A few words on transport

I am currently working on one of the most important features in 2WP because I think it’s rather new in the world of business simulations. I’m talking about the way 2WP handles transport of goods.

In this project, everything is about a closed cycle of goods and money. As such it makes sense that transport is also a part of that cycle. You could probably achieve this by simply letting the system handle the transport of goods, paying “it” for this service and letting it keep track of what’s been spent and reinvesting it at some other end in the game. This is how it works for other, less important features in the game (like the population consuming goods it bought from the wages it earned), but I’m a particularly big fan of everything transport-related so I wanted to make this feature an integral part of the game.

So how does it work? First you need a vehicle. You can either build it yourself or buy it from other companies in the game. Once you have bought it, the vehicle is “mothballed”. To use it you have to put it into service first. The city in which you commission the vehicle becomes it’s “station” which functions as its homebase. The scheduling system is rather simple and vehicles can only do trips originating or ending at their station (a lot less complex/complicated than AirlineSim). 

After you have scheduled a vehicle, a system similar to the flight instancing feature of AirlineSim is used to create “trips” - instances of the relations you scheduled - that can be booked by you or other players. I’m not absolutely sure yet what the booking screen will look like, but I suppose it will be very similar to what you might know from the last flight you booked :-)

As far as I know, this feature would make 2WP the first business simulation ever to allow players to transport goods produced by others, thereby receiving actual bookings contrary to simulated demand as employed by AirlineSim. I’m extremely excited about this and I’m looking forward to see it in action with possibly hundreds of “transport companies” competing for actual, real bookings!