Today, 14 November 2005, we had a small brainstorm session on IRC how Shared Tracks should look like. This was the outcome:

Aircrafts and ships

The easy part of this: allow other players, for a fee, to use your station and/or depot. You can fee them for landing, taking off, using the depot, buying something at the depot, and % of the income. Should be easy to build too :) More interesting are trains...

Trains

We have Player 1, Player 2 and Player 3. Player 1 builds a nice network. Player 2 wants to use part of that network. Now Player 1 can build a Toll-Port, which allows Player 2 to access their network. At this port they define the restrictions they want to add to the trains of Player 2:

• One-Time Fee (which slows down the train for a moment, to pay the fee)
• Fee per tile moving
• Fee per day spent on property
• % of income on entering station
• Allow entering station for unload
• Allow entering station for load
• Allow entering station for load with full-load on
• Fee on entering station
• Fee on entering depot
• Fee for using tunnels (% or set number)
• Fee for using bridges (% or set number)
• Minimum speed
• Allow stopping
• Allow ignoring red
• On crash, guilty part has to pay X times the yearly income + new-value for destroyed property
• On too many crashes/year, the guilty part goes to jail: being unable to do anything for a year or two.

There was also some overthinking about what would happen if someone stopped their train on the track (if allowed, or via break-down). Normally, nothing happens. There only happens something when an other train is behind you and now has to wait for a red light. You pay every X ticks for their loose of cargo value. Now who pays if 4 trains behind each other stand still? The first one, causing the red light. The X ticks are needed, in case everyone starts accelerating.

Now what happens if player 3 is allowed on the network of player 2, can it access the network of player 1? In general: no. Player 1 has to allow player 3 via the toll-ports of player 2. Here they can ask other amounts of money if they wish. This means that if player 2 is a good friend, you can allow him for free, while asking money to player 3.

What we want, is that the info about the agreement between player 1 and player 2 is hidden for player 3, but code-wise this can be hard, so for now it is public-information.

To make this really to work, we need Celestar's patch for pay track upkeep!

You can build a toll-port at any place, not allowing any other player, to make sure they can't enter that part of your track. If you don't protect your stations, and allow them via the toll-port, they are allowed to enter ALL stations.

How do the toll-ports look like

They can only be horizontal or vertical tracks. They use a whole tile. A custom sprite will tell it is a toll-port.

Things to keep in mind

Q: What happens when a company goes bankrupt?

A: [TrueLight] I think, if no-one buys the company, all track should be sold. I mean.. too bad :p

Q: Is a shared junction an option?

A: No! 1 tile, 1 owner!

How to do this code-wise?

I, TrueLight, have some (many?) ideas on this subject. First of all, no we do not have to wait for the new map-array. This is what we need:

• A new type, like a depot, together with a pool, for Toll-Ports. Together with sprites and everything. Shouldn't be too hard..
• Alter the PF to see Toll-Ports as options, and to see track behind that as options.
• A pointer in the vehicle, pointing to the last toll-port, if any, it passed (so we know the penalties and stuff)
• An event-handler on the train-entering-next-track, to calculate fees
• More event-handlers to handle other fees
• SaveLoad code to save the new Toll-Ports correctly.

Good tip from peter: combine waypoints with toll-ports. This allowing giving orders on the toll-ports.

Thinks to do next

When that is done, some things that would be nice:

• Price Negotiating Dialog (2 players fighting for the price of a toll-port)