Patch to allow towns to build houses on turns

17 August 2016 12:34

Hello,

It always bugged me that towns can't build houses on road turns (on diagonal tile). So that space is usually wasted, which means you can't use too many turns and still have effective layout.

So I did a patch that fixes it, but now I have some doubts proposing it to OpenTTD devs, since things are starting to get a little bit crazy (and ofc even if I propose it doesn't mean it will be included, but, I think, it has good chance). There is no big balance change since even as corner itself has 3 house spots roads that go from it are bound to share one tile so it's still 2 house spots per road tile on average. But it makes possible to arrange roads in a way that puts them further from center and in a more circular shape so it can potentially get better houses.

I added option to town emulator that allows houses on turns (under "more options") so you can check how it works. So far I came up with these two layouts: 1, 2, but they don't seem to beat regular spirals (which also benefit from this change).

So for now I think it's a good change. It allows more variety in town layout and adds some challenge to town design as you can curl roads a bit but you still need to fit stations and stuff somewhere. But let me know what you think of this.

17 August 2016 13:13

This one looks better that regular double spiral. But it's probably because of late branching, square spiral does even better with it.

UPD I added benchmarking to town emulator (b key) and it looks like curly layout is still better than square with late branching for about 300 pop on average.

However, it's clear that just random town size fluctuations on 500 cycles are like +-2k (up to 5k) so all this corner stuff is pretty negligible.