@@ -203,26 +203,26 @@ The rationale behind these goals is that
When it comes to gameplay, there are at least these groups of people:
- *Model railway (mostly singleplayer)*: build "realistic" landscapes, roleplay a world, or even replicate historical scenarios
- *Economical challenge (mostly singleplayer)*: run a business with economical challenges
- *Transport challenge (singleplayer or cooperative multiplayer)*: build efficient track layouts with high cargo throughput and tons of vehicles
- *Competitive speed run (competitive multiplayer)*: maximize some goal in some limited amount of time
When it comes to gameplay features there are at least these groups of interests:
- *Control freak:* micromanagement like conditional orders, refitting and loading etc.
- *Casual:* automatisation like cargodist, path based signalling etc.
To please everyone, the official branch tries to stay close to the original gameplay; after all, that is what everyone brought here.
The preferred method to alter and extent the gameplay is via add-ons like NewGRF and GameScripts.
To please everyone, the official branch tries to stay close to the original gameplay; after all, that is what brought everyone here.
The preferred method to alter and extend the gameplay is via add-ons like NewGRF and GameScripts.
For a long time, the official branch was also open to features which could be enabled/disabled, but the corner-cases that came with some configurations have rendered some parts of the code very complicated.
Today, new features have to work with all the already existing features, which is not only challenging in corner cases, but also requires spending considerable more work than just "making it work in the game mode that I play".
The preferred method to introduce new gameplay features is to extend the content APIs, supporting ever more add-on content / mods.
This moves conflict-solving away from the codebase to content authors / players.
It is more accepted for add-ons not working together than the base game not working with certain setting combinations.
In general the game should allow anything that doesn't violate basic rules, but it should warn players if they take potentially dangerous or "stupid" actions.
For example, players are not prevented from starting vehicles without orders, but will receive a warning about vehicles having too few orders.