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

Read the rest of this entry »

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.
Read the rest of this entry »

Optimization of Logic – Logic Gates [Part II]

Almost half a year ago I blogged about Logic Gates and already the headline promised that this story is not over yet. Now, I was finally able to concentrate my thoughts about logic gates again and was able to optimize the gates again. As I pointed out earlier the reaction time is too long and gates are reacting too sluggish. The slow processing made the gates only interesting in places which don’t need to be fast. For example the timing of injection. But when it comes to mainlines, sidelines, station entries and many other fancy coop-ish constructions they were more an impediment.
Download Logic Train NewGRF

I hope, this’ll change now, because these new constructions require only one train without any wagons and are extremely small in comparison with the old gates and the once I see nowadays in our games.
Read the rest of this entry »

The magic of SRNW (Self-Regulating Networks)

As you might have seen a guide about self-regulating SBahn was recently added to our Wiki. As #openttdcoop thinks large, we took it a step further and created a complete Self-Regulating Network (SRNW) in our current PublicServerGame (#121). You should definitely check the guide first, to get a better idea of what this article is about.
Though the key points stay the same and I’ll explain them to give you an overview how the network works.
Self-Regulating Network Teaser

Read the rest of this entry »

Complex Orders and Improved S-Bahn Concept

Another great and useful feature which one or two didn’t recognize yet are Conditional Order Jumps. They are not available in OpenTTD 0.6.3 but if you are playing with recent nightly builds you should definitely use their advantages. As the name says you can use these special entries in the list to jump to a certain order.
Lets get an overview about the usage first and therefor we start with the types of conditions.
Conditional Order Jumps
Read the rest of this entry »