OPENTTD

[Anonymous No.4255969]

Open TTD thread

Question for a friend, he's new to the game: He wanted to supply the general factory (Steel, Livestock and Grain) , he had livestock and grain and he was lucky enough to find a steel factory and an iron ore mine, nearby so he made a network of trains. When the train from the Iron Ore mine delivered the cargo to the Steel factory, the same factory didn't convert the ore to steel so the 2nd train was useless.

So anons, wat do?

[Anonymous No.4255984]

>>4255969

Make sure the iron ore train isnt set to transfer

[Anonymous No.4255998]

>>4255984
Well...It's on wait until all the wagons are full and unload nothing

[Anonymous No.4256000]

>>4255998
>unload nothing

I'm stupid.

[Anonymous No.4256030]

Another question: I made a farm to factory rail road and built some loading bays. They're working but idk where should the buses unload? A different livestock/grain factory?

[Anonymous No.4256371]

B-bump

[Anonymous No.4256975]

Why don't we have a server for this? I fucking love OpenTTD and play it daily.

[Anonymous No.4257019]

>>4256030
What are you talking about? You mean you have road trucks loading up with goods at your factory? Goods get delivered to cities.

[Anonymous No.4257025]

>>4256975
We probably disagree too strongly about how the game should be played. What settings, which newgrfs, etc. Not to mention some people use disgusting un-vanilla patches.

I like to play on large maps with very sparse distribution towns/industries, lots of water and islands, breakdowns off, cargodest on for passengers but off for everything else, and with a fair but not ridiculous number of newgrfs. Usually something for every vehicle type with FIRS and lots of eyecandy.

[Anonymous No.4257051]

>>4257025
>disgusting un-vanilla patches
anon pls

some patches are very useful e.g. ctrl-click to set all station wait times

[Anonymous No.4257074]

>>4257051
Well if we're talking about multiplayer we should probably stick to the current stable version of the game and newgrfs that can be downloaded from the content browser. That way anyone can join just by downloading the game and clicking on the server.

Single player is another story of course.

[Anonymous No.4257079]

>>4257074
Why not use one of the better-known patchpacks?

I agree about newgrfs.

[Anonymous No.4257094]

>>4257079
I think it would be easier for new players to not have to worry about modifying the game executable. It's not impossible, the reddit community (which I don't like very much) for this game runs a server with patches, but my vote is against it in any case.

It drives me crazy how there are some popular newgrfs that aren't available on the "BaNaNaS" system though. You want MariCo? Too bad, everyone has to download it from the original author's decrepit website that is mostly in German. Some people are too afraid of the GPL.

[Anonymous No.4258001]

>>4257019
Yes, but the truck comes back loaded. Do I have to set up a route for them to stop at a bus station or?

[Anonymous No.4258302]

>>4258001
>Do I have to set up a route for them to stop at a bus station or?
I'm having a hard time understanding your posts, but if you are asking whether you have to give your trucks orders to go somewhere, the answer is yes of course you do. You always do.
Bus stations and lorry stations are different in openttd. You can't drop off or pick up freight cargo at a bus stop (only passengers and mail).

If you want to use trucks to deliver goods from a factory to a city, you need to build a lorry station at the factory and another inside the city (the pick up station must be close enough to say it "supplies goods" and the unloading station needs to be in a dense enough part of the city to say it "accepts goods." You then need to build a type of truck that can carry goods and give it orders to travel between both stations. If you don't specify loading and unloading at each step, it will pick up whatever goods happen to be lying around at the loading station (but not wait for any to show up if there aren't some there already) and drop off whatever it has that the unloading station accepts. Thus it is essential that you order the trucks to fully load at the factory.

It doesn't sound like you are going to be able to make much money doing what you are doing however. Farm products (grain/livestock) are the least profitable things to transport by train, while goods are some of the most profitable. Delivering your goods with slow, small trucks will be much less profitable than delivering huge quantities by train.

[Anonymous No.4258308]

>>4258302
Thanks for clearing it up for me. I understand this shit now.

[Anonymous No.4258465]

Hi lad's, I have a question regarding OpenTTD
>Is there a way to play game like sandbox?
I wan't to be able to edit cities, factories and all the rest with no money, because sometimes I just wan't to play around with different train track designs and so on.

[Anonymous No.4258509]

>>4258465
You can use the "magic bulldozer" cheat to remove immovable objects like industries, and also to clear town tiles with impunity. You can enable settings to let you construct any type of industry including primary industries. There is another cheat to give yourself tons of money so that you will be able to afford to build lots of industries, move lots of water tiles, etc.
As far as I know you won't be able to build town buildings, but if you set them to use 3x3 grid roads and build little "growth engines" in the middle of cities, it's easy to block their expansion in certain directions and encourage them to grow in whatever shape you want over time.

See my screenshot. You can build industries with "fund new industry" under the industries button on the main toolbar, and you can enable the setting to build primary industries by searching for "Manual primary industry construction method" in the settings.

[Anonymous No.4258619]

>>4258509
Goddamn, that is really fancy

[Anonymous No.4258637]

>>4258509
Thanks, have not play'd this awesome game for years, will download today.
Btw, there was a 32 bit mod few years ago, half finished, is it a go now?

[Anonymous No.4258653]

>>4258637
I believe 32bpp graphics are in trunk now, so you just need to download a graphics set that uses them and you'll be good to go. There's a crazy "mad scientist" sort of developer called V453000 who makes a lot of newgrphs in 32bpp, you'll know them by their extreme filesize (hundreds of megabytes instead of a few kilobytes).

[Anonymous No.4258857]

>>4258509
i love open ttd but ive only ever played it in MP and even then the game almost always becomes too big to fail

in sp i barely have the drive to play, are there any good mods that make the game harder without just making everything expensive etc?

[Anonymous No.4258874]

>>4258857
Do you play with cargodist turned on? That makes it significantly more complicated. Of course you kind of have to set your own goals and restrictions in this game. For example you could game the system of cargodist by creating only point-to-point links instead of an interconnected network, which would remove all the challenge. That's no fun, so you have to decide for yourself not to do that.

I have had long games with cargodist where I've connected every city to a rail network of multiple tiers of local trains, express trains, bullet trains, etc., where after 50 years or so my profit suddenly collapses and I have to quickly re-balance things to avoid going bankrupt. But generally the game requires so little of you that it isn't "hard" at any point except maybe just as you are getting started. If you want to make it fun in that way, invent challenges for yourself.

[Anonymous No.4258883]

>>4258874
yeh ive had cargodist on, it does help ofcourse but eh, ive got pretty good at the game which means most of the time i get a few solid lines up and im in the hundreds of millions within 50-80 years

i never use planes either, i love open ttd but i want an even more autistic business one, gimme staff costs, gimme business issues, gimme competitive gameplay vs other companies, give me PR

[Anonymous No.4258904]

>>4258883
>i love open ttd but i want an even more autistic business one, gimme staff costs, gimme business issues, gimme competitive gameplay vs other companies, give me PR
I don't play any of them, but I know there are various other retro and non-retro autism simulators that take it to another level. Have you tried Simutrans, Factorio, Cities in Motion, etc?

[Anonymous No.4258915]

>>4258904
ive never played simutrans, ive played factorio and i love it but not tried the latest update, never played cities in motion, is it good?

[Anonymous No.4258932]

>>4258915
Well like I said I don't play them. Simutrans is very much akin to OpenTTD in that it's a very old (technically retro!) free/open source multiplatform game with a strong development community, and it has a reputation for being somewhat more difficult than OTTD.
Cities in Motion is a different type of game, and much more modern looking. It has a reputation for being an autistic "spreadsheet simulator" like "Grand Strategy" games except with urban transportation instead of Prussia and the Hundred Years War.

[Anonymous No.4259139]

I'm doing another Japan game. This is the layout of my network as of 1920. Only steam engines right now so it takes forever to go anywhere. Most lines are 80 km/h speed limit with a few 130 km/h lines along the Tokaido corridor. However the fastest available locomotives right now can only go 95 km/h. Faster locos will be available in a few years, and the first electric multiple unit trains will be invented in the 1930s.
Passenger trains only, except a few freight trains in Hokkaido which give me some cash to work with until the urban areas grow enough to make passenger transportation financially viable.
My goal for this game is to cover the entire Kanto plain with urban development. The current population of that region is about 88,000 (over 100k including outlying suburbs) out of a national population of 242,000, and the plain looks to be less than halfway covered with development. With the Japanese buildings newgrf, the early years are a good time to grow cities because they are limited to smaller buildings (skyscrapers haven't been invented yet) and thus are forced to grow outward instead of upward.

[Anonymous No.4259337]

Have some gifs to keep the thread alive.

This is one of the most common type of locomotive on my passenger network right now. A small, cheap, light-duty engine that can only go 70 km/h, making it useful only for short local runs. Blue carriages identify it as a local train that stops at every station along its route.
Later on these routes will be served by cheap EMUs and DMUs. These routes aren't very profitable, but they are necessary for my purposes. They link outlying towns and suburbs to the big cities so that passengers traveling from anywhere else can reach any destination.

[Anonymous No.4259356]

Here's my fastest type of locomotive right now. It can go 95 km/h, but steam engines that can go 110 km/h will be invented soon and will replace these. It's much more expensive to operate than the 2100-C, costs about twice as much both to buy and maintain over time. Since I'll be playing a long game with steady inflation over time, considering operating costs will become very important in the future. Thus, these trains are reserved for long, busy express routes. The brown carriages identify it as a Limited Express train. Since they travel along the longest routes between major cities, they will be the most profitable trains in the system.
After the end of the steam era, these routes will be served by fast inter-city EMUs, but many of the longer routes will be augmented or replaced by a separate high-speed Shinkansen network. In 50 years those Shinkansen lines will form the backbone of the network running from one end of Honshu to the other.

[Anonymous No.4259472]

>when you've got too much wood

[Anonymous No.4259525]

>>4259472
Time to upgrade to something better than those measly flatbed trucks!

[Anonymous No.4259556]

>>4259525
Pfft, no. I just bought more trucks as time went on and added a second road to reduce clogging if one broke down. That's an old screenshot before and I was always too lazy to take a shot of the "new" setup. Y'know what, I'll do it now.
There's no kill like overkill!

[Anonymous No.4259642]

>>4259556
I do like those road graphics. Is that the American road renewal set? Keep an eye out for the matching bridge set that may be released soon.

[Anonymous No.4259792]

Favorite train length, anons? 4 tiles is comfy

[Anonymous No.4259798]

>>4259642
>Is that the American road renewal set
Yes

>the matching bridge set
In the meantime there's "Total Bridge Renewal Set ARRS"

[Anonymous No.4259893]

>>4259792
Three, 5, and 7

I do mostly passengers, so it's best if my stations fit neatly into my city blocks. I use the 3x3 grid which means a station of three platforms and length 3 or 7 fits into one or two blocks, and a station of length 5 plus two extra tiles for signals and a junction also fits into two blocks.

[Anonymous No.4260137]

>>4259893
Grids are boring.

[Anonymous No.4260181]

Any recommended custom scenarios?

[Anonymous No.4260683]

>>4260137
Your autism is weak

[Anonymous No.4260894]

Some faggot is actually trying to sell OpenTTD (a free GPL program of course) in the Microsoft app store
>https://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/store/p/openttd-transport-tycoon/9pjphwm23sds
Not technically a GPL violation if it includes the "COPYING" file I think, but I still hope no one will be dumb enough to pay for this.

[Anonymous No.4261447]

The cool thing about cargodist is that once it's possible to go from anywhere to anywhere else, the algorithm starts to take over and the player is forced to add capacity to the parts of the network that the pax are using most heavily.
Even though my scenario map isn't very accurate, the geography of Japan inevitably causes certain resemblances to reality. The main east-west route between Tokyo and Kyoto/Osaka in the west has become by far my most heavily saturated line in this game, with many more trains needed than on other routes, mirroring the crucial and busy Tokaido corridor in real life.

[Anonymous No.4261525]

Anyone know how i can resize the hud to a more reasonable size? the default option is too small and the 2x one is fuckhueg.

[Anonymous No.4261565]

>>4261525
There's not much else you can do. The UI is very clunky and hard for the developers to work with. There is a hidden option to change the fonts and font sizes:
>https://wiki.openttd.org/FAQ_troubleshooting#My_User_Interface_is_too_small_to_read_.2F_My_font_is_unreadable_or_faulty

But to be honest I've tried it, and I ended up going back to the default because it didn't help much and made some things look worse. I recommend just getting used to it. It's probably bad for my eyes but I just sit closer if I can't read something!

[Anonymous No.4261596]

>>4261565
Ah that sucks. Gigantor-GUI it is then. Already sit taped up against the monitor to begin with.
Time to learn how to play this game then

[Anonymous No.4261681]

>>4261565
OpenGFX Big UI set to 1.5x is alright.

[Anonymous No.4261689]

>>4261681
Meant to reply to >>4261525

[Anonymous No.4261701]

>>4261447
Abashiri and Okinoshima are feeling pretty left out, dude.

[Anonymous No.4261826]

>>4261701
It's only the 1920s, the rail network doesn't reach outlying islands and distant parts of the far end of Hokkaido yet. In fact the historical Japanese rail system was much less developed than this at the same time.

I will probably connect to them by steamship, like I did with the other island with a town on it.

[Anonymous No.4262325]

.>>4261826
I'm really liking these Japan screenshots, thanks anon. You've inspired me to play again

I've played a fair bit of vanilla OTTD casually, but have never looked at extensions. What are some recommended mods to play with for an expanded experience?

[Anonymous No.4262481]

>>4261681
Thanks for the suggestion. Really makes things a tad easier to look at.

[Anonymous No.4263268]

>>4262325
Pic related are the newgrfs I'm using for this Japan game. Newgrfs generally fall into one of several categories.

>Train sets
These are the main event when it comes to openttd, and this is usually where modders have put in the most care into research etc. Most train set newgrfs are national sets, like the Japanese train set I'm using here. Other popular examples:
>Dutch Trainset - what it says on the tin
>UKRS2 - UK renewal set
>NARS2 - North American renewal set
>DBset - Deutsche Bahn, German railways
>xUSSR - Engines and rolling stock from Russia and ex-Soviet countries
There are also general trainsets that aren't specific to one region or country. These might be good places to start if you haven't used newgrfs before.
>2cc Trainset/2cc Trains in NML - An excellent set of interesting trains from all over the world
>Iron Horse - generic trains (i.e. not re-creations of specific historical trains), more similar to the default vehicles than other trainsets
All of these train sets will add their own matching sets of rolling stock (carriages and cargo wagons). Train sets will use a lot of features you don't see in the default vehicles, like requiring braking vans/cabooses, wagons that can be re-fit to hold different types of cargo (including support for cargos that aren't in the default industry chains), and multiple-unit trains (like a subway, where all the cars are identical and there is no locomotive). Many of them will have corresponding track sets (like the Japanset Tracks I'm using here) that add different types of rails, such as narrow gauge, electrified third rail (for subways), or high speed tracks.

[Anonymous No.4263294]

>Industry sets
These will replace the default industries with new graphics and new types of industries and cargos, often with much more interesting and complicated chains. The popular sets are
>FIRS - configurable to select industry chains that correspond to different climates
>ECS Vectors - industry set broken into individual chains called "vectors" that you can load separately
To carry the new types of cargos added by industry sets you will either need to be using a train set with compatible rolling stock (almost any of the popular ones will work), or you will need to load a special set that makes the default vehicles able to refit to carry the new cargos. Usually they won't have one type of wagon for every type of cargo like in the default vehicles. Instead similar cargos will all be able to be loaded into one or more types of cars. For example you might have various types of hopper wagons that can all carry any type of bulk cargo (coal, iron ore, copper ore, sand, clay, etc.). along with various types of tanker wagons that carry all the various liquids (oil, milk, petroleum, chemicals, etc.).

>Road vehicle sets
Trams are my favorite types of vehicles in the game after trains, and they don't even exist in the default vehicles. Therefore I recommend always loading at least one road vehicle newgrf. They usually include both standard road vehicles like buses and trucks to replace the default ones in addition to trams/streetcars that run on tram tracks.
>eGRVTS - Extended generic road vehicle and tram set, a basic set of everything, vehicles that can hold all types of cargos, introduction dates ranging from the 1800s to the 2000s
>Road hog - Higher capacity trucks and trams
>HEQS - Heavy equipment set, lets you use trams like light rail with long, multi-car vehicles
Just like with train sets these are pretty much necessary if you want to play with earlier start dates or with newgrf cargos.

[Anonymous No.4263328]

Realized the pic didn't post before so here it is again.

>Aircraft
Even though you'll never git gud if you rely on aircraft, there are still some awesome newgrfs focusing on them that people put a lot of work into. There's av8, which is sort of the original and has some spinoffs, extensions, and new versions like av9. There's also the WAS, the World Airliners Set which is pretty similar. Both of them give you a nice big selection of real world aircraft starting way back in the era of dirigibles. The fun part is that they also give you a vast selection of liveries so that your planes can all look different. It's really amazing how many individual art assets went into these sets.

>Ships
If you're overhauling everything else, might as well improve your ships too. The OG ship overhaul set was called FISH, and there are various modern spinoffs like Squid Ate FISH and redFISH. Any of them are fine and will give you ships that handle new cargos, more variety, and nice detailed graphics.

>Infrastructure
I already mentioned track replacement sets, which are often necessary to take advantage of the bigger variety of vehicle types provided by trainset newgrfs. There are also sets to replace pretty much any other piece of infrastructure in the game. Roads, buildings, trees, docks, airports, stations, etc. Road and building sets are often combined into town overhauls like the Japanese building set I'm using here. Some road/building sets off the top of my head:
>TTRS - Total Town Replacement Set
>AARS - American Road Renewal Set
>Swedish Houses - good for any vaguely "European" setting
Also look out for bridge replacement sets that match whatever road/town theme you are using. Here I'm using "Total Bridge Renewal Set for Japan Set 3," and you will see versions of that for the generic roads and AARS as well. The default bridges in the game are really quite bad gameplay-wise and are also pretty ugly, so I definitely recommend trying out replacements.

[Anonymous No.4263382]

>Infrastructure (continued)
Station replacement sets are also a big one in this category, and they really improve the game if you ask me. If you also play Rollercoaster Tycoon, you'll know how satisfying it is to build a good looking station house for your roller coasters, and why should train stations be any different? When you load one of these sets, your station construction window expands to look like pic related. You will have many types of tiles to choose from, some of which are train platforms and some of which are just eye candy tiles that a train can't drive up onto. Usually sets that overhaul industrial stations are separate from sets that overhaul passenger stations. Thus, this is one case where it is sensible to load several different sets at once (you probably wouldn't want to do that with train sets, vehicle sets, etc.).
Passenger stations:
>Japanese station set - versatile Japanese-style passenger platform tiles, including urban tiles with shopping malls, high rises, etc.
>Dutch station set - European style stations modeled after the designs in various Dutch cities
>City Stations/Suburban Stations/Rural Stations - three sets that work together
Industrial stations:
>ISR - Industrial Stations Renewal, adds both individual tiles and some pre-designed stations for certain industries, all very unique
>DWE - adds some more industrial station tiles that ISR doesn't have

>Eye candy
If you look at my screenshot above you'll see that I have tones of sets loaded that are just described as "objects." These are useless eyecandy somewhat like the non-platform station tiles in ISR, except when you place them on the map they don't become part of a station. That's how I built things like the docks and moles in this screenshot >>4261826. These don't effect gameplay so you can just search for "object" on the in-game browser and load as many as you want. Objects are constructed with the last button on the landscaping toolbar.

[Anonymous No.4263787]

Trains!

[Anonymous No.4264057]

>>4259139

Where/how did you get that map of japan with cities actually placed correctly? I think I've only seen the heightmap of that, and the only scenarios I've seen are very specific to smaller portions of the country.

[Anonymous No.4264203]

>>4264057
The cities are not actually placed all that correctly. Osaka should definitely not be an island, and Tokyo should be much closer to Tokyo Bay for example.
What I did was load a heightmap of Japan into the scenario editor, generate a few dozen randomly placed towns and cities, and then rename them all based on their approximate location.
I would really like to see a proper Japan scenario with cities that actually reflect the population distribution positioned in the right places etc., but as far as I know no one has made one. I don't think this map I'm playing on is good enough to be that--the cities are just placed in random spots, so there is way more population in southwestern Honshu and far outlying Hokkaido than there should be, while far too little in Kyushu and northern Honshu.

The next step would be placing cities manually on a heightmap of Japan in the scenario editor, but I haven't found a good historical map of the key population centers spanning all the necessary time periods.

[Anonymous No.4265390]

>>4262325
Really depends on what kind of experience you're looking for; there's things like NUTS train set if you want more efficiency based/unrealistic things, or things like >>4263268 suggested otherwise. Japan set also has replacement faces, which are nice. Manga faces fit really well in openttd for some reason.
I've also found that playing with friends easily makes the game twice as enjoyable, so you might want to take that into consideration, too.

[Anonymous No.4265442]

Made a webm of one of the routes in my current game. Come aboard and get comfy, anons.

[Anonymous No.4265481]

>>4265442

noice

[Anonymous No.4266119]

>>4265442
And here's a little recording of my biggest station. Sit back and watch the trains come and go, anons.

>>4265481
Thanks anon.

[Anonymous No.4266207]

>>4266119
I suck at aesthetics. I like builder games like this, but I suck at making them pretty.
As such, addons like >>4263382 are fairly useless to me.

Also I wish OpenTTD was as popular hear as RCT is.

[Anonymous No.4266324]

>>4266207
The pre-designed automatic stations in ISR let you get some visual variety for basically no effort at least. I just started with those and then began using the custom tiles later on as I noticed ways to use them.
Of course I think this game with its little trains crawling around going about their business will always look neat, regardless of eyecandy mods.

[Anonymous No.4266326]

>>4266324
Very nice docks, anon

[Anonymous No.4266584]

Made it to the 1930s, EMUs and faster trains have begun to arrive but aren't very practical yet.
As I add new trains of newly invented models to the busiest lines in the center of the country, I'm transferring the old steam engines out to the lines on the periphery. About half the area around Tokyo is already electrified, but some of the distant tracks in rural areas like northern Hokkaido will remain unelectrified for decades to come. They will still get some nice diesel engines of course.

[Anonymous No.4267891]

>>4266584
My only real complaint about Japan Set is the running costs aren't particularly balanced, but I doubt they were intended to be in the first place.

[Anonymous No.4267903]

>>4267891
I think it's meant to enforce a certain play style. It seems to want the player to disable inflation though (which I don't), since if you have been playing from the start date of the set (around the late 1870s), the inflation will have accumulated so much by the time the comparatively expensive high-density commuter trains come around that their running costs are unaffordable.
I try to take it as a challenge but in practice it often means just using the cheapest available EMU or DMU for as many routes as possible.

[Anonymous No.4268079]

>>4267903
>in practice it often means just using the cheapest available EMU or DMU for as many routes as possible
Yeah, this is sadly what I end up doing too; it's a shame because it has such a large amount of trains, though.

[Anonymous No.4268636]

Continuing to balance routes and add capacity where needed to address bottlenecks in the distribution model. For now most of the routes are local lines stopping at every city along a line or else traveling only between two adjacent towns. Several of these are labeled as express service but the only true express route right now is the Tokaido line running from Tokyo-Nagoya-Kyoto, which carries the bulk of the East-West traffic on my fastest steam engines. In 30 years when the Shinkansen is invented, the balance will tip in favor of express service between all the major cities, but for now most of the traffic is local and traveling from one end of the country to the other would be an ordeal involving many transfers.

This map also shows the current state of electrification. For now it is confined mainly to eastern Japan, but within a decade it will stretch to the key cities in the central and western regions. Historically this process was interrupted by WWII, but that won't be a problem this time.

[Anonymous No.4268651]

And the most autistic part, my route groups list.
The only thing I wish is that openttd had more spreadsheet-like things for me to stare at. I've actually looked into pulling data out of savefiles (basically impossible) or through the remote server administration socket (very limited data available), but it never amounted to anything.

[Anonymous No.4268661]

>>4268651
>trains with negative last year profit
Anon pls, it hurts. Let your inner capitalist take over.

[Anonymous No.4268679]

>>4268661
It's an artifact of cargodist. It's impossible to accurately tally the profit of each individual train when any given passenger's "ticket" could have involved transferring between three or four trains. Usually what happens is the longest stretch of the route gets its profit overestimated, and the difference is taken out of the last-mile routes that come at the end of the journey, giving those trains "negative" profit. It's just a wonky accounting system.
When the Shinkansen comes along it will get much worse--they are so fast that they will get massively overpaid for their portion of any given journey, and I'll end up with tiny inter-city trains supposedly running at a loss of millions per year to make up for it, when their operating costs are less than $10k.

Since those are all the most recently constructed trains, it's also relevant that it takes a few months for demand to build up for a given route, as the cargodist system only creates passengers that want to go to places they can actually reach. In other words, if I add a new route between two places, it takes a while for any passengers to notice they can buy tickets to go that way, and then it takes a while after that for the line to get saturated up to the planned capacity. Before then the trains are basically running empty, even if there are thousands of pax that want to go in that general direction.

[Anonymous No.4268693]

>>4268679
Oh, cargodist, that makes sense now then. I could never handle playing with cargodist, honestly. Maybe I'll give it another shot in the future or something.

[Anonymous No.4268756]

>>4268693
I suggest only using it for passengers. It doesn't make any sense for most freight cargos:
Imagine if you had five coal mines and one power plant hooked up together. All the coal from all the mines would have the one power plant as its destination. There would never be any incentive for you to add another power plant to the network, and if you did you would surely lose money. At least with passengers there is an incentive to keep adding more nodes to the distribution graph, because you will make more money from letting your pax choose to travel longer distances.
One key thing to observe about how I have chosen to play is that there is only one train station per city. If I need to build more platforms, I make sure they are joined to the original station. That way it is very straightforward to plan a route from, for example, Osaka to Tokyo that involves taking the train from Osaka to Nagano, and then hopping on the express to Tokyo as it travels through Nagano. If there were multiple stations in Nagano, the one you got off at might not be the same one the express to Tokyo is stopping at, so unless there were a connector you would not be able to complete the journey.

The one type of freight cargo that I have experimented with using cargodist for are the various "supplies" cargos in FIRS. These are basically just bonus items that you are meant to take back to your primary industries to get a boost in production. If you turn cargodist on for them, you can use one train to bring just the right amount of supplies back to all of your primary industries. If you didn't have cargodist on, all the supplies would just unload at the first station and none of the other industries would get any production boost.

[Anonymous No.4268851]

>>4268756
Using it for passengers only does sound kind of comfy, but it feels like it would complicate network designs a good deal if every city had to connect to every city.

[Anonymous No.4268982]

>>4268851
>if every city had to connect to every city.
It doesn't have to connect directly. It's more like how train lines work in the real world, with a train traveling between two termini and stopping and multiple local stations along the way. See how my network map above forms a connected graph? So Fukuoka in Kyushu isn't connected directly to Sapporo in Hokkaido (which would be pretty much impossible anyway), but you can still get to Sapporo from Fukuoka by traveling north to Kyoto, east to Tokyo, and then north again to Hokkaido. The caveat is that you have to stop at pretty much every station along the way, and you will have to change trains a few times.

[Anonymous No.4269692]

>>4268982
Oh, alright. I wasn't sure if they would still board connecting trains or if you would have to manually use transfers to connect cities. That makes a lot more sense; I'll definitely give it a shot in the future.

[Anonymous No.4269916]

>>4269692
Yeah, cargodist basically makes transfers automatic. I don't give any load or unload orders at all, just a timetable entry to make sure the train stops for at least a little while (for the sake of station rating.)

[Anonymous No.4271468]

>>4268982
anon if you could post the heightmap/scenario you used I'd be really grateful. I'm struggling just to get a comfy sub arctic terrain generated because for some reason unless I make the map size 4k by 4k it won't spawn any forests no matter what my snowline, terrain height etc settings are

[Anonymous No.4271540]

>>4271468
I'm not JR-anon, but I'm fairly certain it's the heightmap simply named 'Japan'.

[Anonymous No.4272057]

>>4268982
i am always suprised how loose the japanese rail net is in real life

[Anonymous No.4272108]

>>4271468
Unfortunately there's no scenario. I just loaded this heightmap and regenerated the world over and over again until I got a satisfactory distribution of towns, and then renamed to have the names of real Japanese cities.

I'm actually not very happy with how this turned out. I abandoned this save like two months ago and only picked it up again because someone posted this thread and the last thread here on /vr/. I wish I had placed a few more cities in the key locations (all the low-lying coastal plains) when I was generating the map, but now it's too late. "Founding a town" costs like $50mil and I don't want to cheat money into existence to place a town that won't even have enough time left in the game to grow.
You'll also notice that this heightmap is limited to only a handful of height values. You could run it through a blurring or blending filter in a photo editor to smooth the edges of those big flat areas somewhat, but it won't help much. At least they are convenient for building on.

Over the years I've collected many heightmaps of Japan that I've attempted to use in openttd, but the results have never been quite right. One thing I really like about this one is that it has been rotated 45 degrees so that the country appears to have the right orientation in-game (i.e. north is up instead of upper-left). I think I could achieve a good Japan scenario someday by using this map as a base, blending it with another more detailed heightmap, and manually placing cities in all the valleys, alluvial plains, etc. I'm undecided about whether it should be this size, or be doubled to 4096x2048. This one feels like it's almost the right size but I'd like it to be just a little more spacious, plus I'd like room for more minor towns in a future version.

[Anonymous No.4272697]

Are there any maps that mimic countries or can let you emulate them easily? I really wish that I could develop one landmass, expand to another one (that's a considerable distance away) and then link the two countries. I don't know if the game just wasn't designed to be played that way or if it's just that no one wants to play that way.

[Anonymous No.4272863]

>>4272697
>no one wants to play that way.
I definitely do. Unfortunately the land generator has a tendency to prefer long, snaky continents to islands, but with luck you can coax it into doing something like pic related.

I set the amount of water on the terrain generation screen to 51%, and then generate new maps over and over again until I get one I like. Sometimes I spend over an hour generating maps while I'm doing something else. The other settings don't matter that much in terms of whether you will get islands or not, but they do effect the terrain on the landmasses. Mess around a lot until you get something you want to play on.
It does help to use a large map size. Although 1024x1024 will work, 2048x2048 or larger is better. You are setting a high water percentage so there won't be as much land as you'd normally have to worry about at that map size anyway.

[Anonymous No.4272905]

>>4272863
>Unfortunately the land generator has a tendency to prefer long, snaky continents to islands
Probably to make playing with trains not that annoying. I've tried that before, I just don't like how all over the place the towns can be and the islands are often not realistically shaped in the least. Ideally I'd like two realistic continents with realistic town placement and number of cities but I guess I'll just have to try doing that myself.

[Anonymous No.4273656]

>>4272697
In real life linking the rail networks of separate countries has been an absolute nightmare due to issues of gauge and signaling. It wasn't until standardisation in the second half of the 20th century that you didn't have to transfer trains at the border, even in Europe.
It would only be a matter of time before someone decides that this defiantly needs to be simulated in OpenTTD, were scenario there.

Would anyone be interesting in setting up a /vr/ server? The game has always been more fun with other people.

[Anonymous No.4275420]

>>4273656
You can simulate gauge-hell yourself with some rail sets. Japan set has narrow and standard as a good example, also high speed and such too.

As far as servers go, I think the problem would probably be deciding on a set of newGRFs and a time to run it.

[Anonymous No.4275903]

>>4275420
there's been debate over using patches, if we have the resources we could have a vanilla server and a patches + grf server going.

A custom pre-patched game client like reddit has would be great too

[Anonymous No.4276046]

>>4275903
>>4275420
I'm going to vote for no external patches to begin with, keep it as easy as possible for people to join.

Maybe we can enable them once we have a small group playing and a consensus is reached.

[Anonymous No.4276856]

>>4275903
There's no reason to exclude in-game downloadable newgrfs from vanilla, since you can download them automatically when you try to connect to the server.
Default vehicles are so boring since from basically 1920 to 1960 there is only train worth using, the are no true DMUs or EMUs (and what there is sucks), no cargo refitting or customization, no trams (!) or articulated buses, etc.
I wouldn't using FIRS either as it's much more interesting than the default industries, but I don't know if it might be too confusing for people who haven't used it before.

>>4276046
I agree, we should start simple and with a low barrier to entry. It's a pretty small group who have been using these threads so far, and it would be great if we could attract some new players to this fine game. The RCT threads have a pretty good crowd and they seem to manage multiplayer successfully from time to time.

[Anonymous No.4278019]

>>4276856
>>4276046
Back when I played openttd with a certain double imageboard we'd play every weekend or so. Generally would choose a newgrf set every weekend to keep things fresh. It worked pretty good, just ran out of good newgrfs and it kinda died off.

[Anonymous No.4278019,1]

Hi