Optimization of Logic – Logic Gates [Part II]

Almost half a year ago I blogged about Logic Gates and already the headline promised that this story is not over yet. Now, I was finally able to concentrate my thoughts about logic gates again and was able to optimize the gates again. As I pointed out earlier the reaction time is too long and gates are reacting too sluggish. The slow processing made the gates only interesting in places which don’t need to be fast. For example the timing of injection. But when it comes to mainlines, sidelines, station entries and many other fancy coop-ish constructions they were more an impediment.
Download Logic Train NewGRF

I hope, this’ll change now, because these new constructions require only one train without any wagons and are extremely small in comparison with the old gates and the once I see nowadays in our games.
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Complex Orders and Improved S-Bahn Concept

Another great and useful feature which one or two didn’t recognize yet are Conditional Order Jumps. They are not available in OpenTTD 0.6.3 but if you are playing with recent nightly builds you should definitely use their advantages. As the name says you can use these special entries in the list to jump to a certain order.
Lets get an overview about the usage first and therefor we start with the types of conditions.
Conditional Order Jumps
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SML Shiftback

It has been a while since this idea came in my mind. I experimented to find a better way managing the train flow. The main idea of the SML concept is to shift trains to other tracks if they are free and joining trains use this free track. If the track is not free, the others aren’t either. This works very well but has a disadvantage too: train’s entering a station will primarily enter via the shift-tracks (the innermost).
SML Sketch
That’s the point where “shiftback” comes into play.
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Tutorial – The Canal Trick

I got familiar with the tutorials and the videos I create. Today, I used a trick to create train tracks on sea level with sea around on the Public-Server. Due to requests I created this tutorial showing you how to do it and what you should care of. In my opinion the canals are more decent than a bunch of bridges. They also remind me of Sylt.

The Canal Trick

All you need for this trick is Read the rest of this entry »

The Difference between Diagonal and Straight Tiles

Diagonal TilesI thought it is time for some more tricks and tips when playing OpenTTD. All of us use diagonal tiles when building train tracks. Of course, they are important. But you should know for sure that one diagonal tile has not the same length as a vertical/horizontal tile. This comes into play in a couple of situations.

First of all let’s have a look at the basics.
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