Route Detective

Route Detective

Where is that person going, and why not by car?

You built a fine tram line. A person walks past the stop, gets into a car, and drives off. This mod adds a Route card to the window of every person, so you can see the trip and the ways to make it.

What it shows

• The trip: where the person comes from and where the person goes, with the town of each building.
• The options: Walk, Car, and Public transport, from the shortest to the longest, each with its time and its length. The option the game chose is marked.
• The steps of a travel option: a public transport option lists its steps as a numbered list. A step is a walk or a ride, with its time in minutes, the place where it starts, and the place where it ends. A ride also shows the average wait for the line in brackets, for example "3 min (5 min waiting)". The times of the steps add up to the time of the option. Trips over several lines are covered.
• The step the person is on: bold, between two yellow arrows. This step comes from the game: the person rides it or waits for it now.
• Paths on the map: the eye button of an option draws it on the map. You can even show all options at once! Each option has its own colour, the same as the dot in front of its name, and its steps alternate between a light and a dark shade. A ride on public transport is a thick line, a drive a normal one, and a walk a thin one.
• The wait at a stop: how long the person waits, and for which vehicle.

How to use it

1. Click a person. The Route card opens, and the route the game chose is drawn on the map.
2. Press the eye button of another option to compare it on the map.
3. If you want the card closed until you click it, switch off Show the route when a person is selected in the settings of this mod.

Good to know

• What comes from the game: the option the game chose, the path of a walk or a drive in progress, and the line and the two stops of the current ride. The game keeps nothing else about a route.
• The game's pathfinding: Yeah, it's a... khm... tricky one...
• What the mod works out: every other option, and the steps before and after the current ride. The mod uses the pathfinder of the game, the timetable data of the lines, and half the interval of a line as the wait. So these parts are an estimate, and a person can do something else.
• Time is not the whole story: the game chooses by a cost that a mod cannot read. A person can take the option that the card shows as slower.
• The car time uses the speed limits of the roads. It ignores traffic and junctions.
• The card computes the options once per step of a trip. Press Recalculate after you change the network.
• The mod changes no gameplay and saves nothing in a savegame. You can add it to a game and remove it at any time.
• Languages: English, German, Spanish, French, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Dutch, Polish, Brazilian Portuguese, Russian, Simplified Chinese and Traditional Chinese. Where the game has its own word for something, the mod uses that word. I checked the English only, the rest is machine-made. If a text sounds odd, tell me and I fix it.
• I used AI as my development assistant, and it made all the graphical work too. :)

Found a bug? Tell me what you did, and attach stdout.txt if you can. Lines that start with [PersonRoute] help a lot.

The figure in the icon is a new drawing of the passenger icon of Transport Fever 3.

The source code can be found here, PRs are welcome: kergekacsa/tf3_route_detective on GitHub