Topic: Do you use a system for bus stop names?

[Postlimit]

I am playing (1st time) a map with huge cities. Right now, I'm connecting a city of 150k pop. with bus and tram lines (and later I'll build underground trains too). Since I've only recently opened up many new lines, it is obviously far from optimized, and I have some very full stops.

However, clicking on the full stop gives me a list that:
147 passengers > via Lancaster axis stop
45 passengers > via Lancaster external stop
34 passengers > Lancaster inner stop
33 passengers > Lancaster central stop
etc.
... and with 50+ stops, I find myself at the first level of hell to figure out what line is not running optimally. I don't know where those stops are, and I don't know which line needs more capacity (if any, maybe the busstop is just too small).

So, now I started to rename all of them systematically. I'm gonna call them by the lines that serve the stops, so a stop could be called 'Lancaster T1a B3d', meaning it's in Lancaster, on Tramline 1 and also on Busline 3. And following the tram and buslines, the 3rd letter in each code just goes up alphabetically, so you know how far it is along the line. So far, the alphabet proved longer than my lines.
The benefit is that you can see in one glance that half the people crowding the stop will take the tram 1, and the trams have enough capacity... so, no worries.

It seems to work, but it's tedious to rename everything. Maybe there's an easier way to remember (or, I almost don't dare to ask after playing only a few weeks - maybe some brilliant developers would want to automate this - so the game just shows which lines we're dealing with - maybe so you can toggle it on/off?)... 
What do you guys do now to keep track of what's what in a large passenger network with many lines with many intersections?


p.s. Unrelated, but not worth its own thread: When you get a noise like a car engine that wont' start on a cold morning - what is that about?

[Zeno]

I tried several times to follow similar patterns for stop naming. I think I never repeated a pattern in two different games, so I guess I never got a satisfactory way to compose those names.
More recently I use buildings, monuments and places to name my stations. They are all composed as [townname] [placename], examples would be "London Hospital", "Barcelona Courthouse", "Berlin Airport", "Manchester Townhall", and so on. These are short, easy to obtain (low neuron loss) and very intuitive; you can quickly know about the station, identify it, where it is, etc. The bad thing is you don't have any info on the lines serving the stop, but that happened to be useless information to me (at least at first sight). Moreover you can always click on the stop to get the list of lines serving that stop

[sdog]

i only renamed stops in very early games. later on the number of bus stops gets so enormous that it was not feasible anymore. I even stoped to give lines names. For a map exceeding 1280^2 a good number of towns is above 200. With at least one bus line for each, and about 4 stops on average numbers get large. I tried to set up local transport bus lines in less than 4 minutes, to get anywhere. (as i was playing experimental, i could use the replacement tool for maintaining the routes, by replacing buses with more modern ones, else i would at some point have been stuck with updating lines slower than vehicles get obsolete.)


What i usually do though, is renaming cities before starting a game. The largest cities get names of large cities fitting roughly the geographic location (eg. London in the south, glasgow north etc)

[Postlimit]

 Zeno, I understand that it's a pain in the a** to rename busstops and lines. I just spent an hour doing it properly (my system will probably fail soon if it has too many mistakes), so it's far from ideal. I don't think that renaming all the stops is my idea of having fun playing a game. But it did enable me to sort out the problems in my network pretty soon, once it was done.

How do you optimize the crowded stops, when you have connections in all 200 cities? Do you just let passengers wait (screw the customers, just like in the real world), or do you use overkill of buses, making sure everybody gets a seat, but take for granted the buses will be quite empty if you make a wrong estimate?

 sdog, funny to hear - I also rename the cities. Again, it helps to find your way around, and it has some aesthetic value too.
How difficult would it be to at least make sure that the city names are sort-of geographically correct? The game already has a coordinate system - so I'd imagine that you just need to add some order to the list of city names, and rename them after the map was drawn? I imagine it's a rather simple task to check google maps to get them in the right order (and maybe expand it a bit, to reduce the simcitys). Then the mix of large and small can still be wrong, but at least London is always in the south, and Newcastle always in the north. I'd happily help out a bit if I can - I can't program anything, but I know my way around google maps

[sdog]

How do you optimize the crowded stops, when you have connections in all 200 cities? Do you just let passengers wait (screw the customers, just like in the real world), or do you use overkill of buses, making sure everybody gets a seat, but take for granted the buses will be quite empty if you make a wrong estimate?

experience and iteration. first i have a rough idea how many buses i need for the lines, then i also check again after a year or two and add new buses to the line if they were not sufficient. In the experimental version i played wait times were critical, as pax get a refund if the journey takes to long, so i often accepted losses by empty buses on local lines to prevent wait times get too long.

For the larger towns and cities with i needed more lines, and of course took much more time to set them up. Those were of course much fewer.

How difficult would it be to at least make sure that the city names are sort-of geographically correct? The game already has a coordinate system - so I'd imagine that you just need to add some order to the list of city names, and rename them after the map was drawn?

it has been discussed two years ago. the conclusion was it wouldn't be terribly difficult, with most of the effort to provide the meta information in city list. The desire for this was too low however, with more people prefering fictional city names. (couldn't find the thread right now)

(I like real city names, as i can remember them easily, and such a system helps me to keep my orientation, i typically do it for the largest 10 cities or so.)

here's a slightly related thread: http://forum.simutrans.com/index.php?topic=2448.0

and that's on one of my games (i've taken down a couple of images in the meantime). http://forum.simutrans.com/index.php?topic=6375.0

wow, my computer just crashed massively, but google chrome saved the answer i've written, but haven't sent

[Combuijs]

I organise my cities always in the same way (assume station coverage = 2):

Every stop has size 2x1, so covering an area of 6x5. In this way later on trams can be 4 long, as can underground stations much later on.

I group stations in a 3x3 grid, covering an area of 18x15. The group gets a name, the first one around the townhall usually the city name (say London), for others I concoct a derived name (say London Croydon, London Tottenham). Each station gets an addition to that name, depending on their location: Center, North, South, West, East, NE, SE, NW, SW. So you get London Center, London North, London SE, London Croydon Center, London Croydon North, London Croydon SE etc.

I usually organise my transport in such a way that a local line picks up all passengers and mail in a group (serving 9 stations) and then another line connects the center of such a group to a central station. As long as the group is not that big (say the city covers just 4 stations of the group) then these two are combined in one line, e.g. bus goes from central station to all stations in that group).

It's a nice, convenient and not unrealistic way of organising things...

[Postlimit]

How long can it take you guys to build a network? I mean, I've spent two evenings now, to have two cities with grids, connected by rail and a couple of branched freight train lines for a constant income (I built the freight first).

Ok, I am likely to be very (very) slow because it's all still new (my god, this game has a learning curve!)... but I am starting to think that you can easily spend a month on a big map?

[ӔO]

For me, it takes around... 30 to 60mins setting up a rail line.
For bus lines, it's under 20mins.
I find that the more money I have, the more time I will spend trying to smooth out the route.

this is with 8 to 10 cities or around 100 tiles route length.

[Combuijs]

How long can it take you guys to build a network?

Depends on the mapsize. I've got maps that I've worked 50 or even 100 evenings on... Perhaps I should get a life...

[Roland Deepson]

Depends on the mapsize. I've got maps that I've worked 50 or even 100 evenings on... Perhaps I should get a life...

I can totally see myself falling into that trap. 

As to the OP, I like that (in the windows version at least) the ctrl+c / ctrl+v functions work.  Using these, the first stop I create in any city is the "{cityname} Terminus."  I place this stop just outside the edge of the initial city footprint, and cordon it off with dirt roads to remind me how much space I saved for it.  As the city expands, generally this terminus ends up at the center, and that dirt perimeter around the terminus helps save space for this.  From there, I have a naming system for the factories, and their stations get the same name for simplicity's sake.  All other stops get {cityname} Stop 1, {cityname} Stop 2, etc. in some kind of geographically intuitive order.  Occassionally city expansion will prompt me to renumber these stops, but this only happens when a city expands by an order of magnitude.  This numbering system allows me at-a-glance understanding of my route manifests, since I tend to reevaluate my pax lines at times.  I also name my individual vehicles with {linename} 1, {linename} 2, etc (I have a nice keyboard that can program macros, which is a godsend for this level of anal retention I describe to you.)  This vehicle numbering allows me to know approximately what the vehicles' relative ages are, so that I can always pull the newest vehicle off during contraction.  I save some of my vehicles in the depot, but when I do sell them back, I want the best resale value available.  (It occurs to me that since bankruptcy in game is determined by net wealth as opposed to cash on hand, this may be a moot issue.)

I intend to experiment with pure hub/spoke routing, likely with underground-only pax / mail lines within cities to reduce congestion.  Freight within cities may dive underground as well if things go swimmingly, reserving rail transport for the intercity hubs.  I will start anouther thread on this soliciting ideas and feedback.

[Patrick]

Assuming i'm understanding the question properly, i lay my cities out like Combuijs.  I devide the city by north/south/east/west quadrants, then i add bus stop numbers.  i.e.  Jamestown East #01, #02, #03 etc.  Jamestown West #01, #02, #03 etc.  Makes tracking buses a snap!!!

After a while i go and look at the bus stops to see if excessive passengers are 'waiting' for a bus, and i'll add more buses as needed to alleviate over-crowding.  Once you get so far into a game and you've got a million buses running around i just let things run their course as you become overwhelmed trying to keep up.  By then i'm a member of the 1% club (USA term for Mega-Rich folk) and don't need to upgrade stuff.

That's just the way i run my buses.

Patrick

[Isaac Eiland-Hall]

I assign every city a 1-3 letter unique code, then each bus line a letter (never had more than 26 bus lines in a city so far, but I don't play long enough, probably)...

Cities get unique codes - Panama City might get "p" or "pc" or whatever, depending on what cities exist... Bus lines are A-Z (never have gotten 26 bus lines in a city so far), and each stop is numbered. I usually use a single digit since I usually don't have >9, so assuming "p" for the city code, the stops of the first couple of lines:

pA1, pA2, pA3, etc
pB1, etc

For "pc", it'd be pcA1, etc

In the rare case I decide to assign multiple lines one stop, I use a slash, i.e. pA3/C5

[zdwiakee]

Oh, yes, I do use a system...

I play Simutrans more as a big city sandbox with transport simulation. So I usually have a few very big "cities", consisting of multiple ingame cities (up to 40, maybe - have never counted) acting as parts of agglomeration or city districts. Each big city has its own bus, trolleybus and tram numeration. For example, in my previous game (with only one big city) tram routes in the capital had numbers 1 to 48, trolleybus - 1 to 38 and bus - 51 to 127 (for not to be confused with trolleybuses). If there is more than one big city, line names in all of them except one ("the capital") use one- or two-letter prefixes. I also use different types of brackets for different means of transport, so, for example, tram route #15 in, say, London, will be named as (15) (or (L15), if London wasn't the capital), trolleybus - <15> or <L15> (I often use them as they are very common in my country), bus - [15] or [L15].

In cities I usually try to give names to streets, and, if there is no attraction or something else to name the stop, stops usually are renamed after the street (streets) they are located on (but it is not a strong rule as I am too lazy to name all streets - many stops have their default names for looong time ). But it is obligatory for the stop to have a list of lines passing through this stop in its name (city prefixes are dropped out - it is always <15>, not <L15>) - it is very convenient for vast in-city networks I have. Metro and railway stations are usually named after the district they are situated in, and are marked as Mx "Stationname" (where 'x' is the number of metro line) for metro and RR "Stationname" for railway stations.

For example, some stop names from my previous game (which was with Finnish flavor for some reason):

• Koivistonkatu/Uusi Riihikatu stop (9 19 24 41) <17 22 23 31> [62 63 64 65 80 83 91 110] (very busy stop named after street crossing).
• M3* "Harju" (20* 21* 46) [79 96] (metro station. Asterisk marks the end of the line).
• Suur Merijoki City Hall stop [87 152] (some outskirt stop with default naming. But lines list remains obligatory).
• RR "Myllypelto" [242 245*] (quiet suburb railway station).
• Quadrohouse stop [72 88] (stop named after a strange building I built using Fabio's residential blocks ).

Get a life, you say? What do you mean by "life"?

[Lmallet]

I only rename railroad stations so that the station name is simply the city name (ie. London).  If two cities are close enough to be served by the same station, I will then put both city names (ie. London-Leeds).  Everything else gets the Simutrans generated name.