[Idea] Train Route

[Felle]

First I would like to mention that I'm not quite sure whether this is even doable and that there are quite a few points that would probably need to be changed and/or added. Nor do I actually know if it's such a good idea and whether people would actually use it, but meh, worth posting anyway.

The railway of San Andreas in LVP, today, has one train which goes in the direction LS-SF-LV. The railway itself goes around the entire San Andreas with a total of 5 stations (2 in Los Santos, 1 in San Fierro and 2 in Las Venturas). Driving the entire track around (including some stops around the way) takes below 15 minutes, which I could imagine is comparable or actually less than the same distance by car. That makes train a fast and easy way of traveling, although it cannot beat a command like /taxi, it can probably beat most other ways of traveling (apart from flying).

To the idea, there would be routes (I'm thinking starting and stopping would be best on the Unity Station in Los Santos) going probably every day. You would need people who are ready to take on a mission to drive the trains on a day-to-day basis most likely (as I think this cannot be automatically using scripting, correct me if I'm wrong though).. A time schedule would of course be set, and the trains should of course be going when the server is busiest (probably being evenings, European time).

Something would be needed to attract peoples (probably mainly RPers) attention on when the trains are going, I assume a topic on the forums and maybe an informative command ingame as well as some announcement before a train departs from Los Santos.

If I recall correctly, you cannot have passengers in the train, and this can probably not be changed (once again, correct me if I'm wrong, which would be awesome and make things a whole lot easier). This erases the possibility to easily filling up the train with people who wanted to ride with it. Instead, I'm thinking, when you approach the train within a timeframe (when the train is going, obviously), you get a message such as "This train is due to depart from this station in x seconds/minutes. If you would like to go with the train, type /aboard". The train ride would be free of course, offering an alternative to expensive use of the /taxi command amongst other. With today's gas prices I can assume this would be a nice alternative to driving by car as well...

Then when you type /aboard (or whatever the command is), you would be teleported to an appropriate interior, along with the others who are on the train. Something like disabling all health losses in eventual fist fighting would probably be a good idea. When the people are in the interior, a message like the ones in races could be appropriate ("Next stop: blabla in x minutes. Get off here for the gangbase/whatever."). Whenever the train arrives to the station, a message that goes along the lines of "Get off the train by typing /getoff" should be shown.

In case you actually can script the train to drive automatically (also avoiding human mistakes like missing stations, derailments, running late/early and what not), that would be great, making the possibilities many more, you could have trains running all the time. If the train can be scripted to take passengers somehow, that makes the interior thing unnecessary, which would be a definite improvement.

A list of things that are a little doubtful about this (assuming that you have players as drivers and are teleported to an interior):

Code:

* The train, what if it's taken when the route is scheduled?
* What if someone steals the train? (could probably be prevented easily)
* What if the driver crashes?

Conclusion is probably that useful commands such as /emergencybrake would get you off the train (in case the driver crashed) and that the train is spawned in Los Santos a few minutes before the start (perhaps only that known train drivers can enter it).

Yeah... that's a whole lot of text...
Now to some pictures I took when driving the train one lap around the railway (take note of the time in the upper right corner to see how long the route takes):



Railwaystation in downtown Los Santos (Unity Station). The station I suggest as to be both for start and end.




Underground station in Los Santos (Market Station). Quite useless, I'm not even sure there's any way to reach it from above ground else than running through the tunnel from the Unity Station. Could possibly be skipped if so is the case.




Main station in San Fierro (near the freeway, pay n' spray and tuneshop), the Cranberry Station.




Yellow Bell Station in northern Las Venturas. This station is located in walking distance to/from the gangbase!




Similar to the previous station, which is rather close, is the Linden Station. Not in a very central location, could possibly be skipped.




The Unity Station in Los Santos again, note how the route has taken 14 minutes this time. I did stop at every station and got jacked once, killed a guy and missed a station making me forced to reverse. I'd say if you skipped the underground station in LS and the Linden Station in LV, it would take around 10 minutes around the track.

I have to admit this is a whole lot of writing on an idea I'm not even sure is possible making. Despite likely having made a dozen typos and confusing sentences along the post, I hope this makes my idea somewhat clear. If you want more information on the railway, such can be found at wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Andreas...Auto)#Rail

And no, I did not read through the whole post before posting.
- Felle.

[Sander]

Although the idea is nice, I'm 99% sure that this isn't going to work if a player needs to drive the train each day.
It's a little bit the same with the real taxi's driving around. (Not the /taxi command) Nobody uses them. A few times a day/week you see someone offering taxi services, but it's not on a regular base. I bet it would be the same for the train.

[Offtopic]
Did you know that there is also a hidden railtrack? Normally a train can only drive on the right side of the track (If you follow LV > LS > SF direction), it is however possible to add another train at the left rail, which doesn't quite follow the normal tracks
[/Offtopic]

[Wesley]

I really like this idea, and I also think something like this should be possible in LVP 3.0, making the train follow the tracks automatically without any drivers, however, I do think that that'll be quite some work, and I'm not sure how much it would used by the players in-game.