Factory Locations: Ports, Mills, Mines

Topic: Factory Locations: Ports, Mills, Mines (Read 42162 times) previous topic - next topic

Factory Locations: Ports, Mills, Mines

September 14, 2009, 02:56:12 pm

Currently a factory can be defined in its .dat file as having a location of land, city, or water.

I propose adding the following, to make the maps more realistic and to fill the need for Ports. Ports become especially important in the British pak, for example, in the late 1900s when domestic goods manufacturing should be replaced by imported goods; Ports would also be useful in a (hypothetical) American pak that begins in Colonial times when raw materials were exported and finished goods imported (by law, even).

The proposal. Add:

location = shore -- This would force an industry (like a Port) to be created on water that communicates with the edge of the map. (When creating such an industry, start on water at the edge of the map and move randomly until you hit land.)
location = river -- Forces the industry to be built next to a river. Early mills of all types would use this.
location = hill -- Forces the industry to be built at or above the map's average land height. Useful for mines.

Re: Factory Locations: Ports, Mills, Mines

Reply #1 – September 14, 2009, 03:22:36 pm

Quote from: wlindley – on September 14, 2009, 02:56:12 pm

location = shore -- This would force an industry (like a Port) to be created on water that communicates with the edge of the map. (When creating such an industry, start on water at the edge of the map and move randomly until you hit land.)

it should be possible with climate=water

Quote from: wlindley – on September 14, 2009, 02:56:12 pm

location = hill -- Forces the industry to be built at or above the map's average land height. Useful for mines.

similarly, it should be possible with climate=rocky (although not all the maps have rocky height)

Quote from: wlindley – on September 14, 2009, 02:56:12 pm

location = river -- Forces the industry to be built next to a river. Early mills of all types would use this.

this would be VERY useful!

VS -- how are they going, the efforts to create a new climate system not based on height? :

Re: Factory Locations: Ports, Mills, Mines

Reply #2 – September 14, 2009, 03:30:53 pm

I like the idea also, but the shore option was discussed and it has a problem: rotations! You'll never know which part will be over the water on random rotation.
Nice idea for hill and river, but maybe river has same problem described above ...

Re: Factory Locations: Ports, Mills, Mines

Reply #3 – September 14, 2009, 05:34:56 pm

I support this. I know the shore idea could be tricky to code, but is there any mileage in doing something like in the screenshot below? How hard is it to require a "straight" edge of shore for, say, 2 tiles (as in the screenshot), and then build on top with artificial slopes (all done by the factory builder AI)? Ideally, the AI would know which edge was closest to the shore so if it was a port, for example, cranes could be built on that side.

I'd also love the location=shore ability for attractions as well...

Re: Factory Locations: Ports, Mills, Mines

Reply #4 – September 14, 2009, 06:15:29 pm

Shore is in some form already possible with location=water...

Re: Factory Locations: Ports, Mills, Mines

Reply #5 – September 14, 2009, 06:31:10 pm

Doesn't location=water make it actually in the water, like a deep-sea oil rig?

Re: Factory Locations: Ports, Mills, Mines

Reply #6 – September 14, 2009, 07:36:24 pm

Hm... then I may have mistaken it for climate(s?)=water. Sorry. But I know something like that does already exist.

Re: Factory Locations: Ports, Mills, Mines

Reply #7 – September 14, 2009, 09:13:39 pm

Quote from: fabio – on September 14, 2009, 03:22:36 pm

VS -- how are they going, the efforts to create a new climate system not based on height? :

Re: Factory Locations: Ports, Mills, Mines

Reply #8 – September 14, 2009, 10:04:03 pm

This seems like a very sensible idea. It'd be excellent, as The Hood said, to have it for attractions, too: piers and beaches would be wonderful!

Re: Factory Locations: Ports, Mills, Mines

Reply #9 – September 15, 2009, 01:32:10 pm

Quote from: fabio – on September 14, 2009, 03:22:36 pm

VS -- how are they going, the efforts to create a new climate system not based on height? :

Not going at all. I have a finished, deterministic recipe for one part of that, the humidity, which is (imho) the hardest part wrt. planning and testing. Making this into actual Simutrans code would require some serious number crunching with Fourier transform... I am not really sure how hard that would be. In the concept demo I used plain convolution which is of course easier to do... but infinitely slower.

Even once that is in place... I can't remember outright, but the other parts were also temperature, a GUI to control these parameters, and finally combining these two into new climates, which requires changes to drawing terrain.

Re: Factory Locations: Ports, Mills, Mines

Reply #10 – September 15, 2009, 01:47:25 pm

well, that's a pity there is no progress, i was really *looking forward* to this feature. it' would be awesome!
is there any chance to simplify the model, at the cost of losing some precision?

Re: Factory Locations: Ports, Mills, Mines

Reply #11 – September 15, 2009, 01:55:58 pm

What, no Simutrans weather forecasts? But seriously...

For river and shore --

I have looked at the factory builder code. The comments and symbols are quite a mix of German and English -- fortunately I can more-or-less read German, and I used to write C for a living in the 90s, so I could take a stab at this.

There is code for placing factories inside cities (and more specifically, right next to a road) but I don't see anything that would do the "shore" part. I do imagine that "place a factory next to a river" wouldn't be too different from "place next to a street" although you'd probably pick a random point on the map and then search horizontally/vertically until you find a river, and then apply the "place along" bit. For placing a factory with "shore" I imagine you'd pick a random ocean point on the edge of the map and then search perpendicular to the map edge for landfall, and then apply the "place along" bit.

Does that sound logical?

Re: Factory Locations: Ports, Mills, Mines

Reply #12 – September 15, 2009, 02:07:10 pm

It sounds quite logical, apart from the last one:

Quote

For placing a factory with "shore" I imagine you'd pick a random ocean point on the edge of the map and then search perpendicular to the map edge for landfall, and then apply the "place along" bit.

There are also a lot of "lakes" on the map, e.g. a collection of water tiles fully surrounded by land. They won't be found in your algorithm. But you could probably take the same algorithm for rivers, and search for water instead of river.

In both cases you might want an upper limit of tiles to be searched and of course you should not look only horizontal/vertical but probably the area in a region around the random point. I'm sure there is code for that when factories must be placed in a certain climate (=height). As a consequence finding a suitable tile might fail.

Re: Factory Locations: Ports, Mills, Mines

Reply #13 – September 15, 2009, 02:09:38 pm

yes

There is also 'location=water' for attractions, check the light house in pak64. The corresponding check looks for tiles that are sloped and on water level (i.e. slopes on the shore). A place is accepted if all tiles are sloped shore tiles (which is fine for 1x1 buildings like the lighthouse).

The 'location=water' for factories works different, it is used for oil rigs for example.

Re: Factory Locations: Ports, Mills, Mines

Reply #14 – September 15, 2009, 02:17:08 pm

Yes, I was thinking of "Ports" which would necessarily be on water near the edge of the map. A nuclear reactor, though, would often be on a lake as well, for cooling. Maybe we need two kinds of "shore."

Re: Factory Locations: Ports, Mills, Mines

Reply #15 – September 15, 2009, 03:53:47 pm

Quote from: wlindley – on September 15, 2009, 01:55:58 pm

There is code for placing factories inside cities (and more specifically, right next to a road)

Yes, but it doesn't consider direction of building image, even if it has 4 direction images.
That is not a big problem if a building is square like as 1x1 or 2x2.
But if may have a problem if a building isn't square like as 1x2.

Re: Factory Locations: Ports, Mills, Mines

Reply #16 – September 15, 2009, 08:04:02 pm

NOTE: you can go to the trouble of finding water on the edge of the map, put a dock along the "ocean" and then later expand the map and find the "ocean" was just a large lake . . .

-d

Re: Factory Locations: Ports, Mills, Mines

Reply #17 – September 16, 2009, 07:47:14 am

I think if people decide to extend the map manually they can learn to live with the consequences

Re: Factory Locations: Ports, Mills, Mines

Reply #18 – September 16, 2009, 07:55:36 am

Quote from: dannyman – on September 15, 2009, 08:04:02 pm

find the "ocean" was just a large lake . . .

this is a true gem of philosophy!

Re: Factory Locations: Ports, Mills, Mines

Reply #19 – September 16, 2009, 07:12:49 pm

Quote from: VS – on September 15, 2009, 01:32:10 pm

one part of that, the humidity, which is (imho) the hardest part wrt. (...) the other parts were also temperature, a GUI to control these parameters, and finally combining these two into new climates, which requires changes to drawing terrain.

When I read the thread regarding this, I already wanted to ask whether (or why) you (plural) want to make ST a climate simulator.
It might be easier to first prepare the actual new implementation of climates, and later introduce additional methods of simulating their natural distribution on the map.

For this extension request: The factory builder already has problems finding proper locations for all the factories in a chain, leading to incomplete (and therefore dysfunctional) chains, a problem still waiting for a solution. For attractions and foundation of cities, it would be easier to deal with the location preference.