[Extension Request] Variable wind speed for sailing boats

February 18, 2010, 09:36:50 am

While I've been doing more sailing boats for pak128.Britain I've made the following historical observations:

1) Sailing boats had higher top speeds than steamers until after world war 1.
2) Sailing boats were cheaper to run as they don't require as much fuel and didn't need space on board for coal and fresh water for the steam engine
3) However, steamers generally superceded sailing boats from the mid 19th century as they could keep to their (lower) top speed in all wind conditions.

This effect is currently hard/impossible to do in simutrans at the minute, and will generally lead to steamers being useless pre-1920s or sailing boats being made slower than they were capable of. So I have a complicated extension request (hence why I'm posting in experimental, as I think this is the sort of thing that would fit nicely into experimental, but probably goes against the flavour of standard).

It would be great to have some kind of representation of wind speed and direction, so that sailing boats are only capable of top speed in favourable wind directions. The main feature would be that wind has a direction - sailing with the wind means fast, against the wind means slow, and perpendicular to the wind means intermediate. It would probably make sense to have a uniform wind for the whole map for computational simplicity and ease of understanding.

With that in place, a couple of further extensions, if worth it, would be
1) wind direction could change (but should have a "prevailing" wind direction that it is most of the time)
2) wind strength could change

Obviously this would also need some kind of GUI where you could see what the wind was doing, and wind direction should rotate when the maps rotate too.

Any thoughts?
Obviously this would only affect sail-powered boats and not anything else. It would also require some sort

Re: [Extension Request] Variable wind speed for sailing boats

Reply #1 – February 18, 2010, 10:57:30 am

Wind is already used for planes to choose the take off/land direction (IIRC).

Re: [Extension Request] Variable wind speed for sailing boats

Reply #2 – February 18, 2010, 12:16:35 pm

It's a very interesting idea: it certainly makes sense. Bernd and I are currently working hard on fixing basic bugs introduced by merging the network code for the next release, and I have been very busy generally of late. If, however, somebody was willing to write the code for this and maintain it, then, proving that it worked reliably, I'd happily put it into Experimental.

Edit: In the meantime, probably the best compromise is to set the sailing boats to their average speed - lower than their maximum speed, certainly, but something that would at least make the economics of them work accurately over the long term.