Stupid User Detection II

Now imagine: you are increasing your Empire, building new tracks, connecting more and more cities and industries, carry the whole world to the age of public transportation. And even though road, water and air vehicles exist, the most rewarding means of transportation are trains; maybe that stems from childhood memories of playing with model railways. But I am drifting of.

As research is continuously going on while time passes, you gain access to more and more advanced train types, starting from steam powered ones to Diesel engines. And also you have to option to build electrified tracks, allowing you to use – who would have guessed that – electric trains. Those are basically the best (fastest with highest acceleration) trains. I agree that watching steam machines graciously pulling their waggons over the map has a more nostalgic feeling, but that is fine for some scenic routes, which of course have to exist in your network, maybe through a hilly and wood cover region next to a lake or something like that. Anyhow, the tricky part is to actually upgrade your trains: You start with some mediocre things at the beginning, but as soon as new shiny inventions are available, you mostly want to use them.

You can start to replace every train by hand. That's how it was done in the old times. But OTTD has the nice option of pulling up a window for replacing vehicles (that works for all types of vehicles you can build). That looks like this:


In the left column you get a listing of what is currently rolling in your company, sorted by type. And on the right hand side, you are offered all types of engines you have access to at the moment. Replacing engines goes like this: Select on the left side which engine you want to take out of service (I selected the BR103 there) and on the right side you select the engine that should be the replacement. Then just push in the lower left corner 'Star Replacing Vehicles' and every time a train will go to a train station depot for service, the engine will be replaced automatically (given that you have enough money to buy the new one though). That is an extremely nice feature.

And extremely annoying because I searched for at least an hour how to not only get Steam and Diesel engines but also Electric engines (battery doesn't count) as replacements. I don't want to replace my neat shiny Electric engines with second choice Diesel ones. I am running a modern transportation company!

But hey! OpenTTD is Open Source, right? So, since I anyway build the game from the subversion repository I have the source code to look at; Use the source Luke! A quick grep -n replace *c reveals the interesting file: vehicle_gui.c And indeed reading a bit around in the code I see this:


Railtype selected in replace GUI? Can I select the type there? Really? Okay, lets have a look again at the picture above. Indeed, at the bottom in the middle there is something saying Rail Vehicles. And there is a suspiciously looking triangle next to it. Heureka! That is a drop-down list where one can change to:


Electrified Rail Vehicles! Maybe that is absolutely intuitive, but I just did not see it. Good to have the source code.