Re: [Rails-devel] 18xx Rails: Feature Request 1517702 - automatic route calculation

[Aliza P. <ali...@gm...>]

Another thing that varies by game -- the president/director/current
plunderer of a railroad may or may not be required to use the optimal
route. (Yes, there are situations where you would want $10 less of
income.)

This is often stated in the rules as "if any shareholder can point out
a better route, the director is required to use it."

Another possibility for tinkering would be games where there's a
payment to an owner of a map feature.

In 1844 there's an explicit rule that you can't run a suboptimal route
just to get the virgin run through a tunnel/mountain.

Perhaps the optimal path would be a route suggestion feature; ideally
this would be something you could use (and not save!) even when it's
not that railroad's turn, to help people parallel-process their turns.

 - Aliza

On Tue, Dec 22, 2009 at 2:41 PM, Jim Black <jim...@ya...> wrote:
>
> Frederick-
>
> Best of luck with the new feature development- what an awesome way to join the rails team !!!   ;-)
>
> More seriously, do note that legal tile/track placement would be a prerequisite feature for route calculation.
>
> In our user groups- using rails for pbem- this wouldn't take priority over any of the other stuff Erik and Brett have been working on.
>
> Adding up routes is a pain, but it's a well-understood pain, and it's actually straightforward to note the stuff for pbem (works way better than f2f for this).
>
> As Aliza mentioned, route bonuses & rules get complicated really quickly, across the 18xx- we avoid critical Rails bottlenecks getting this straight, if we just/simply continue typing in the earnings each turn.
>
> I'm not saying it wouldn't be a nice feature, but it sounds like it's been carefully evaluated by the developers (here and in the yahoo group) and would be a lot of work.
>
>  - jim
>
>
> On Dec 22, 2009, at 2:19 PM, brett lentz wrote:
>
>> We agree with you that route calculation is important, but so are many
>> other things that are far easier to implement.
>>
>> If you're volunteering to write the code, great. Just let us know when
>> to expect your first set of patches.
>>
>> Let me know if you need any help checking out the code so that you can
>> get started helping us add this feature.
>>
>> ---Brett.
>>
>>
>>
>> On Tue, Dec 22, 2009 at 2:18 AM, Frederick Weld
>> <fre...@go...> wrote:
>>> Hi developers,
>>>
>>> I was wondering why this feature is prioritized so low. For me, this would
>>> be THE reason to use the computer instead of a physical board.
>>>
>>> Is it that you need a good algorithm before implementing this? In such a
>>> case, please consider the following:
>>> (1) Even though the brute force algorithm wouldn't be in O(n^p), it will
>>> probably be ok for non-diesel runs.
>>> (2) What SimTex's 1830 (most probably) does: A separate model (multi-edge
>>> graph) for route calculation is updated whenever someone lays a tile. By
>>> doing this, you get a very low constant factor of the time the algorithm
>>> needs, meaning you'll still have exponential time but you won't perceive
>>> this until the size of the graph becomes very large.
>>>
>>> What do you think about that?
>>>
>>> Best Regards,
>>> Frederick
>>>
>>> ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>>> This SF.Net email is sponsored by the Verizon Developer Community
>>> Take advantage of Verizon's best-in-class app development support
>>> A streamlined, 14 day to market process makes app distribution fast and easy
>>> Join now and get one step closer to millions of Verizon customers
>>> http://p.sf.net/sfu/verizon-dev2dev
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> Rails-devel mailing list
>>> Rai...@li...
>>> https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/rails-devel
>>>
>>>
>>
>> ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>> This SF.Net email is sponsored by the Verizon Developer Community
>> Take advantage of Verizon's best-in-class app development support
>> A streamlined, 14 day to market process makes app distribution fast and easy
>> Join now and get one step closer to millions of Verizon customers
>> http://p.sf.net/sfu/verizon-dev2dev
>> _______________________________________________
>> Rails-devel mailing list
>> Rai...@li...
>> https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/rails-devel
>
>
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> This SF.Net email is sponsored by the Verizon Developer Community
> Take advantage of Verizon's best-in-class app development support
> A streamlined, 14 day to market process makes app distribution fast and easy
> Join now and get one step closer to millions of Verizon customers
> http://p.sf.net/sfu/verizon-dev2dev
> _______________________________________________
> Rails-devel mailing list
> Rai...@li...
> https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/rails-devel
>