Fail-Safe Joiners, Priorities and the Cyclotron example

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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Stochastic Networks

You will probably have seen, or participated, in the last Public server game, which was all about logic. I’ll try to explain it in a bit.

After recent interests in self-regulating construction, there was an attempt to improve the usability of such designs. We have already seen self-regulating networks, where dummy trains transfer cargo onto ML trains, and recently self-regulating orders where vehicles could potentially go to all stations. What has not yet been done is to apply a form of regulation to point-to-point passenger games.

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Even or Odd – About Tilelengths

Tilelengths 5 (left) and 4 (right) on diagonal trackWhenever starting a new game, be it local or on #openttdcoop, one important question to be cleared before starting to build the network always is: “What tilelength (TL) are we going to use for our trains?”.
The chosen setting will mostly depend on the size of the map, as you don’t want to have a hundreds train servicing a single coal mine on a 2048*2048 map. However, there is a great difference between using even tilelengths such as 4, 10 or 20 and odd ones like 5 or 11.

The patch setting “When dragging, place signals every: X tiles” should always be set to “2” when playing on #openttdcoop, and most players will also use this setting if playing alone. If dragging signals, you will always have one piece of track with a signal on it followed by one without one and so on.

Now, if trains are jamming up somewhere in the network, for example behind a full station, those trains should block as little space as possible, so that they won’t for example block the mainline.

As you can see in the first screenshot, with signals every 2 tiles, the trains with tilelength 5 (left) fit almost perfectly in between the signals. However, the TL4-trains (right) always have a gap of more than one tile between them and need as much space as the TL5-trains. To fix that, you would have to place additional signals in the gaps, which might look ugly (especiall for straight track, see below) and is a lot of work, as you would have to do it manually.

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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 »