Two-way tram on one tile

[steffen]

Hi,
I already asked in #simutrans but nobody knew a reason so I wanted to ask, is there a particular reason why there is no tram track that allows them to travel both ways on one tile? It is a very common way for trams to travel in Germany, and it is done sometimes in Britain (e.g. in Manchester City Centre). Of course, if they share right of way with cars or busses, they will hinder each other (and are restricted to the speed limit of the road). Using the "line restrictions/capabilities" feature of SE, could this be done using just pak files?

On a related note, would you be willing to accept trams that are not (yet?) used in Britain into pak.britain?

[Ashley]

The effect of roads is achieved by having the graphics offset from one another so that they appear to be on different sides of the tile. Internally to the game road vehicles (e.g. buses) are very little different to trains, they are just restricted to travel on a different kind of way (roads rather than rail) and do not have signalling imposed on them. The effect of cars being able to pass each other on a tile comes from there being no restriction in effect for them to drive through each other in opposite directions.

Thus you could create a road which had two-way tram tracks drawn on it (this has been done actually, and I believe the earlier implementation of trams worked this way) and create trams which are effectively buses with longer constraints. These would be blocked by other road traffic in the same way as buses however, and you wouldn't be able to run them on railway tracks.

"True" double-track in the same tile is an often-requested feature, one which would require so much change to the internal workings of Simutrans to make it a very daunting feature to implement... If you have skills with C++ I have come up with a nice implementation of it which I'd be happy to describe if you fancy having a go at integrating it into Simutrans...

[paco_m]

This is with some issues already possible, as far as I know pak192.comic is using this kind of trams.
Technically they are just normal street vehicles.

Current problems:
* trolleybuses and this kind of tram are for the game one and the same,
in other words the trams can run without rails when there is a trolleybus powerline in the street

* you loose the benefit that current trams are ignoring street vehicles and traffic jams,
they would get stucked when the street is blocked (imho more realistic, but needs another balancing for trams)

* you won't be able to connect trams and railways or run trains through cities using tram tracks
(i don't like it but it is a very common playmode)

[Spike]

If you try to implement it, the major problem will be signals. For two-track tiles, there can be a whole lot more of crossing and junction variants, and a whole lot more combinations of signals on one tile.

The other problem is, that Simutrans does not distinguish "lanes", not even for roads - the vehicles just belong to a square and are painted in order to let them appear on one lane or the other. This lack of structure inside a tile will also make it difficult to implement double tracks.

As mentioned above, roads that look like double tracks are entirely possible, but all the inherent rules for roads and vehicles on roads will apply there too - eventually those are just roads by another name and image.

[VS]

It should be possible to create a new waytype that behaves like road but can "overlay" roads.

Then again, everything is possible. You want to think about probability instead