CARTYPEWNTED question Options

[Frascati]

Hi

Is there any effect to be had by having the same car type listed more than once in an entry?

eg BOX-BOX-BOX-FLAT.

Would boxes be 3 times more likely to turn up?

Stefan R

[sgdavis]

Hi

Is there any effect to be had by having the same car type listed more than once in an entry?

eg BOX-BOX-BOX-FLAT.

Would boxes be 3 times more likely to turn up?

Stefan R

This was such a great question, I actually had to read through my own program code to determine how the program would respond to this. As it turns out you are correct, doing this will cause the Box car to be more likely to be selected. The way it works is the program looks at all the types that are separated by hyphens and builds a list of those. So the list in this case would have BOX, BOX, BOX, FLAT. Then the program counts the number of items in that list (in this case 4). Finally the program generates a random number between 1 and 4 and selects the type that corresponds to that humber, i.e. 1, 2 or 3 would return "BOX" and a 4 would return "FLAT".

So you have discovered a new feature of the program for those advanced template designers who would like to "stack" the odds of a certain car type to be shipped to a given industry. Of course CarTypeShipped (cars shipped OUT OF an industry) would work the same way -- it uses the same program subroutine.

Thanks,

Steve