Feature Request: Select Bus Routes for Hiding Zones

[ChrisHartman]

Once you add bus stops as hiding zones, games can really explode in size. For example, the city of Seattle has about 20 train stops and over 1000 bus stops. To cut down on this, it would be nice to only select a few bus lines, enough to cover the city without overwhelming the players. It looks like the route_ref value should make this possible: https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:highway%3Dbus_stop.

Also, what's the best way to reach if I want to try implementing this myself?

[taibeled]

I'd happily accept a pull request! You can comment here to reach me.

[ChrisHartman]

Cool, I feel like there's a few ways this could work from a UX perspective:

1. A "Route Filter" dropdown that appears when you've selected bus routes, and updates the set of zones in the sidebar to completely remove filtered routes.
   • Pros
     • Out of sight out of mind once you've established you're not using a route.
   • Cons:
     • Introduces a new state for hiding zones, so now they can be enabled, disabled, or... filtered?
     • Alternatively, If this updates the OSM query, that's another expensive query when it really should have been cached.
2. A "Route Filter" dropdown that "disables" (strikethrough but still visible) everything on the filtered route.
   • Pros
     • Doesn't introduce any new concepts, just a new quick filter.
   • Cons:
     • I'm not sure there's a "good" user outcome if they try to enable something on a route they filtered. Remove the filter but leave everything disabled as it was?
3. Sorting the list of zones by their route, and then having an easy "disable all" button on the headers.
   • Pros
     • Precise user control
     • Makes the list of zones a little easier to navigate - and opens up to making the list collapsable by route
   • Cons:
     • I'm not sure the current sorting of zones, but if they're sorted in some way so that zones that are close physically are close in the list, this might be an annoying change for users, since that won't be true anymore.
     • If the list should ever be sorted by something else, this will get in the way.

I think I like 1 best, but I'm not in love with any option...

[taibeled]

This issue is kind of similar to #61, in that both are with lines (just #61 regards train lines instead of bus lines). I personally feel like both should be implemented with the third method. I like the aesthetic of having stations in different groups on the right sidebar.

What stopped me from implementing this already is mainly the sharing process. When developing, I try to account for large games. In other words, I always make the questions with Japan as the goal. That's why I had only implemented hiding zone specific measuring/matching until a8ffc86 and 014dd9b. I had not thought of implementing the normal versions of those yet, since they would always crash on Japan. That's why I had to make them exclusive to smaller games. The difficult part of implementing this fix is how the stations would be saved. Saving all 10,000 stations would be next to impossible to share, so knowing which stations are disabled would not be easy between each player. Bus stops are even more numerous then train stations, so this number would likely be far far too large for Japan.

The last paragraph is kind of a disorganized ramble, so I'm going to explain my opinions about this implementation in simple, less-justified terms:

• Would this have to be exclusive to smaller areas?
• How would the stations be saved? i.e., which of the following?
  • Saving all stations
  • Saving additions, deletions, and filters

Besides the potential issues, this idea would definitely be useful.

[ChrisHartman]

Oh man, this really becomes a can of worms doesn't it?

I think the bus route side of this feature is basically stuck in small games, because bus routes already crash Japan anyway. And train lines have the infinitely harder problem of figuring out custom lines, since OSM doesn't have train line data.

Saving stations feels like it will definitely be impossible to share, I'm with you there. Maybe once a whole route is enabled, share it as enabledRoutes?

Actually that reminds me, the grouping of stations is going to be a little bit messy because bus stops can be on multiple routes. Let me see if I can even get something close to a nice UX there before worrying about sharing...

[taibeled]

Actually that reminds me, the grouping of stations is going to be a little bit messy because bus stops can be on multiple routes. Let me see if I can even get something close to a nice UX there before worrying about sharing...

I had totally forgotten that bus stops can be on multiple lines. That definitely makes things more complicated.

And train lines have the infinitely harder problem of figuring out custom lines, since OSM doesn't have train line data.

I have found that some deductions can be made about the lines, but they are very inconsistent. I'm not exactly sure how this can be circumvented either. I have researched other databases, but found nothing that is optimal.

Edit: The best I have found was https://www.transit.land/, which seems to work to some extent, but requires an account.

[khiral]

If selecting by route is complex, would it be possible to add have an option to add all bus stops to the hiding zone list, but have them be disabled by default instead of enabled by default? It wouldn't be perfect, but it would be more workable to select ~50-100 bus stops out of 1000 compared to disabling 900-950.

I'm happy to take a stab at it if you have some pointers for which features to change.

[taibeled]

At least in a rudimentary state, this can be accomplished by adding a button src/components/ZoneSidebar.tsx close to Clear Disabled that simply adds all stations to the disabled list. However, there would be some complications with how sharing works under this design, as if the disabled state contains too many objects, it possibly cannot be concisely shared in a URL. However, I'd be happy to look at a pull request!