Roads & Transport in T3

[Coconut Kid]

This has been mentioned so many times in the "Suggestions for Developers" thread that it is time to start a special thread for this topic.

The T3 screenshots so far clearly indicate that there will be:

• military trucks/lorries
• civilian trucks/lorries
• military jeeps
• civilian jeeps
• taxicabs

Can the following be far behind?:

• busses/jitnies
• limos - at least one for El Presidente
• "beater" autos (per T1 leader)
• armored car/tank - to protect El Presidente

.
The T3 screenshots also clearly indicate lots of different kinds of paving for roadways and plazas.

Dreams are coming true -- for some players. I wonder about the programmers/code writers.

 
BTW - this is some sort of statistical milestone for the forum. This thread is topic #11111

[el_malo]

CK, I seriously doubt that the screenies are of actual game-play.

I would say, that they are from a promotional vid... that the art department threw together.

[Coconut Kid]

All of these realized dreams can't just cruise about randomly. They have to be in charge of a person "unit" that is, the driver (not the game player). The driver has work/personal affairs to do and has to choose the route to accomplish such. It also seems unlikely that the route picked can just crash off through the country side randomly (as the driver/person unit could do whilst on foot).  So, roads are involved.

By way of a history lesson, the developers of T2 struggled with the idea of improving the way T1 handled unit "pathfinding". Here is a comment on the results.

Hook of 'Frog City': We really wanted a road system that was actually used in a predictable manner to improve on the way T1 treated the issue. That meant, in order to make roads sensibly work, that buildings (in most cases) had to be connected to roads.

Another consequence of wanting to be able to to do efficient road-based path-finding is the need for a single road system. Or else, calculations would have to traverse multiple road systems to find all possible paths and then decide on the best one (thereby wasting a lot of resources). Not to mention the question of how to route a character around random obstacles between the road systems.

Ultimately, we ended up enforcing *one* road system that has *all* buildings (that require such a connection) connected to it. This allows for fairly quick pathfinding using the roads and avoids having to calculate open-terrain obstacle courses and multiple road network paths.

The drawback is indeed, that you can only remove road from the ends of your network.

http://tropico.strategyplanet.gamespy.com/cafe/index.php?topic=6697.msg142946#msg142946

Kaltes: My complaint is not that I am unable to arbitrarily demolish critical sections of road, rather is it that once you have looped any road, it if not able to be deleted no matter how useless redundant it may be.

Let's say you build a building next to a main artery, and you decide to loop the road around that building to completely surround it. Later, you restructure that area and you demolish the building, now there is merely an empty loop off in the middle of nowhere that has no significance, yet it cannot be deleted.

As an island grows and prospers from its humble beginnings to its fully developed glory, the player constantly redesigns and alters his setup. For practical reasons, it simply is not easy to scale up without demolishing some buildings and shuffling things around as you grow.

Unfortunately the road situation presents a huge pitfall to this, because once you lay any road, unless it is some kind of "offshoot" you are stuck with that road forever.

As a veteran T1 player, I can see that this creates a huge pitfall in developing your island. Either you must meticulously plan out your island at the very start on paper then slowly transfer it in carefully as to not make mistakes, OR rely heavily on "offshoot" roads that don't loop back. This is very inefficient.

Hook: Yes, I'll gladly admit to that one... we could be a bit better with our graph traversing algorithms detecting loops in the road and allowing them to be broken.
I suggest its going to be quite a chore to teach players how to plan and build a road system. This is a country-wide effort, not just a city. It includes your agricultural, forest and mining activities in very rural areas.

 

[Coconut Kid]

CK, I seriously doubt that the screenies are of actual game-play.

I would say, that they are from a promotional vid... that the art department threw together.

You most assuredly may be correct.

But if you are, the release of such screenshots is leading a lot of potential buyers down The Primrose Path toward a huge disappointment.

In my opinion, the die has been cast. Either Haemimont is going to have vehicles in the game play that were not in T1, or they are going to dine on a huge crow, feathers and all.

 

[el_malo]

A PC game company that overstates it product... who would have thunk it

I shudder at the thought of how buggie, a newly released T3 will be, with all the vehicles that they are hyping.

The publisher, kalypso, has a history of releasing very buggie games and doing little to patch them.

I recommend that CT members do some reading of reviews for kalypso games.

[Coconut Kid]

I recall when the guys at PopTop were developing the original Tropico they had wanted to incorporate some form of road vehicles.
However on examining this in more detail, the AI and pathfinding, along with the need for a higher spec machine, meant this plan came to nothing. ...

Well now! There you have it. All the dreams about vehicles have to fit on the buyers machines as discovered by market research; and also within the code budget for the disks supplied for the game.

Surprise, surprise!! It is not just the wild blue younder, or ignorant developers.

 

[Coconut Kid]

... I recommend that CT members do some reading of reviews for kalypso games.

Better, read the kalypso English forum for GA:R.


Buildings come with adjacent paving, but if you don't build them just so -- you have grass patches in your plazas. But you have no tool for filling-in paving.

There are ground surfaces that look like roads, but they are not -- they are just terrain "painted" with gravel or pseudo-paving "texture". In my opinion the gravel is river-bed sized rocks, and any packed earth or other pseudo-paving should have ruts if man has passed by.

[Lyubo_Haemimont]

The pavement around most buildings in Grand Ages: Rome was implemented, so the player's city does indeed look like a city, and not a bunch of buildings on a lawn (like in many other city-builders). I think it does a pretty good job.

[Coconut Kid]

The pavement around most buildings in Grand Ages: Rome was implemented, so the player's city does indeed look like a city, and not a bunch of buildings on a lawn (like in many other city-builders). I think it does a pretty good job.

That's a reasonable point. It does work well - with Rome. In any other civilization, I would have gone for pushing the player into doing the paving his own self -- by surrounding new buildings with a zone of muddy ruts (rather than nice grass), very detracting from the value of the building and upsetting to the people.

I hope T3 doesn't get automatic, beautifully paved streets with buildings.
Firstly, that would screw-up the ability to landscape and make lovely boulevards ; meanwhile also making it impossible to have really crowded slums of shacks with no real roads through them.
Secondly, El Presidente has to take financial & design responsibility for the road system.

If anything is to come automatically, it should be "The Beaten Path" for tracks/paths frequently, informally used for travel by 'Tropicans' (especially vehicles) whereby the soil is churned into heavy mud/dust and ruts with frequent pot-holes. They can exist even in the "city". Such tracks/paths do not "heal" themselves if not used except with wild growth of brush if there is rainfall. Those using them have their movement speed cut in half.

That will motivate El Presidente to put his road construction crews into action.

[Coconut Kid]

Motor Vehicles and Roads -- The player will be able to build roads on his island. As to how and when vehicles will be available to the player in the game, we are exploring several different possibilities, but the main idea is that the maps are larger than in the original Tropico and a faster way of transportation might be needed (if we simply make the units faster, they will look weird). So far we are very pleased with the look of the vehicles and feel that they contribute to the atmosphere of Tropico.

Now then, Haemimont has lots of stuff to test.

It's great to have motor vehicles. But they really have to have some kind of roads -- mud & pot-holes or semi-improved -- or constructed as part of El Presidente's National Road System with paving and all such improvements.

Perhaps in the early days, the Teamsters (as their name implies) could be drivers of donkey carts which could go where no road had gone before.  The donkeys don't need a great elaboration, but they have to be a bit more elaborate than the "hand-truck in the hole" of T1. One suspects they come out of the garage at the back of the Teamster Office when the Teamster picks up his work assignment. When the load is delivered, the donkeys & cart could return to the Office on their own. Of course that would not work for a motor truck. The Teamster with his donkey cart (or cheap motor truck) could operate like the Fisherman in his boat. But with smoother coding.

[Smallaxe]

I think the best way to implement vehiches into Tropico society would be by haveing them imported from another country(like in real life)

[Coconut Kid]

I think the best way to implement vehiches into Tropico society would be by having them imported from another country (like in real life)

I don't think that is the "how and when" vehicles are available that Lyubo had in mind.

 

Are they available only WHEN there is a certain kind of road network?

HOW are they used? Only by certain occupations, e.g. Teamsters? Only for certain tasks, e.g. moving goods or busses/jitneys?

Certainly motor vehicles have to be imported. A local factory would be too much a fantasy. Donkey carts & donkeys would be a different thing.

Personally, I think donkeys & carts should be the civilian system -- excepting perhaps a handful of busses.

[Coconut Kid]

CK, I seriously doubt that the screenies are of actual game-play. I would say, that they are from a promotional vidio that the art department threw together.

My friend, now that we have been assured that all of the screenies came form actual gameplay (but from various iterations of the game engine) it is appropriate for us to speculate on how the game engine is all screwed-up.

All the roads are perfect; there are no "classes" of roads. They are just the right width, smoothly paved and have bright and clear stripes. They define uniform distances between buildings.

They are absolutely flat -- but of course the terrain is all flat. The hills and rocks must be added later -- after construction.

One wonders what the maintenance cost on each tile of these magnificant roads which last forever is.

[el_malo]

CK, who are we to question kalypso and Haemimont... sealing the death of the Tropico dream.

[Coconut Kid]

This is a very revealing reply in the Developer Interview Part 3:

9. Mudder (German)
Do the taxicabs in the game have any real functionality (e.g. transportation of tourists). Is there a system for public transportation?

There is a system for public transportation, and an island with good road connectivity will be at a significant advantage. For example goods will be transported more efficiently, and constructors will reach the construction sites faster. As for the tourists - the transport system will allow them to quickly visit attractions that are far from each other, thus maximizing the profit from their vacation time.

Keep in mind that it is not trivial to setup an efficient transportation network. Since not every building has its own built-in garage, you will have to use the special Garage buildings as hubs, thus investing both workforce and building space.

It seems El Malo and I have had the wrong conception of Tropico. It is not a small, back-water improvished island -- it is Transportation Tycoon in the Caribbean!