Topic: bridgewater-brunel.me.uk - Simutrans-Experimental - Pak128.Britain-Ex 0.9.1

[Sarlock]

Indeed, it is certainly underserved right now.  I've elected to just terminate my line in the middle (more or less) and let other players take advantage of the north-south connections.

That said, it requires more starting capital than 250,000 to build.

[VOLVO]

Been busy for the last week, went back to the game, my network is certainly lagging behind... (in terms of technology and service quality)

It's better start off late and make time slower than to have 150 years of absolutely nothing interesting and suddenly too many things to do

[jamespetts]

It's better start off late and make time slower than to have 150 years of absolutely nothing interesting and suddenly too many things to do

Hopefully, once canals are properly balanced, there will be plenty to do in the first 150 years: canals are an interesting infrastructure all by themselves.

[VOLVO]

Hopefully, once canals are properly balanced, there will be plenty to do in the first 150 years: canals are an interesting infrastructure all by themselves.

I think it's kind of annoying because you can never abandon infrastructures.
People upgrade rivers and then deleting the whole canal is destroying the environment.

Is it possible to let players abandoned canals and let it degrade to rivers?
Of course there must be an incentive for players to maintain a canal.
What I had in mind is faster speed for the canals than unmaintained rivers.

I also found myself in desperate need of an upgrade whole railway system button.. (I assume I'm not the first one to suggest that?)

[Sarlock]

I've found the canals have continued to be a very effective way of gathering local passengers and mail to bring to the main train stations.  The iron coastal paddle ship can travel at 22km/h, holds 320 passengers, 1000 mail and doesn't get bogged down in road traffic.  It does take a bit longer to load, but the passengers in this era don't seem to mind.  You'd need dozens of road convoys (with a significantly higher operating cost) to match what one ship can do.

[ӔO]

I don't think I have anything to do until 1864, or when underground signals are available.

[Sarlock]

I am getting an instant client crash after connecting to the server (once the clock starts moving)... it seems like the server is crashing as well as it takes a couple of minutes to reset itself for connection.  Anyone else experiencing this?

[ӔO]

maybe a corrupted save game?

[jamespetts]

Ahh, my apologies about this: I am afraid that I will not be able to look into this to-morrow, as I am currently away from a computer on which I can run a debugger.

[jamespetts]

I have now tracked down the bug responsible for the crash and fixed it on the 11.x branch: when there was a factory with no suppliers that tried to calculate its maximum in transit percentage, this would cause a crash when the programme tried to calculate the figure based on data from the suppliers.

I am afraid that I do not have time to deploy the fix to-night, as I have been and continue to be very busy with work this week, but I hope to be able to deploy this within the week. Apologies again for the difficulties, and thank you all for your patience.

[Sarlock]

No worries... been a good time to catch up on other jobs instead of spending an hour or two a day tweaking schedules

[jamespetts]

Server now restarted with 11.34, which has fixed the crash that had caused it to go down of late. Thank you all for your patience.

[speedbus]

I've been off for two weeks and could not connect for a further week because of the known issues. After having installed 11.34 this morning, I have found that someone has taken over the Island Hopper account. Is there an option to get it back?

[jamespetts]

I have reset the company's password and PMed you the new password.

[Sarlock]

We put your company in to care and protection and set a password to keep anyone else from taking it over.  Everything should be in order for you to return to it

[DrSuperGood]

In fact it should be in better shape than when you left. I spent hours upgrading some of your lines to cheaper tracks (they are cheaper, faster and support heavier loads!). Why? Well I wanted to see the impact it made upgrading passenger trains and clearly it has not done anything too bad last I checked (they were still making tons of money, possibly even more but it is hard to tell). My company mostly specializes in freight and I wanted to experience working passenger lines for future knowledge.

One thing I noticed was your passenger networks are often fairly irregular, you may be able to increase passenger flow with better timetabling or more trains (in some cases you only have 1 convoy on a line.

On another note there are 3 unclaimed companies online, some with pretty serious money/infrastructure. If anyone wants to get a feel of experimental drop by and you may be able to claim one.

[AK]

Hi,
Client and server crash after few minutes of playing.

Runtime Error!

Program : C:\ ....

R6025
- pure virtual function call

Im using x64 binary.
Then server is loading previous game and restart.

[DrSuperGood]

Hi,
Client and server crash after few minutes of playing.

We are aware of this and I have spent a good part of today trying to gather information around it.

It appears that the way eye candy list, used for clouds generated from factories and trains such as starting diesels and steam locomotives is getting filled with invalid object pointers. When these are de-referenced they point to a nonsense function pointer structure which when dereferenced throws a read exception,

[jamespetts]

Server now updated to 11.35, which has fixed the crash: apologies for the disruption, and thanks to Dr. Supergood for finding the fix. Happy playing!

[DrSuperGood]

I already played with your test using the old version (or however it got past May/April).

Standard Simutrans does not have the awesome flow controlled factory production system so I was getting a tad bored...

[Junna]

Seems to crash now. Crashes client as well and reverts?

[jamespetts]

Hmm - is this crash occurring reliably? If so, I shall have to investigate. Apologies for the trouble.

[DrSuperGood]

I let the server run through to the next month and no crash has occurred. However Sarlock's ships are now stuck in two places...

[Sarlock]

Fixed again... this stacking limit per tile is a major hassle on a map of this size.

EDIT

Server crashed around 5:00:00 or so in Nov 1871, reverted back to the beginning of Nov 1871 again.  I lost about an hour of work releasing stuck ships and other projects... not sure what the issue is.  So the ships are stuck again... no point in releasing again until we resolve the crash.

On another note, I can see that we are rapidly going to run in to an issue of being unable to handle increasing industrial demand.  Freight trains are still very slow and have low capacity and won't change until well in to the 1900's, so we're stuck using ships and our lines will require many thousands of ships to handle the cargo... which runs us in to "stuck" issues with so many ships sharing the same common routes.

[DrSuperGood]

The server appears stable (can advance many months without crash), the crash must have something to do with what you are doing to fix the blockages.

[jamespetts]

Interesting. Thank you for that.

[Sarlock]

Seems fine again, I was able to "unstuck" my ships and set up a preliminary cross-map freight train route.  With a max speed of 56 km/h and 8 freight per train car, however, freight trains seem woefully inadequate on a map like this (unless I ran 10 sets of parallel track).

[Junna]

Seems fine again, I was able to "unstuck" my ships and set up a preliminary cross-map freight train route.  With a max speed of 56 km/h and 8 freight per train car, however, freight trains seem woefully inadequate on a map like this (unless I ran 10 sets of parallel track).

Speed is not much of a problem (though the pak really needs to incorporate minimum speed signs for rail at 60 and 100 so you can force goods trains onto passing loops easily, without needing to set five hundred way points - such a pain to manage on existing routes). The capacity gets better by the 1880's. I don't think it could replace shipping entirely, though. You can easily press through some 90 trains per month with 56km/h.

[DrSuperGood]

Sarlock you have done it again by Queensingchester @206,1120. It has blocked my supply ships from reaching one of the major manufacturing docks as well.

I also now have 2 lines shipping >1k cargo a month without paying my anything at all (0 revenue).

[Sarlock]

Yeah, there's just too many ships all wanting to take the same routes.  It's not just my ships I have to contend with, which makes it extremely challenging.  All of the ships want to take those canals instead of the open ocean.

[AP]

the pak really needs to incorporate minimum speed signs for rail at 60 and 100 so you can force goods trains onto passing loops easily, without needing to set five hundred way points - such a pain to manage on existing routes).

This is very true, but we've been suggesting them for a very long time for pak.britain (& pak.britain.ex) without them appearing, so it may just be wishful thinking.

[DrSuperGood]

Yeah, there's just too many ships all wanting to take the same routes.  It's not just my ships I have to contend with, which makes it extremely challenging.  All of the ships want to take those canals instead of the open ocean.

This can be resolved by large ships later (that cannot take Ship Cannal/Medium River ways and only oceans). Until then it may be a good idea to place a sign where a blockage occurs so that players can be aware care is required when using that area (and so they can avoid causing one themselves).

[Sarlock]

I've rerouted using waypoints as best I could to avoid the canals but I am pretty certain that we're going to see a backlog in the canal by Bidstable in short order (it may already be backed up - I haven't logged in today to check).  Widening that canal is a possibility but there are several players who would need to participate as each person has docks, rail bridges, road bridges, etc, along that route.

Part of the issue is that the long loading time for ships (2+ hours) causes a significant backlog to occur once we reach a certain level of activity in an area.  Unlike with road and rail traffic, which can use platform choose signals to distribute convoys, ships all use the exact same tile to load/unload.

The only way I can see to get around that (somewhat) is to set up multiple parallel lines using different stopping points at the docks.  Making those cross-map shipping lines takes quite a while, however, as there are dozens of waypoints in each direction.  I may not have a choice, as industrial demand is growing at a significant rate (and will grow even more shortly, as power plants come online).

What is the tile limit for ships?  Is there a different limit for loading/unloading operations and transiting through?  I assume that the total holds plays a factor in this total.  Having 1 vehicle ship convoys would certainly make it much easier.  There are no other viable ship alternatives to bulk transport via 8 hold sail ships at the moment.

[DrSuperGood]

There is a theoretical limit to number of ships on a single line based on the loading time and number of ships allowed per tile.

Lets say each ship takes 3 hours to load (worst case is required) and that 50 ships can exist in a tile (some random number that seems plausible). If the months are 6 hours 25 minutes long, we can convert this into hours fraction for ease of calculation.

6:25 -> 6.4166666666666666666666666666667
6.4166666666666666666666666666667 / 3 -> 2.1388888888888888888888888888889

This means 2.1388888888888888888888888888889 ships can load and leave per month in series. The maximum you can have is 50 loading in parallel so
2.1388888888888888888888888888889 * 50 -> 106.94444444444444444444444444444

So this means about 106 ships per month on a single line assuming 50 ships per tile.

In reality this would require perfect conditions and dead long the tile. I would only use 0.8 times that so I would say at most 80 convoys per month per line.

There is also the problem with "catch-up head" that convoys loading in parallel get like ships when operating at frequencies above their loading rate. This is because ships take time slots they cannot leave at due to loading delay (time at port = max(loading time, schedule wait)) so you get {loading time / line period} convoys leaving simultaneously in a big wave. This is obviously limited to 50 (or however many) but this would block the tile and potentially block another 50 ships preventing departure in the mean time (the ships that are properly spaced arrive at the same frequency). The only way to get rid of catch-up head is to have idle convoys of head size sitting in the tile (which can leave while the head convoys finishing loading procedure so they can all leave on time). This would bring the limit down to about 50 convoys per month per tile.

It would be nice if we could get 2 improvements to the time-table system.
1. Conservative slot allocation. This could be a flag that causes the line to rather drop a time slot entirely than allocate it to a convoy that cannot leave on time due to loading. Basically this would skip enough time slots so that the arriving convoy gets the earliest time slot it can leave on time with after loading delay, with all others before then being lost (skipped). This is a major change over the existing one as it prioritizes correct spacing of at least period time between convoys rather than the existing system which prioritizes correct departure quantity per month.
2. Line statistics for number of time slots missed per month (that convoys were not able to take due to insufficient convoys being available at stops or feature 1 dropped them) and total time spent waiting for departure slots. These stats would greatly improve how easy it is to optimize a scheduled line with missed slots >0 meaning lower frequency or add more convoys and a high amount of waiting time meaning too many convoys or too low frequency.

[Junna]

Big jam on AEO's network. Some on Arlington and South Western I think, as well, that would need to be looked at.