Presignal Bypass Station
In a local game and now on the public server I have tested a new stationlayout named as “Presignal Bypass Station“. Read the article on the wiki how to build it.
Whats a terraformer?
We just had an interesting game on the Public Server (Game 59 when it closes down and is archived), where we tried to play a whole map without any terraforming, and IMO it was a blast. It was hard, tricky and challenging, but it was a blast. The most common problems was ‘relearning’ how to build stations and hubs without using any kind of terraforming to make room for it. Luckily we were realistic about our first try and got it on a very flat map so it wasn’t that big issue as it could have been. But nevertheless it forced us to think an extra time about where to place it and how to use the enviroment around the area to be used for making it even easier because you wanted to make the network just slightly more efficient.
The only turnoff for people was that they had some problems with that it wasn’t as easy as it used to be, failing to like a good challance from time to time. This aren’t a kind of game to be played several times in a row, but one here and then forces you to think outsite the box about how to build diffent things, but it have to be on a relatively flat map if possible to make it that tiny bit easier with fewer lakes than the game we had. they are a pain to bypass unless you ‘cheat’ with canals at waterline paired with liberal use of dynamite, though it could debated weather it is some kind of terraforming or not.
“Rails? who needs rails…” a new kind of game for coopers
This is a bit unusual picture for any game, especialy #openttdcoop ones, however it turned out to be quite fun. 1000 trucks and busses… no trains… small revenue of about $15,000,000… 180,000 units of cargo delvierd yearly… quite nice actualy considering tiny amount of networking required and it definately a good learning experience. I did not know that road vehicles can not overtake eachover at bridge rams and tunnel entracnes, as well as at any point when speed changes. And hence arrangement for slopes and tunnel/bridge length is quite different from regular railroad kind of networking.
New Terminus Station Concept
We all know terminus stations and we try to avoid them, because they are poorly slow. They are not able to cope with higher amounts of trains and start jamming faster than Bermuda Hubs. At our current Member Zone game (a.k.a. WD2) I built a larger Station for express traffic in an area with a lot of problems. There was no place for a proper exit and a too big station is not good for a city area. I decided to built a terminus station and developed a new concept, which is able to cope with a much higher amount of trains than a generic terminus station and a lot of smaller than a roll-on-roll-off station (RoRo). Now lets have a look at the details.
Simplified 6 to 4 merger
Some of most comonly used elements in network are mergers, pretty much any network node such as hub or station require track/lane mixing. Easiest of them all is just a simple cross of as many lanes there are to as many as needed, however since that would be a one single block – only one train can pass it at given time and that would lower thoughput to pretty much same level as a single lane no mater how many output tracks there are:
Only one train at time can pass through.
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