually a "problem" with the executable in that sense: it does not check for direct sea connections between the industries.

Alternatively you could consider it a "problem" with the way I implemented fishing ports (having a separate goods category from fishing ground to port and another from port to fishmonger).  This was to avoid what you have in pak128 where fishing boats are generic cooled goods transporters (so you could have a container ship going fishing, or even build a rail bridge out the fishing ground...).

So I already know about this, but I'm not planning on changing anything unless anyone comes up with a smart way of getting around this.

[Severous]

'not ideal' is putting it mildly.  This sort of thing is bad.

I like the PakBritian Fishing chain but would hate having the whole industry chain broken due to such placing.

Something makes oil rigs and fishing grounds appear at sea (3x3 area?), and other industries on land.  Couldn't that logic be amended to ensure fishing ports were built in a 3x3 area at least 50% water?  A better chance then of having a valid connection and not a bad spawn like David shows.

[The Hood]

I've moved this to extension requests as any change in behaviour e.g. what sev proposes would require a change in the code not the pakset.

[jamespetts]

It would be good if there could be a means of checking for a direct sea connexion.

[prissi]

Checking connections with seas is the most time consuming activity possible. Even now place search for new industry is slow. It would require a new place searcher for this special kind of industry.

[Severous]

Why not invite the player to place it?

[prissi]

Default action needs still to be done automatically. You can delete and relocate it anyway using the map editing tools.

[dave62]

Firstly, thank you to The Hood for taking the trouble to answer my question in the first instance and to everyone else for their interesting input.  I’m a game player not a coder or a transport expert, but it’s always interesting to discover how the game works in this sense.

Having read everyone’s opinions I tend to agree with The Hood that it may be a problem not worth solving in as much as the cure is worse that the problem; as Prissi says it simply takes too much time to search for a problem which in all eventuality will not arise.
 
To give some perspective, I should say that I have never encountered his problem before and indeed when trying to discover if the problem could be replicated in Simutrans Standard I started ten separate new games of the same size as the Experimental game which gave the problem in the first place and did not find any landlocked fishing ports.  I eventually had to change to public service player and try to create the problem that I described and I was able to do so.

I understand what Severous means when asks if there is a way to check if the port is built in a 3x3 area with least 50% water surrounding it, but I fear that the problem may be more complicated than that because the game would also have to check if the fishery is in the same body of water as the fishing port and as The Hood says the game doesn’t check for direct sea connections. The fishing port which is up the supply chain from the landlocked fishing port I described in my current game is in a lake – sorry that the uploaded picture does not make this clear - and having a fishing port on the coast would still require a waterway of some sort in this instance.  As I said I’m not a programmer and if I’m confusing the issue I’m sorry and I’m sure someone will put me right.

[jamespetts]

In light of Prissi's helpful reminder of how computationally expensive that checking sea routes is, and Dave's report of the infrequency of the issue, this issue might best be solved, when it arises, simply by the public service player deleting the relevant industries. In Experimental at least, this will reduce the actual industry density, and make it likely that a replacement industry chain will come into existence in a short time.

[wlindley]

Doesn't the code to check whether the Fishery can be reached from the Fishing Port, already exist as the code which routes a ship from one to the other... can't we just check for No Route?

[VS]

I think building the industry reliably on a shore of at least 20 water tiles could be enough