Timetabled convois do not obey short max wait times

[PJMack]

Timetabled convois do not appear to be following the maximum wait times correctly when they are set shorter than time between departures. 

While trying to timetable trains, I set the departure per month to 6 (1:03:59) and set all stops to wait for schedule at the proper time shifts for about five minutes of leeway.  I set the maximum wait times for all but the first stop to 6:00 with the intent to prevent a train that is a few seconds late from blocking the platform for an hour.  The trains will only wait for maximum of 17 seconds.

To confirm this I created a dummy road route (on a different map) with two stops, also setting the departures per month to 6, and varies the maximum wait.  With any maximum wait time 48:00 and below, the vehicles refused to wait at the stops

[Matthew]

Three thoughts on this.

Firstly, I do not think maximum waiting times are supposed to have any effect when using the timetabling feature. You can either use wait-until-full (optionally including maximum waiting times) or timetabled departures. Unfortunately, there is no way to "prevent a train that is a few seconds late from blocking the platform for an hour".

Secondly, late departures are a feature in the OTRP fork. That part of OTRP is forked from Extended so could be backported (though prissi has a low opinion of the OTRP code quality so I don't know how wise or easy that would be).

Thirdly, if you are investigating this, I am aware of a couple of bugs in the Extended timetabling code:

• all railway departures leave slightly before the set time
• if the loading time is longer than the time until the next set departure, the convoy will halt for the required loading time and then depart (playing havoc with railway paths  )

Even if it works imperfectly, I am so pleased that we have a timetabling feature! It was Extended's Unique Selling Point/killer feature for a decade. Playing Standard without timetables used to infuriate me. 

[PJMack]

When the maximum wait time is longer than the timetable interval, both are applied properly. 

Looking again, I noticed that maximum wait of 17 seconds I mentioned below is the same as the loading time for the trains, and the loading time is skipped.  This makes me suspect that the trains were simply wait to load while displaying waiting for schedule.

I do not think I would try to fix this myself as would not want to accidentally interfere with the schedule feature branch.

[PJMack]

I found the code and the commit for it from November 2015.  It appears to be designed so that if the convoy arrives with maximum wait time of it's scheduled departure, it is considered on time and will wait for the remaining amount.  Otherwise, the convoy would be considered late and leave immediately to try to catch up.

[jamespetts]

This appears to be in closed bug reports, but it does not appear to be a closed bug on the face of it - can I check whether it was posted here purposely or is that an error? If it is an error, I will move it to the open bug reports section.

[PJMack]

I had moved this to the closed bug section upon my last post.  The code is behaving per the description in the 2015 commit, and is therefor not exactly a bug in the code.  The behavior I was expecting was different, but the current behavior does make more sense.  I think the only thing that may need changing would be the user instructions.