Topic: Loading times for mixed consists

[Jando]

First of all hello!

And thanks for this wonderful small gem of a game. I found it a few weeks ago and already wasted too many hours with it. Good thing! Many thanks also for the experimental version, some nice features indeed!

I guess by now you know it, I'm a newbie. Thus I have a question.

I'm not the guy that wants to run the biggest transport network in the world, instead I use a random map and like to try to make it work. And then I get a problem, with the loading times of the trains. Not that big a deal you will say, but for my small network it is. 

I frequenty have mixed trains, hauling passengers, mail and cargo. Every bit of revenue counts! Thus in my network there's a train running stations A-B-C-D-E, a small village service, a passenger and a mail car. But the train could haul some fish (Yummy!) from station B to E, the engine can drag it, no problem, the stations have enough tiles. But when I add the car for cooled goods my small train now spends a lot of time loading and unloading at every station on the route, even at the stations that don't need fresh fish.

Any way around this? Or is it just a "strange feature" that a train spends time loading and unloading altough there is nothing to load and unload?

[jamespetts]

Hello and welcome to the forum! Glad that you are enjoying Simutrans-Experimental.

There is not currently a way around this issue. What I think that we need to do is alter the game so that it only counts for loading time purposes vehicles that are loading/unloading at any given station/stop. That should solve the difficulties that you describe, I think.

[Jando]

Thanks for the answer. I will try to avoid mixed consists for the time being.

I have downloaded the new release candidate anyway and play with the idea of starting a new map. Cities got a lot bigger in that new version!

[neroden]

Hello and welcome to the forum! Glad that you are enjoying Simutrans-Experimental.

There is not currently a way around this issue. What I think that we need to do is alter the game so that it only counts for loading time purposes vehicles that are loading/unloading at any given station/stop. That should solve the difficulties that you describe, I think.

Loading time is currently supposed to be a range of times.  I've never been quite sure how this is implemented. 

But I figured that the bottom end of the range was supposed to be the loading time for loading/unloading nothing, with the top end being the loading/unloading time for fully unloading and fully loading the  vehicle.  (Note: with passengers, this should probably mean "full to overcrowded", or else overcrowded should take even longer to load and unload.)

If this is correct, then reducing the bottom end of the loading time numbers should solve the problem.

If this isn't correct, then we should figure out what the range actually means in loading time.  :-)

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Edit: Thinking about this further, we may also want, at some point, to specify separate unloading and loading times.  A rotary dump coal car loads slow and unloads fast....

[jamespetts]

Currently, the loading/unloading time works per convoy, not per vehicle, by taking the slowest vehicle in the convoy. This works when all vehicles in the convoy are being loaded/unloaded, but works less well with mixed trains when, for example, passengers (which are the fastest to load/unload) are mixed with, say, coal (which takes a long time to load/unload, especially in earlier vehicles).

One day, it would also be good to be able to detach/attach vehicles during a trip so as to enable already loaded freight wagons to join a freight or mixed train more quickly than their loading time (as the ability to reconstitute in this way is an important part of what trains are all about: or at least was until the last 20 years or so), and in a manner more realistic than in Railroad Tycoon (where empty wagons materialised and dematerialised as if by magic), but that would be quite a lot of work, I think, especially to do it properly to enable things like locomotive changes and multiple unit dividing/combining.