Because of restrictions on scale in Simutrans, even in the Simutrans-Standard scale of 1km/tile, global travel cannot sensibly be simulated. However, a useful approximation of the apparatus of global travel can be implemented by pakset authors quite easily without any changes to the code. An "international airport" can be made as an attraction with a very, very high p****enger level, appearing from, perhaps, the late 1950s onwards, with a larger version appearing in the 1970s and an even larger version in the 1990s. It would be an imperfect solution (players' short-haul air transport could not share facilities, as the international airport would be an attraction), but it would go a long way towards making the Simutrans world seem less isolated and more connected. It would also give additional interesting challenges to players.
Likewise with the international sea ports: they could be specified as an industry that must be built on the coast. They could enable national-specific paksets (such as Pak.German, Pak128.Japan and Pak128.Britain) to have transport in goods that are imported and not produced locally. Both imports and exports could be dealt with. As with airports, in reality, international sea ports are important transport hubs, and having them simulated in this way would provide interesting additional transportation challenges, variety and realism.
Ports have been used in this way before. Railroad Tycoon1 and 2 for sure had ports with both demand and supply characteristics.
I remember suggesting something similar some time ago: http://archive.forum.simutrans.com/topic/07232.0/index.html
I think it was denied / no developers wanted to take it forward at the time, but that was before the experimental platform came along. The other solution is the attraction/industry approach which could work OK in the current game, but with less realism.
I also thought of them as attractions/industries. It seems reasonable enough.
maybe ST-Exp could go, instead, for a very expensive extension building having this effect and being a terminal for international transport.
in order to avoid cheating, there could be a "Global economy" object, with given values for demand/offer for each good type (but changing in time). the demand/offer of such international terminals would be a share ot the global values. e.g. given 100 the global offer, if i build 4 terminals i'll get a value of 25 for each of them. this way, the player would have an incentive not to build too many of them and to localise them strategically on the map.
There was such an airport in pak.Japan...
I would support fabio's idea, and it could be used for ports as well...
I like the idea of international airports and ports, but implemented that way^.
Fabio's proposal is an interesting one indeed, but implementation in Simutrans-Experimental may well be some time off owing to prioritising the production of a fully compatible pakset, bugfixing (and a consequential feature freeze), production of documentation and the eventual production of a single integrated version accross multiple platforms with automatic installers. I shall bear it in mind for the future, though :-)
This is unrelated - but what needs to be documented for Sim-Exp?
i would say, pak-wise specifics, help texts, tutorials and the like.
Currently working on Simutrans-Exp Docs
Pak-Wise Specifications: Semi Done
Help Texts- Work In Progress
Tutorials - Work in Progress
great, i'm looking forward to reading them! :)
Maragil,
thank you very much for your work on the documentation - it is very helpful. I have been re-writing most of the in-game help files one by one to bring the up to date and add Simutrans-Experimental specific information: that is what I was referring to, although it is very useful that you are doing other documentation work, too :-)