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

Started by jamespetts, January 26, 2014, 01:35:08 AM

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DrSuperGood

A train tried to cross tracks and with incompatible signalling resulted in it blocking the line. The solution is about 15-30 seconds to apply with company access.

prissi

The limit of objects on a tile is 250 (actually 255, but a little buffer for smoke etc is added). If the ships have trailer, then 125 ships on one tile.

DrSuperGood


jamespetts

Server seems to have crashed with a corrupt save. Not sure why that happened, but am restoring the backup and restarting now. Apologies for the difficulties.
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Sarlock

It may have been from me... I was getting a lot of checklist desynchs earlier while playing and I removed a rail signal and thought I had another desynch.  I tried to reconnect once but it failed and then I hadn't tried to connect again after that.

Thanks for restoring the server.
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jamespetts

Hmm, curious - I am not sure why removing a railway signal would cause this. Very odd.
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DrSuperGood

Progress on the server has come to a crawl because it is impossible to remain connected more than a minute or two. I can only imagine the problem is related to the rise in power on the map.

On a lesser note Sarlock has successfully managed to kill off my long distance food line due to his trains. There is no way my 20 km/h ships can compete with his 80 km/h trains so all food is being routed though him.

Sarlock

Indeed... it was rather unexpected, as I did not realize that food prefers a fast route.  Bulk goods generated will happily take the next ship across the map, if it is first to arrive at the station, but food will wait for the trains and not use the ships.  This is why I have converted my freight rail line to food only instead of a mix of goods, as my food was backing up across the map, wanting to take the rail line only (it would rather build up 100,000 food at a station than take the ship going to the same destination!).
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jamespetts

Have we conclusively narrowed it down to electricity now, or are there still replacements going on?

Incidentally, all loads of all kinds will always prefer the fastest route.
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DrSuperGood

QuoteHave we conclusively narrowed it down to electricity now, or are there still replacements going on?
I am not even sure if my last disconnect was related to it. For some reason my connection with your server was extremely bad. What usually is a 50-100 second download took nearly 10 minutes. I have not ordered any replacements for several months as I cannot get much done before disconnecting. It is not likely the replacements as far fewer are being done than earlier when the new ship came out.

QuoteIncidentally, all loads of all kinds will always prefer the fastest route.
Which is all fine until you start trying to compete 20 km/h ships against rail 80 km/h rail. There will only be 1 winner and there goes 2M of profit per month (24M per year) for me. The fact food makes so much money might be another problem.

Sarlock

We have no idea if it's the electricity or not... but it does coincide with a sudden increase in desynchs.  It's so bad now that if you can stay connected for more than 1-2 minutes, consider yourself lucky.  I haven't been on in 4-5 days.  It was May 1886 then and it is still May 1886.

re: speed.  I've watched bulk, piece, long and livestock all happily take the next ship even when there was a cross-map train route to the same destination.  The food, however, would wait until the train and never take the ship, even if it was the first to leave.
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DrSuperGood

Quotere: speed.  I've watched bulk, piece, long and livestock all happily take the next ship even when there was a cross-map train route to the same destination.  The food, however, would wait until the train and never take the ship, even if it was the first to leave.
The logical thing for that to happen is when the waiting time would exceed the in-transit time via that route since waiting longer than the slower route for a faster route is not very logical. In any case I need to shut down my ships as there is no way I can compete with a route that is 70% faster.

jamespetts

It would be helpful if somebody could confirm whether there are any pending replacements at present. If there are not, this might point to electricity being the cause.

As to the fastest route: what is happening to Dr. SuperGood is precisely what happened to the canal proprietors in the early 19th century, which is why railways dominated and canals largely went out of business except for local haulage where there was no space to fit in a railway line. In terms of Sarlock's observations, one should not confuse, on the one hand, the route taken (that is, the sequence of stops through which the goods pass, which is always based on the fastest speed) and the particular vehicle chosen to get to the next stop in the route (which in the current version depends to an extent on speed bonus, although the behaviour for this will change in the next major release to be more reliable and accurate).

Edit: I have just managed to stay connected, albeit passively, for 5-10 minutes.
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DrSuperGood

QuoteAs to the fastest route: what is happening to Dr. SuperGood is precisely what happened to the canal proprietors in the early 19th century, which is why railways dominated and canals largely went out of business except for local haulage where there was no space to fit in a railway line.
No as it did not involve a >300 km long under sea tunnel spanning multiple islands. Either the tunnels need to not be allowed such nonsense construction patterns (at least until a later date) or there needs to be some kind of better cost model.

Currently you are paid purely based on transport metrics such as average speed, transport type, distance etc. In real life the transport companies set the cost and they do so based on the infrastructure and running costs. Since Sarlock is running in tunnels all the distance this would translate into a much higher cost since the transport company would be expecting more to pay for the tunnels. This would result in two ways of shipping, slower cheap boat or faster expensive train. The speed against cost benefit would be weighed up and the appropriate chosen based on the value of the goods being shipped.

This is especially the case in the present where everything can be air freighted. Goods such as some food products, electronics etc are air freighted where as other goods like children toys or coal are shipped. Using your current model it would always send by air purely because you are allowed to ship at a loss, be it from actual running costs or the infrastructure. In real life shipping at a loss is not really done (is not viable) so instead goods are given certain costs of shipment which factor in the actual cost of shipping rather than simple transport metrics.

QuoteIt would be helpful if somebody could confirm whether there are any pending replacements at present. If there are not, this might point to electricity being the cause.
If you run the server game a few months ahead it should almost certainly have no more convoys pending upgrade. You can also check if each slot is getting annoying error messages relating to convoy upgrades since these convoys will remain in an "upgrading" state forever. The error is along the lines "cannot insert depot into schedule, please post in forums" and I am 100% sure my company has none of them at the present.

jamespetts

Ahh, the tunnel balancing needs to be fixed: tunnels such as that should, in the shorter term, be made uneconomic (but this requires full balancing on which see above), and, in the longer term, impossible (your suggestion a few months ago about ventilation is not a bad one, but would be a very large coding effort, and is a long way down a truly gargantuan queue of higher priority items, I am afraid). There is no practical way for players to set prices without the game becoming impossible to balance and/or unremittingly tedious to play, so the way of remedying this is by making (for example) air transport of coal totally uneconomic. (In fact, there are no aircraft in Pak128.Britain with bulk holds in any event).
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DrSuperGood

Sarlock, maybe we should delete all transformers and see if it improves synchronization stability? If there is a good correlation of improvement then it would prove the problem is with power.

Sarlock

It's worth a try, to see what happens.

For other than milk, the undersea railroad is not economical hauling freight - it costs more to maintain than it makes in revenue (even with heavy usage rates).  For milk, however, as has been highlighted already, the revenue is much too high.  When I was hauling mixed freight on the line, it was running at a small loss per month.  It's the undersea passenger service that makes the big profits in the game.

Not that profits matter with interest income for all established players outstripping revenue by a significant margin (another thing which will be fixed in the next game).
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jamespetts

I should be very grateful if we could run a test removing all of the substations to see whether that affects desynchronisations: it will make a large difference to the amount of testing that I will have to do, and there is already a backlog of work for me to do as a result of spending so much of my time on matters connected with trying to move house.
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DrSuperGood

Removing them all may be difficult as there are so many power stations and so many lines. However I will try removing most of mine later. If the player who operates Orange reads this, I know you own some so please remove them as well.

jamespetts

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DrSuperGood

Something is seriously wrong with your server upload at the moment.

I am only able to download from it at <100 kb/sec (usually around 50-60 kb/sec). A test of my connection downloading from youtube reports a speed of 900 kb/sec so it clearly is not my ISP or local internet connection. I also ran a trace route to your server and the ping was under 60ms which is acceptable (no major congestion).

This means it takes about 15 minutes to download the map. This clearly was not a problem before (used to download in 1 minute odd, appropriate for my network speed)  so it has started only really recently.

jamespetts

Hmm - seems to be working fine for me: very quick transfer of less than 1 minute - the loading and calculating paths took longer. Has anyone else noticed this?
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Sarlock

I just connected to the game and it took less than 1 minute to download the file, so it may be local to you.

I disconnected within seconds of joining, so removing these transformers might take a very long time.  I wonder if it would be far faster for you to do it with a local copy, James, and then upload that save game for us to carry on with for testing purposes (and then we don't need to go and reconnect them all again).
Current projects: Pak128 Trees, blender graphics

DrSuperGood

The download is fixed now, loaded in 2 minutes (someone else was loading network heavily at time). When it gave problems it was 4:00 AM GMT so maybe it is time dependant. As mentioned it was not my ISP as I could download from youtube and all other kinds of sites very fast (well at what I should be downloading at). I tried twice so it was not a "once off" fault.

Removing some more transformers, already removed a lot of mine. Remained connected for ~3-4 minutes.

jamespetts

Very odd about the download speed: not sure what is causing that.
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Sarlock

I think I've been able to remove most of my transformers... hard to find them all as there is no way to reference the industry list to verify.  There are several that I noticed that belong to you, SuperGood, on both the west and east island.  Plus at least one that belongs to A-Train.
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jamespetts

This is very helpful, thank you. Has there been any noticeable reduction in the number of desyncs with the fewer number of substations?
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Sarlock

Not yet... still checklist desynched several times.  We'll see what happens after more are removed.
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Sarlock

I can't find any more transformers that belong to me... still a few for SuperGood.  Running much better, been connected for 2 game hours without a checklist desynch.

EDIT: Connected for 3 game months in a row.  Almost certainly related to transformers and city electrical supply.
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jamespetts

That is very helpful, thank you. I shall have to look into this when I have time. I suspect that this might take a long time to track down, I am afraid. In the meantime, I can only advise players to avoid using the power system until the bug is fixed; my apologies. At least it will be possible to continue the game in these circumstances.
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DrSuperGood

I will log in later to try and find more transformers I own and remove them.

I reviewed the power system a while ago to see if there were any blaring mistakes and could not notice any (the again I did not write the code) so fixing will probably not be easy.

jamespetts

Quote from: DrSuperGood on August 13, 2014, 11:33:02 PM
I will log in later to try and find more transformers I own and remove them.

I reviewed the power system a while ago to see if there were any blaring mistakes and could not notice any (the again I did not write the code) so fixing will probably not be easy.

Yes, I rather fear that you are right. One thing to test is whether this is reproducible on the way-improvements branch, as there have been a number of changes there (and I must confess, so many that I do not remember anything like all of them); it is probably not worth spending months of intensive work trying to fix it on the 11.x branch if it is already fixed in way-improvements.
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Sarlock

SuperGood, A-Train listed a bunch that he found in chat, should make it easier to find them.

James: Could this be related to another variable issue like the other problem that was causing checklist desynchs?  Knowing that it is likely related to power systems, probably something unique to Experimental, may help a lot in narrowing it down.
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DrSuperGood

Power is very unstable, with demands of stupidly large amounts appearing for the odd tick here and there (this map will never, ever use that much power, it was in the order of millions). It is possible that these silly values may be the cause.

EDIT

Once again I am downloading at a mind boggling fast speed of 50-60 kb/sec. Loading the map takes 15 minutes. This is something wrong with your server/connection with your sever since I can download at 900 kb/sec from Youtube easily.

I am very sorry poor person that must wait 15 minutes while I join. I did not expect it to take so long.

Sarlock

Indeed, I've been online waiting for you to connect this past 15 minutes.  I've had to reconnect several times in the past hour and every download has been very quick, in the 1-3MB/sec range.  I haven't had any issues today.

I've also seen the odd tick of insane power consumption.  It also seems to correspond to some industries increasing production exponentially for a few moments.

EDIT: And then I got booted the moment you finished connecting.  Upon reconnecting, my download speed is great.  30 seconds tops.
Current projects: Pak128 Trees, blender graphics