Big hubs in a nutshell – finding a universal hub design

Recently I started playing a game on my own, featuring some LL-RR main network. When I had to build my first ever 4-way hub for double tracks, I first took a look at the Junctionary just to find out that all hubs were designed quite different and hardly any of them follow all necessary rules (curve length, double bridges/tunnels, merge after split). I then started wondering if there’s a universal way of thinking about hubs.
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Various degrees of terraforming

In almost every game that is being played on one of our servers there is a terraforming, TF for short, rule in place. However it is up to debate on what is considered to be low, medium or high terraforming. Via this blog I want to give you some insights in the various types of terraforming that we use.
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About Curve Lengths

Every game we have the same discussion about what Curve Length (CL) to use to allow trains to maintain their maximum speed while still keeping corners as tight as possible. After some experimenting and looking through the source code I came up with some formula that can be used to determine the minimum CL. The graph below shows the maximum speeds for different railtype, further in the article I will explain where these values come from.


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OSQC#01 (finally) finished

Dear folks,

some of you may remember the long forgotten #openttdcoop scenario quest competition (osqc). We tried but failed to gather the judgings of more than two people (Mark and myself) on the 8 final submissions to the contest. A far bigger number of people actually played that map back in early 2008, though.

A complete description of the task and the initial map supplied to the participants can be found here. A quick recap is this image


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