I have been thinking about a mod idea, a little inspired by outside connections in a game like cities skylines, but adapted to a TPF context. My idea is that outside connections can represent cities and/or industries. Each outside connection can have a type (air, water, road, rail), a distance (how far away is the city/industry from the map edge aka. how long will it take to get there, unload/load) and a level/configuration (can grow like cities/level up like industries). They can be placed manually on the map edge, and configured as wanted (same options like sandbox mode for cities/industries). Outside connections would also represent stations that can be added to lines. I imagine reusing existing game concepts as much as possible.

As a player/in a gameplay scenario, i would use it in several ways, but generally it is about playing as a part of a bigger picture. You could have part of a mainline on your map, and have intercity/long-distance passenger trains enter the map from one side, stop in only the biggest cities on the way, and exit the other end (and return the other way). You could have an "international airport" and ships from outside, representing tourists and business travel. You could also use it for goods, allowing for regional specialisation, e.g. the need to import stuff, that is not available locally to deliver for manufacturing, or a game scenario where you focus on rural maps with lots of raw material extraction for export, and any goods/food needed would have to be imported.

What would be completely new, is of course the general concept of an outside connection, but broken down a bit; 1) Asset to place on map edge 2) UI to configure outside connection (add and configure city/industry that outside connection represents) 3) some kind of visual representation of vehicles "disappearing" outside the map edge 4) the mechanic to keep track of connections added and what they represent 5) the integration into the existing game concepts and UI (reuse city/industry/station/line/vehicle mechanics - e.g. a city represented by an outside connection should be 100 % identical to a normal city e.g. in the city overview UI, a stop on a station in an outside connection should behave like a normal stop in the line tool etc.).

The sad thing is that im not a skilled developer at all, so doing such project myself seems almost impossible. Even though i think i could learn it eventually, i dont have the basic skillset, so it would be starting almost from scratch. On the other hand, I have several years of professional experience analysing and writing requirements for software development, QA/testing, and have some techical insight (i can write clear requirements (i dare to say haha), i took a full programming course on uni in C#/.NET, i can read API documentation/understand higher-level architecture/system components). I have direct experience working with developers in the entire software development lifecycle and everything related, representing the user/client/customer - here the player.

My hope is first of all to get an idea if this idea is feasible at all. If it is, and if someone else thinks this could be fun and interesting to explore further, I am open to any suggestions for a collaboration where each can pitch in with their own skill-set. Let me hear if anyone has anything to say about this suggestion :-)