#openttdcoop

Some days ago I stumbled upon openttd wikis page about Railyway Designs and I saw the Cyclotron created by Pitt2. Those high speed injectors are not too new and we experimented with them a lot. Though we don’t use them in most cases, because they are difficult to build, depending on the properties of trains and such. Its just too much work for too less effect and pre-accelerated joiners are the better choice. Though I had a look at the construction and checked how it worked. A little footnote about a fixed bug made me curious, but then I understood that it fixes the issue which occurs if a train wants to join another track but in the same moment the signal turns red and the train stops blocking a complete line. Therefor we have the overtaking lanes in most SML constructions. We all like cool words for cool constructions, here they are. Fail-safe Joiners:

How it works

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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).

That’s the point where “shiftback” comes into play.
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The last Public-Server Game was quite a nice one. The game was played for more than 80 hours in six days (14th – 20th December). Due to the fact our players live throughout the world our games can run almost 24/7.



We built 600 trains with a train-length of 8 tiles. They bring a network quite into struggle. But our massive tracks with 4 lanes or more were able to handle the traffic. Remember, those trains use as much tiles as 1200 4 tile trains. Read the rest of this entry »

Some weeks ago I had a little talk on IRC about shift-mainline games and numbers of trains. Personally I really like the SML concept, and I wanted to know if it is possible to squeeze more than 2000 trains into a single game and still get a fluent network. Read the rest of this entry »