Major version release candidate on the -devel branch - testers welcome

[jamespetts]

WLindley,

the features to which you refer actually come from Standard (credit to Knightly, of Experimental high-performance routing fame). The number of passengers that each type of industry generates can now be controlled individually in the industries' .dat files, but this work has not yet been done for Pak128.Britain (either the Standard or Experimental versions). It is planned, but there are many other things on the list. Of course, if you or anyone else would like to do it, I should be most happy to integrate the results.

[Carl]

However, there is a bug. Some vehicles display a huge "brakes from max speed" value in the depot window -- that is, in the range of 50,000m - 100,000m. As you'd expect, these vehicles never exceed c.20kph -- presumably because they're always "braking" for somewhere, even if it's still 10km away.

However, this does not occur with all vehicles, and it's hard to pin down what's special about the ones it does occur with.

To complicate matters, this particular bug appears to have arisen very recently. I compiled the braking-physics branch three days ago (because I'm nosey  ) and this issue does not arise at all using that executable; even the vehicle attached above displays a sensible braking distance (1500m). Here's a link to that executable for comparison: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/61716/Simutrans-Experimental-Braking-Physics.exe

Just to add some more data to this bug report.

The bug can be observed in Pak128.Britain-Ex 0.8.3 with (at least) the following vehicles:

LNER Class V2 2-6-2
LMS Class 3F
LMS Class 3P 2-6-2T
LMS Class 8P 4-6-2
BR Class 378 EMU
BR Class 450 EMU

Also that, GWR Pannier Tank 57xx appears to have a braking distance of 0m.
Meanwhile, the BR Class 220's braking distance is just 29m when in a 4-car formation, and the Class 165 is only 3-4m in 6-car formation.

Furthermore -- as before -- none of these vehicles display buggy values on the -braking-physics branch itself; rather, these problems arise only on the -devel branch.

[jamespetts]

Thank you for the information. Bernd Gabriel has traced the problem to an uninitialised variable. Now that I have fixed the major desync bug in 10.x, I can work on this again, by first merging all the latest changes from Standard into the 111.1-merge branch, then merging that into -devel, fixing that bug, incorporating your and Richard's latest patches, then send it out for a further round of testing.

[Carl]

Excellent!

[jamespetts]

I have updated this with the latest from the 10.x branch and the latest from Standard up to the previous release (111.2.1). I should be greateful for any further testing!

[jamespetts]

I have produced a binary release candidate version of the latest -devel build for testers who are unable or do not have time to compile themselves: see here.

I have also released a test build of Pak128.Britain-Ex 0.8.4 (the next release build will be 0.9) to showcase and enable testing of the new features, particularly fare stages and braking physics: see here. I should be very grateful if further testing could be carried out using that build, as it will help to test the new features more thoroughly.

Thank you everyone for testing and for being patient whilst a number of bugs identified earlier were fixed!