Minutes of the meeting on February 26, 2005

1. Pick chairman + minutes maker

    - Today's chair: Steve
    - Today's minutesman: Hellfire

2. Airports: how is they constructed? by modules or fixed?

    - With a 6 vs 2 vote, option H: "Players initiate, construct and own 
      airports" was chosen.
    - Airports outside towns can be built using the same moduled approach.

3. Docks (confirm decission)

    - The thread is locked, no need for further discussion.

4. Research (confirm decission)

    - A new forum vote with clearer descriptions of the vote options is needed.

5. Signalling (confirm decission)

    - Last meeting's decision was confirmed.

6. Finding routes and services

    - No decisions were made, except of continuing the discussion on the forum.
      A summary of the discussion follows below:

        The discussion was mostly an attemt to as whether passengers should use
        specific routes, or just take any transport which will eventually lead
        to their destination. Although at first this question was answered with
        "any," it was mentioned that passengers prefer shortest routes. ChrisCF
        continues with a story about a possible setup of finding destinations:
            My thoughts are that we make some basic assumptions.
            1. Private transport exists, and may be used as an alternative, or
               as part of a journey, e.g. people might drive a short distance
               to a station when the train drops them off right outside the
               office.
            2. If the element of private transport is too much in a given
               journey, it is not feasible to use public transport.
            Maybe inverse-square as to the distances between start and end.
        Steve mentioned that we might need a limit on the number of stations
        per journey.
        An important detail is that passengers should travel in the right
        logical direction, not the right geographical. One of the problems that
        could arise with the proposed system is due to people taking the first
        train they see. If they do that at each station, they could go a really
        long route, although they would eventually get there.
        Physical distance doesn't matter as much. We'll want to make a graph of
        all connections, and attempt to find a route using some shortest-path
        algorithm from the source to destination, but with a modification.
        We'll actually find all paths, and then take the subset that are at
        most X% longer than the absolute shortest and all of those will be
        possible paths the passenger will take.

7. Company rating (confirm decission)

    - The decision was confirmed, but there were some remarks on steam trains:
        - Steam is only good for ratings to a certain limit.
        - Museum steam trains are a luxury and have a nice revenue; 
        - Scenic routes need to be defined by the coders to see if a steam
          train boosts rating or drops them~

8. Liveries

    - Company colours as standard.
    - Artists can and will create national sets with real liveries.
    - Keep a colour across all vehicles, but allow seconday and tertiary
      colours change for different transport groups.

9. Vehicle breakdowns ~

    - Still needs proper discussion on the forums.

10. Computer players (confirm decission)

    - Computer players will be added to the game.
    - Computer players should not need to cheat. "Cheat" in this context is
      having artificially higher ratings assigned by the game, higher profit
      factors, etc.
    - Computer players should "connect" to the game as human players. That way,
      they won't be able to do anything a player wouldn't be able to do, unless
      a server discriminates between the players, which it of course shouldn't
      do.
    - The AI should have a smart track laying interface and be able to end a
      service when it runs poor.

11. Style

In this discussion, also some comments on useability were made. These are
listed below.

    - The style should be consistent across every element of the game.
    - We should be keeping in mind that our audience is mostly going to be 
      TT(D) and Locomotion players.  Any default style should be made such that
      it can be used by them.
    - Other than that, we should hold off any major stylistic decisions until
      we have something to work with.
    - Style should not affect usability.  If a visual style makes the controls
      harder to use, then we don't ship it, let alone make it the default.
      Simple as.
    - Because it wasn't 100% clear what whas meant with "Style", the topic is 
      postponed.

12. Set next meeting and pick chairman + minute maker, erm, wrong place?

    - Next meeting will be at saturday March 5, 2005
    - Next meeting's chair: ChrisCF
    - Next meeting's minutes maker: Hyronymus
    - ChrisCF will open a new topic for this meeting.