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Topic: One-way roads

Nordfriese
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Posted at: 2018-08-31, 11:40

There were so many new suggestions recently, I just can´t abstain from making one of my own face-wink.png

One-way roads

It could be possible to mark roads as "one-way". Wares can only be transported from the start to the end flag on a one-way road, not the other way around. Workers are unaffected by the direction.

I don´t think this would affect the gameplay in a negative way, as no-one has to use one-way roads. It could be used to coordinate the wares flow in a road network better, especially at bottlenecks.

I believe this would not be very hard to implement.

This feature would cause the problem that wares cannot necessarily be transported between any two flags in one economy, which is much the same as for workers in my ferry branch. I´m currently implementing a compromise there in the search for Supplies for Requests to circumvent the issue, which could also be applied here.


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WorldSavior
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Posted at: 2018-08-31, 18:27

Nordfriese wrote:

There were so many new suggestions recently, I just can´t abstain from making one of my own face-wink.png

One-way roads

It could be possible to mark roads as "one-way". Wares can only be transported from the start to the end flag on a one-way road, not the other way around. Workers are unaffected by the direction.

I don´t think this would affect the gameplay in a negative way, as no-one has to use one-way roads. It could be used to coordinate the wares flow in a road network better, especially at bottlenecks.

I believe this would not be very hard to implement.

This feature would cause the problem that wares cannot necessarily be transported between any two flags in one economy, which is much the same as for workers in my ferry branch. I´m currently implementing a compromise there in the search for Supplies for Requests to circumvent the issue, which could also be applied here.

Hasn't ypopezios solved the congestion problem completely, so one-way-roads are rather useless?


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Nordfriese
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Posted at: 2018-08-31, 20:15

Hasn't ypopezios solved the congestion problem completely, so one-way-roads are rather useless?

He has done a good job on that, and the road system is indeed clever enough now to figure out complex routing problems without the need for better planning tools. This is sort of a psychological point here, because although routing works well internally, it can still look as if the network is messed up, because a complex wares flow (as it can surface especially around bottlenecks) is practically impossible to follow with the eye. The use one-way roads structures the wares flow in a way that is easier to watch, while the impact on routing should be minimal. So, if this is implemented, players will be able to choose between the current system (good algorithm, poor visibility) and a network that may require more careful planning if it is to achieve the same efficiency but rewards the player aesthetically.

Since one-way roads should get different graphics so one can tell them apart from normal roads, it´s probably be better to wait with an implementation until my ferry branch is in trunk though, because that´ll introduce a none-trivial change in the road-rendering system that would be very useful here.


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ypopezios
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Posted at: 2018-09-02, 08:20

This needs some more explanation. Shouldn't ferries be always equivalent to two-way roads?

Congestion is solved for the worst cases. Some edge-cases may still happen. One-way roads cannot improve the situation.

In an one-way road, the carrier would have no reason to wait in the middle of the road, would rather wait at the beginning of the one-way. But that could be aesthetically problematic.

Routing works well-enough, but I would not call it particularly clever. There is much room for improving it.

A busy road-system can indeed look chaotic. But that's a visual indication that the player should consider improving its overall design, not just its looks.


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kaputtnik
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Posted at: 2018-09-02, 11:24

It could be used to coordinate the wares flow in a road network better, especially at bottlenecks.

You may need two one-way-roads most of the time then: One road in one direction and another road in the opposit direction. Otherwise wares may take a big detour to reach his destination.

I would prefer to have the ability to cut economies apart, or tell a warehouse to prefer only wares produced nearby. Or another solution to prevent sending wares from one production site to a far away consumer whereas a production site is nearby the consumer. But that is worth another topic...


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king_of_nowhere
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Posted at: 2018-09-02, 12:51

I don't see what is gained by one-way roads. Bringing wares back does not cost any additional times, and the study cases on traffic jams happened with traffic in a single direction


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dreieck
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Posted at: 2018-09-02, 14:31

In order for the psychological problem of watching what is going on, I really would like some tools which would help visualising the ware flow.

  1. The "follow"-mode in the view-window could also be applied to a ware, so it would follow a single ware as it is transported through the road network.
  2. Nice-to-have debug feature: Some sort of switchable option that wares leave traces on the screen. Not sure about the design-details. Could be a single trace per ware-type (selectable which ware-types; each ware type gets a different colour, as in the statistics window) which gets wider if more wares follow this path and choosable integration time window.

(1. is the one I am really missing. 2. a very nice high-level feature if implemented well, but I think quite complicated to make it work well.)

What I also would like is the ability to choose ware type transport priority.

Edited: 2018-09-02, 14:37

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