#openttdcoop

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.

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With revision r10437 peter1138 added a new feature to the trunk of OpenTTD: Automatic signal completion. What does that mean in detail? I did a few tests and created a wiki page to show you how the newest feature of OpenTTD works and how you can use it. One thing is for sure, it makes the life of OpenTTD-Players (and Co-Ops) a lot of easier. I needed one second to signal this weird construction in the screenshot. Imagine massive Mainlines you can signal them in seconds now. Just wonderful.

Signalling & Automatic Signalling
Enjoy this great new feature of OpenTTD

We had a lot of trouble with the latest revisions of OpenTTD and our games suffered from de-syncs. In the last three days we did a lot of debugging and gave information to the developers, they finally found the problems which tend to those symptoms. Today they will be gone. It was a hard journey to locate the problem, sometimes it occurred and sometimes it didn’t, depending on OS, CPU architecture and compiler version. In first place it was a compiler issue, but we also thought some memory bits of the Servers RAM might be broken, also 32bit vs. 64bit was a question. I don’t want to do it so detailed. But here is the final rev.
-Fix [YAPF, r10301]: INVALID_TRACKDIR causing buffer overrun leading to desync in MP game (many thanks Rubidium)

A lot of thanks to KUDr and Rubidium for locating and fixing this issue. Lets continue our games now 🙂

There is another big game on Alanin’s server – large scale europe map.

It’s a new game type we want to try with our community. Goals are – realistic functionality and eyecandy looks. Where possible – based on historical/geographical data and very minor landscaping (aside of breaking long bridges). The end result should not look exactly as current europe railway map, but it should feel close to that, being combined cargo and pax game.
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As you may have recognised, we have some problems with the latest Nightlies of OpenTTD (beginning with r10300 and higher).
The problem is a desync of the game due to the YAPF of trains. The devs are already looking at this problem and started their work:

-Codechange [YAPF]: added DEBUG_YAPF_CACHE macro that (when set to 1) allows to track YAPF “cache errors”. They are probably responsible for current MP desyncs. (thanks Rubidium for this great idea!).
I will deal with those errors/desyncs tomorrow.

I hope they will be able to fix the problem tomorrow.
Unfortunately we can’t revert to an older revision because the savegame version changed and we can’t load them with older revs.

Update:
Good News! The Problems with YAPF will be fixed with the next nightly release.

Commit by KUDr :: r10394 /trunk/src/yapf/yapf_costrail.hpp:
-Fix [YAPF]: MP desync caused by incorrect last-red-signal penalties applied when cached segment was reused. Players that connected more recently (didn’t have these segments cached yet) calculated those penalties correctly. This caused different YAPF results.