Vehicle departure order follows vehicle arrival order

[Lord Vetinari]

Sometimes, when a stop has multiple bays or platforms that are selected with a choose signal, it can happen that a vehicle stops there and then gets stuck for ages while other vehicles which were behind it arrives and depart before it.
So, for example, vehicle A, B, C, and D are all the same kind of vehicle and are queueing at one large stop; they all enter the stop thanks to the choose signal, but then vehicle A waits there untill all the others have cleared the way. If the stop is very buisy, vehicle A may sit there forever untill the player intervenes.

My suggestion is that, when no loading orders are issued, vehicles should leave the stop in the same order they entered it.
So vehicle A, being the first in the queue, is also the first one to leave.

[Combuijs]

But surely you have a capacity problem now at your station. If vehicle A never leaves then YOU should do something, not the program. For example enlarge the leaving capacity by adding exits or by splitting the station into two seperate systems.

I like the current system (whatever it is based on, vehicle id?), because I get a warning after a while that a vehicle can't leave. I know then that I should do something. In your proposal I would hardly notice the problem unless I check the output capacity manually every month or so.

[Lord Vetinari]

If vehicle A never leaves because the program chooses the departure order randomly (or at least, not in a predictable way) is not a feature.
You get a warning a month or two after the problem started, and you are informed that you have a problem thanks to the game causing an additional problem, potentially bigger than the first one (because if one vehicle never leave it's stop, you effectively have reduced vehicle capacity for a long time at a stop which already has capacity problems).

I could agree with you if the vehicle stuck warning was as quick as the no route warning, to name one, but that's not the case (and I guess it's not doable because the game needs time to check if a vehicle is actually stuck or just waiting).

[prissi]

Such occurence does only happen when there is a bad station design or too many convois for a small station. The order vehicles are accessed at a crossing are mostly random, since they also have an internal waiting time. Only driving vehicles will check exactly in the order of their ID and thus will drive usually before any waiting vehicles (as for them stopping has the highest impact).

But in order to handle many convois without eating all CPU after an unsuccessful attempts the waiting time will be increased. Finally only every two seconds a train will look for a free slot, since the driver got very sleepy.

There is no way for read my mind scheduling. The system you described would reduce the throughput of a station quite a lot (since the other trains block this particular train since they were faster with turning around) and would require very more bookkeeping.

[inkelyad]

You are right, look at Experimental code. I need this feature for my convoy spacing patch. It was hard to do is 'not too wrong'.