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Change: Sort cargo payment rates legend in order of (initial) cost instead of alphabetically #8268
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…stead of alphabetically.
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I haven't dug up the commit (I could if it's needed), but it was explicit choice to sort by alphabetical :) A case can be made that it's quite tautological to sort by price:
Seems like a Chesterton's Fence case https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Chesterton%27s_fence Related: with the 49 cargos in FIRS v4 Steeltown, the chart is even harder to use (borderline useless). I have 'solved' this by resetting cargo payment rates to space them out on the chart (I force them apart algorithmically at compile time). Cargo payment rates should really be set for gameplay reasons, not to just make a chart look better, but I could find no other way to do it. This means that FIRS v4 gameplay is really quite distorted, some cargos are way too profitable, and others are almost impossible to make a profit with. But the chart looks better, so eh. |
Such a tooltip would be too large for practical use for large numbers of unique cargo types. Maybe if the cargo's value could be displayed next to the name of the cargo on the legend for whatever time point you are hovering over, like the following:
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@andythenorth I understand your tautology and also the Chesterton's Fence scenario, but personally I think your use case is seldom used:
At least for myself (I play with FIRS3 freight a lot), the reason I use the cargo payments graph is to find the relative value of cargos, so I can decide which cargo is most profitable to transport. I believe this information is more important than the payment rate for a single cargo in isolation. I also believe it is easier to find a word in a list given we know what word we're looking for (eg finding "Fruit" in the list of cargos), than it is to find a colour in a list given we know what colour we're looking for. (At this point I realise PAX/mail is sorted separately because 1. wagons hold different amounts of them, 2. vehicles normally pickup/dropoff at both stops, 3. cargodist normally excludes full loads anyway) We should consider different examples and how many steps a user needs to find the information they want, including finding the price for specific cargos, and finding the nth most valuable cargos. "What is the payment rate for coal?"Alphabetical sort:
Price sort:
"What cargo pays the most at day 10?"Alphabetical sort:
Price sort:
Which cargo comes first in the alphabet?Alphabetical sort:
Price sort:
From this I propose that price sorting cargos is much more efficient and usable than alphabetical sort. Price sort enables the user to find payment rates in a shorter time and with less effort or interaction (possibly without even touching the window). It also allows the user to learn about the relation between different cargo payment rates much more effectively - info such as the highest paying cargo or cargos with similar payment rates to one another. |
Ok fine. TBH, the trend of the OpenTTD UI is towards absolute crap anyway. Why resist the trend? I think I need a break from OpenTTD again. I'm really done with the project for a bit. |
I personally prefer the graph sorted by price too though I guess not everyone likes this sorting the most.
In the best case scenario the setting should be changeable inside the window and not the global settings. |
Money in OpenTTD rarely matters and even in those rare cases it does most profitable opportunities depend on many things and cargo payment graph doesn't really show them. For example, how would it help to notice passenger/mail options? Or bubbles in toyland? Even if you ignore cargo chains and landscape you still need charts like these to have at least a somewhat reasonable impression of cargo profitability: https://citymania.org/tools/profit |
All it needed was a 'sort key by' option eh :P |
As it clear from this thread, there are different ways to play this game. Who would have known, shocker, right? :D Personally, I really like this PR, as it is how I would like to use this window; I just never do, as I get lost in: what cargo was this line again? So I just connect cargos and see what makes most, and take it from there :P And I guess most new players would like it to be sorted by price. That said, the more veteran players, especially those that tend to lean towards more realism, would like to use this to look up a single cargo and see how it does. Which is impractical if you have it sorted by price. Which indeed brings it to its only logic conclusion: it needs a sorting key. And I think it should be below enable/disable button, not in settings. As the type of player you are will change during your game. Would you be up for making these changes @Hexus-One ? I know it is a lot to ask, as it requires to rethink how you do your Pull Request? |
Cargo payment rates are normally hard to read, as with more cargos, the different colours become harder to distinguish.
I believe that ordering the chart legend by cost will make it easier for the user to associate each line with the correct cargo.
Pic: chart with OpenGFX cargos
Pic: chart with FIRS3 Extreme cargos