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Bug Report - Problem with tram orders.

Started by tannerge, February 19, 2018, 01:55:28 AM

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tannerge

Hi everyone. first post here. Normally don't post but this bug has been showing up for the past few weeks and has gotten so annoying I am forced to come out of the darkness and ask for your help. I'm not 100% sure it is a bug but perhaps some new feature or setting i dont know about. but im pretty sure its a bug.

link to save game https://www.dropbox.com/s/yj1abogcqlfbxzz/osloo.sve?dl=0

anyways. if you open my .sve file you will find a large city with a tram network. all of the trams are stuck. you will see Wedney cemetary stop with a line of trams waiting to enter. whats holding them up is a tram that wants to go back to Wedney Cemetary Stop even though it was just there.  what i think is happening is the trams are skipping orders when they wait behind another tram in the que to enter the station.

To recreate the bug all you have to do is find the tram that's holding the line up and set its orders to the next station it SHOULD be going to. (Wedney hall stop, 503, 1164). it will move and everything will go back to normal...temporarily. just wait and one of the trams will randomly skip an order or jump to a different order and the whole line will be held up again.


While i have solved the issue at the moment that i dont attribute to the bug. it might be worth it to leave the game on fast forward and see if any trains or trams get stuck and see what the issue is.

Here is where the bug is easy to recreate. 

i have made a short tram track at kirkstead it should be easy to re create the bug here. what really helps is if you make 10 trams in the shed (make sure they all have the same next stop) and release them all at once. there should be immediate problems. As you will see, each tram is supposed to wait for 6 or so minutes at the kirkstead railway station. however when a tram has to wait behind another tram it suddenly skips orders and will follow the tram in front out of the station instead of waiting 6 minutes itself.

One more thing. this problem might also carry over to trains themselves. Ive had a couple issues so far. not sure yet but i think its possible. 

Please Help, Thanks.

jamespetts

Thank you for the report. I have looked at your saved game, but I cannot see anything that appears to be incorrect behaviour: your trams appear to be stuck because of a head-on conflict next to the cathedral, which is a network planing issue rather than a bug.

Looking at Kirkstead, the problem appears to be the way in which you have your network set up: the stops on each side of the circuit are joined together so that they are regarded as the same stop. The tram will therefore try to get to whichever part of that stop is the closest, which often results in them reversing and then colliding head-on causing a deadlock.

To solve this, you can either split the stops, or put in one way boards between each stop.
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tannerge

#2
Thanks for looking into it! I think you are correct that the trams are looking for any available stop - not the specific tile of the stop they were assigned to. i think this is different than older versions? i used to make big tram networks in the same fashion and i never had problems until the version i downloaded a few weeks ago.

Is there any setting that forces the tram to go to the tile it was assigned too instead of finding any tile within the stop?

Thanks again for your time.

jamespetts

There is no setting for this - however, I do suggest that you split your stops. There is no advantage to having these large merged stops now that passengers can easily walk between stops; indeed, having a larger stop will increase the transfer time for all passengers, so it is generally better to have a larger number of smaller stops.
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tannerge

I tried splitting up my stops but i needed one way signs between each stop in order to get it to work - which is a lot of effort.

The problem is not all the stops can be split. for example my tram line needs to connect to a rail station for transfers but its not like the connection to the rail station can be split up. can passengers walk from one station/stop to another in order to transfer?

ACarlotti

Yes, walking transfers are available.

James, is there any way to split a stop involving just two adjacent tiles? Or do you have to start with non-adjacent tiles and expand inwards? The behaviour is unclear to me.

jamespetts

Tannerge - passengers can indeed walk from one station/stop to another in order to transfer. May I ask why you found that you needed one way signs between all stops to get this to work when you were able to split some of the stops? You would in principle only need one way signs either side of any joined stops.

ACarlotti - the stop joining code is unchanged from Standard; the behaviour is that it is not possible to split a stop on adjacent tiles, but a split stop can be created on adjacent tiles by building inwards as you describe.

There is currently work in progress on a number of additional features (in a separate branch, as these are quite major changes). One of them is an "ignore choose signals" option for each stop in the schedule. I wonder whether there would be any sense in expanding the function of this option so that it did not cause the convoys just to ignore choose signals, but also not to look for an alternative platform in the same stop? It would then be possible to control the behaviour that Tannerge is finding difficult here.
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tannerge

#7
Im not sure why i needed one way signs. I swear the trams are randomly skipping orders haha its really weird. It used to be so easy to use trams! Am i correct that older versions required trams to arrive at the tiles they were assigned to. IMO This is the proper way it should work. if the player wants the trams to use any available tile in the station then they should use a choose signal.

Im also positive that trams are going backwards in orders. to recreate this make a simple tram line. each stop is individual and separate from the stop going the opposite direction. build a depot at the end of the line and make the orders so the first and closest stop on the line is the stop at the end. build 20 trams. release them all at once and at least one of them will randomly reverse and go to a different order. however it will not go to the next order. it will go to the previous order - even when reverse route is not turned on. to my understanding the orders are read and executed top to bottom of list.

Please don't let trams look for alternative tiles in the station! its makes it so hard to build a simple network. it works fine if its a linear network with no additional lines crossing over but when you factor this in it becomes very complicated.

additionally - train stations need to be able to have more than 1 tram stop to be able to support multiple tram lines transferring there. the current tram system only works well if each stop is separate from the others but if you have a large station sometimes you cant build a separate station because the road you want to build on is adjacent to a station tile. to summarize - All vehicles should go to only the tile they are assigned to unless given a choose signal. it just makes everything so much simpler.

Thanks for your help. 

jamespetts

Quote from: tannerge on February 21, 2018, 12:52:15 AM
Im not sure why i needed one way signs. I swear the trams are randomly skipping orders haha its really weird. It used to be so easy to use trams!

You need the one way signs because the trams will try to find the shortest route to any tile of your destination stop, which might be a stop in the opposite direction on your loop. The one way signs mean that it is always shorter to go to the correct tiles of the stops in the correct order.
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ACarlotti

So if I understand you correctly, then the current behaviour might result in train being inappropriately sent off a through line into a bay platform if the mainline is congested. Is that correct? If so, when did this behaviour get introduced, and why? I don't remember it being a feature when I played Simutrans in the past, and I can't see why it would be a desirable feature, given that choose signals exist.

jamespetts

This was introduced into Extended (then "Experimental") back in 2011 by a developer (Yobobandana) who has long since left the Simutrans community. Its purpose is to mean that the "mirror schedule" feature can be used for double track railways, the trains automatically finding the correct platform on the same track without the player having to specify manually that the train should stop on the down platform on the way out and the up platform on the way back. This should not (and, to my knowledge, does not) result in trains incorrectly using bay platforms, as the route to a bay platform is almost always longer than the route to a normal platform (although I have not seen any cases where London Underground style centre bay platforms are used in this configuration).

This functionality is different to that of choose signals; however, I should be grateful on people's views as to whether this functionality should also be disabled when the "ignore choose signal" option is selected in the forthcoming feature-set (as currently under development on the vehicle-management branch).
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tannerge

James - you said the ability for vehicles to seek any available station tile was implemented in 2011 but there must have been a more recent modification to the path-finding system. You saw the original method i had been using for tram networks. stations were shared for both directions on the loop - this had worked just fine until i updated to the latest version. sorry i cant be more specific about what version. what im getting at is that there was a recent change to the game that effected how vehicles find station tiles

jamespetts

I am afraid that I am not aware of any significant recent changes in this respect, and without more information, it will be very difficult for me to find any specific change.
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