Under the Scope: Path Based Signals + Terminus & 2-Way RoRo Stations

PBS - TeaserFor three weeks YAPP (PBS) is in trunk now and we had some games using the feature of Path (Based) Signals. I had a closer look at this feature and some serious discussions with developers and other players. In this review, I want to collect and summarize the main aspects of YAPP as far as I understood them, show you new possibilities for terminus-like stations, pitfalls and much more.

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Busses, Highways and the common Bus Driver

Today planetmaker and I did a nice test game to prepare for another competition against NoAI opponents. Of course we are interested in a real comparable competition and want, therefore, only build road vehicles. A wise preparation is necessary, otherwise we might get a nasty surprise.
We tested the behavior of road vehicles, intersections and bus stops.

Bus Stop
A Bus Terminal
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The insane LED Counter & Logic Gates [Part 1]

While browsing tt-forums I stumbled upon a LED Counter created in an OpenTTD game. This is an amazing work because you require a basic knowledge about electronics as well as about OpenTTD and signaling. This work inspired me and I planned to do some other constructions.
LED Countr by Igloo

Of course this counter is a complex electronic circuit and we should not look at it in a too close manner. It uses half-adders, memory and a lot of logic gates. But some parts, especially the logic gates, are really interesting.
My first intention was to optimize them to be useful in #openttdcoop network games.

Logic Gates – An Overview

Boolean Operators a.k.a. Signals
First of all, we’ll have a look at the requirements to understand logic gates, as I create them, in OpenTTD. A default signal can be either red or green. These two states can be defined as true and false or as 1 and 0 or zero and non-zero or easily as yes and no. In fact, Read the rest of this entry »

Mainline Mergers

Mergers or joins of different tracks have in recent public server games been a constant issue and the cause of many jams. The scope of this article is to discuss solutions for mergers.
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SML Shiftback

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).
SML Sketch
That’s the point where “shiftback” comes into play.
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