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bridgewater-brunel.me.uk - Simutrans-Experimental - Pak128.Britain-Ex 0.9.1

Started by jamespetts, January 26, 2014, 01:35:08 AM

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Sarlock

Yes, it has been much better since those improvements.  I can stay connected for much longer.  As we've reached 7000 convoys, I have started to notice the system dragging down a bit more, but it's still much better than before at 4000 convoys.  In offline play I can reach 9-10x fast forward.

The only regular disconnects we get now are just after the start of every month, which is the checklist mismatch that we've been getting for quite some time now (you mentioned that this may have been found and repaired, so maybe this will correct itself after the fix is implemented).  It's not much of a problem, however, as it's just once a month, which gives us the better part of a real hour to stay connected.
Current projects: Pak128 Trees, blender graphics

jamespetts

Thank you for the feedback - that is helpful. Glad that things are now working better.
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AP

Am back in the game now, password protected again. Company seems profitable, so all good.

If anyone has any housekeeping items they need adjusting on my system, just let me know. :-)

1830 still seems ages away, but the scale of the game is pretty monumental now, trying to figure out all the industry flows will take some time!!

ӔO

AP, can you please open up the causeway near brickingfield?

My ships are being forced to take the long way around, when it wasn't like that before.
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AP

Someone must have made a hole in the causeway when my account was unpassworded, so i just closed it again. It was definitely a causeway for some time. Hadn't realised it was being used.

Diagonal bridges are vastly expensive to maintain, so have adjusted the terrain somewhat to accommodate the shipping route, hope that helps.

ӔO

yeah, I put that hole in there, because it completely forced my ships to take the long way around when it was not like that previously.
It's like an extra 3hr detour to go around it.

And the diagonal elevated costs the same as bridges. The displayed cost is per tile vs. per km.
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Sarlock

Island Hopper: I'm not sure if you read these forums, but I was looking at your 650 ship Bone China line and it could be much more profitable and efficient for you if you changed it slightly: it's a big circuit around the map and often your goods (pax, mail, freight) are jumping on and taking the round-trip journey around the entire map to double back to its desired destination.

The trouble with circular routes in Simutrans is that you will get pax, etc, load at a station that is after the station they want to go and will travel on the ship/train/etc until it finally comes back to their desired location, making it very inefficient (high running costs for a low paying revenue distance).

Consider this route:

A ---> B
^         |
|         v
D <--- C

Suppose your ship is at station A and loads up.  Passengers for B, C and D will load at this stop and your ship will sail off to point B loaded with passengers for all 3 stations.  B and C pay well - it's the most efficient route, but D clogs up your ship and you don't get much revenue for this route because it's not very far from A.  You want to deliver your A-D passengers directly, not have them overload your ships going to B and C.  You can't achieve this with a circle route, even with reversing enabled... you have to isolate the lines.

Your other issue is that while you've set up convoy spacing, you are only loading to 1% at certain stops.  Given that your ships are always running with at least a bit of cargo taking a long route, you aren't, in effect, getting any convoy spacing... thus, if you look at the map, you are getting large masses of ships all moving in groups and then big gaps that cause station overloading.

You could probably run that line with 200 ships and make twice the profits with a few tweaks :)
Current projects: Pak128 Trees, blender graphics

AP

Quote from: ӔO on April 12, 2014, 04:15:34 PM
And the diagonal elevated costs the same as bridges. The displayed cost is per tile vs. per km.

I could have sworn I asked that question before and got a different answer. So we are quoting bridges in one unit and elevated ways (and track?) in another?

ӔO

yeah, the costs are the same in the dat file, but the game cannot display them in the same units, for some reason.

also consider the fact that it's easier to upgrade elevated ways, where as bridges need to be torn down first.
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speedbus

Sarlock, thank yo very much. It's my first attempt to play experimental. Any hint is very appreciated.

Quote from: Sarlock on April 12, 2014, 09:06:26 PM
The trouble with circular routes in Simutrans is that you will get pax, etc, load at a station that is after the station they want to go and will travel on the ship/train/etc until it finally comes back to their desired location, making it very inefficient (high running costs for a low paying revenue distance).

I thought the difference to standard is that trip time is taken into account for routing decisions, so I felt safe choosing the circular route layout. Anyway, I'll separate the lines.

Quote from: Sarlock on April 12, 2014, 09:06:26 PM
Your other issue is that while you've set up convoy spacing, you are only loading to 1% at certain stops.  Given that your ships are always running with at least a bit of cargo taking a long route, you aren't, in effect, getting any convoy spacing... thus, if you look at the map, you are getting large masses of ships all moving in groups and then big gaps that cause station overloading. :)

You're absolutely right, up to now I didn't get the convoi spacing working properly. I probably got this feature completely wrong. Have to think about. Any hints for further reading?

Sarlock

Not really a lot of written information about the systems in Experimental, a lot of it you just have to play with and gain familiarity with.  Carl did a nice write up on the scheduling system that may be helpful.

Ultimately, your convoys, when set to load % and convoy spacing, will leave the station when either they have reached their load % or the time limit expires for spacing.  If your load % is only 1%, you won't get any spacing delay because your ships are almost always at least 1% full.  Given that your ships are running fairly full, I'd set it to 50-100%, then you will get some nice spacing between your ships and avoid the large build up of material at stations (and unhappy passengers) when the grouping in your ships causes a gap in coverage to occur (and then 20 ships arrive in an hour, followed by no ships for 4 hours).

What works well is to split your circle line in to two "L" shape lines:

A ---> B
^         |
|         v
D <--- C

Line 1: A-B-C
Line 2: C-D-A

Accomplishes the same task but now cargo will only load on the convoy going to where it wants to go, rather than circling over the entire map to get back to a point just a stop or two before it.
Current projects: Pak128 Trees, blender graphics

AP

Alt
Quote from: Sarlock on April 13, 2014, 04:26:52 PM
What works well is to split your circle line in to two "L" shape lines:

A ---> B
^         |
|         v
D <--- C

Line 1: A-B-C
Line 2: C-D-A

Accomplishes the same task but now cargo will only load on the convoy going to where it wants to go, rather than circling over the entire map to get back to a point just a stop or two before it.

Also consider running two routes, one clockwise the other anticlockwise, the traffic should (I believe) favour the route which gets it to the destination fastest, so not go the "wrong way" around.

ӔO

I think freight tends to take the path of least transfers, so making CW and CCW loop lines doesn't work the way you will intend it to work.
i.e a ship that does ABCD will still attempt to do A>D, despite there being a line that does ADCB.
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jamespetts

The routing of freight is based on total journey time just as with passengers, but because transshipment inherently takes longer, transfers are effectively penalised more for freight than passengers.
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Sarlock

Indeed, I should have rewritten that diagram to indicate that cargo would travel in both paths, not just a clockwise direction.  Then cargo from A to D will in fact take the A-D route instead of taking the long A-B-C-D path as it sometimes does now.  (take a look at some of the passengers on the Bone China route and you'll see what I mean -- there are passengers on those ships who are travelling across the entire ocean just to get to a stop that was 100km from where they loaded on to the ship)

While designing my underground network in offline play, I originally set it up with a circular route (running clockwise and counter-clockwise), but I quickly realized that passengers were loading the first convoy to reach them, even if that meant they went around the entire circle to reach the stop just before they got on.  "C" shape and grid patterns were far more effective/efficient.

I'll design an example to demonstrate.
Current projects: Pak128 Trees, blender graphics

jamespetts

Quote from: Sarlock on April 13, 2014, 05:59:46 PM
While designing my underground network in offline play, I originally set it up with a circular route (running clockwise and counter-clockwise), but I quickly realized that passengers were loading the first convoy to reach them, even if that meant they went around the entire circle to reach the stop just before they got on.  "C" shape and grid patterns were far more effective/efficient.

This will not happen if two separate lines are used: one for each direction, as is probably prudent for the time being for circular routes. I will have to look into improving the algorithm for passengers deciding which individual convoy to board in due course.
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VOLVO

De-synchronise issues has started to become more frequent these 2 days for some reason.

jamespetts

Just at the ends of the months, when interacting with the world, or at any time, even when passive?
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Sarlock

I always get one around 5-10 minutes in to every new month... but otherwise it has been good.  I've learned to live with it (it's a good chance to get up from the office chair and stretch and do something else other than manage lines for an hour!).
Current projects: Pak128 Trees, blender graphics

ӔO

some month beginnings, 0:00 to 0:16, are super heavy, and then after that the game is pretty light.

I suspect it's because pax are rerouting, but it might also be cities trying to expand when there is no room.


---
I think the server side needs a restart so it can clear its resources. Right now the server game goes like a rollercoaster and the performance is very bad, but with a local copy, the game runs slow, but smoothly.
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VOLVO

There's some problem, with being able to stay connected but the server frozen (might be my computer).

jamespetts

A user has reported to me by e-mail very poor performance (the client will repeatedly hang for seconds at a time and sometimes run very quickly for a short time to catch up), which I have been able to reproduce. I am restarting the server in order to see whether this will remedy the problem.

Incidentally, routes are now calculated more frequently than monthly, so specific end of month issues based mainly on route recalculation.

Edit: Restarting the server did not seem to help - yet CPU usage with a client connected is reported as only 59.8%. Can anyone let me know whether there were any noticeable changes in the game world shortly before and shortly after this performance problem set in such as might have been the cause?
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speedbus

Quote from: jamespetts on April 15, 2014, 11:00:36 AM
Edit: Restarting the server did not seem to help - yet CPU usage with a client connected is reported as only 59.8%. Can anyone let me know whether there were any noticeable changes in the game world shortly before and shortly after this performance problem set in such as might have been the cause?

James, it's probably me responsible for the mess. My apologies for any inconvenience.

Yesterday in the evening I tried to change the routing for my Bone China Line. I must have made a mistake somewhere. The
result is a lot of ship not finding a route. Unfortunately I did not succed in removing these ships. The "Sell Now" button does not do anything, probably due to the server load.

Any saved game older than November 1818 (game time) respectively 11 pm (local time, which is UTC +2) should work as
expected.

Again my apologies.

jamespetts

Ahh, interesting, this might explain it. I will have to look into this when I get a moment. Thank you for letting me know.
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VOLVO

Quote from: jamespetts on April 15, 2014, 12:00:49 PM
Ahh, interesting, this might explain it. I will have to look into this when I get a moment. Thank you for letting me know.
It's not necessary now, after a few more connections, the re-routing procedure seems to be done and the server returned to normal now.

ӔO

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VOLVO

Quote from: VOLVO on April 15, 2014, 01:08:53 PM
It's not necessary now, after a few more connections, the re-routing procedure seems to be done and the server returned to normal now.
Announced this for a minute, 2 clients connected lol

ӔO

I tried it, but there are still some 100~200 ships with no route on that line.
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prissi

A server load of 59.2% is very likely a maxed out server, because simutrans does not distribute its CPU cycles evenly. 100% would just mean that the server cannot cope up all the time. Anything about 30% (when I tried at home) means the server lags sometimes badly (season change, start of a complicated shipping route, experimental probably at the start of a month) and then can catch up.

You can try this even without a server version. Just start a normal game and watch when the idle time drops to zero. That moment is reached well before 50% CPU. At that time there is full demand for CPU for short amount of time.

ӔO

perhaps, teleporting ships back to the depot should be reinstated?
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VOLVO

Quote from: ӔO on April 15, 2014, 01:24:04 PM
I tried it, but there are still some 100~200 ships with no route on that line.
It was running fine, up until the point I clicked island hopper and everything is not fine...
(I persume they want to send "no route" messages and there's a lot of them)
It's so laggy that It's possibly impossible to click retire for all of them..

jamespetts

AEO - thank you very much for the save. I have now reverted to November 1818 to avert these difficulties. I should like further input on the question of sending ships on open waters with no route to the depot automatically. That was disabled because people who made routing errors were losing cargo too easily which caused great problems with very long shipping lines, and ships on open water were not obstructing anything. I did not realise that the problem that eventuated when a line is edited and many ships have no route all at once would be bad enough to make the whole game completely unresponsive (even in single player mode).

Perhaps ships with no route should be sent to the depot automatically, but after a greater lapse of time than other vehicles that can block things? I should be grateful for feedback on this, especially from AP who had trouble with ships being sent to the depot before.
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Sarlock

Thank you for reverting the server, James, seems to be running fine now.

The biggest issue with moving stuck ships to depots on this map is that they might be sent to a depot that can't easily reconnect to the existing route -- meaning that the nearest depot may be outside of the range of route finding and when you try to put this ship back in to service on its existing line, it fails because it is too far away to refind its route.  Then you are stuck selling that ship or adding waypoints to get it back on track and then putting that convoy back on its regular line server, and losing the cargo you had on it before.  Tough to decide what is best in this case.

Either way, in 10 game years or so, most cargo will be train hauled, so it won't matter much anyhow.
Current projects: Pak128 Trees, blender graphics

ӔO

IMO, the ships serve cargo better than trains on a map with this much sea.
there are only a 3 or 4 routes where freight trains make sense.
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Sarlock

Indeed, I see that now that I've looked in to it.  In early years the freight cars are much slower (30 km/h until 1835, then 40 km/h until 1855) and the capacity is very low... so we're stuck using ships for quite some time for freight.  It's really not until 1885 that anything viable comes along.

EDIT

I am getting these multiple times per month now:


DESYNCH #1, around 5:00 in new month:

Warning: karte_t::interactive: sync_step=38160  server=[rand=148512792 halt=2049 line=1025 cnvy=8193 ind_dns_prop=3816 act_ind_dens=16568 traffic=69457254] client=[rand=3955254484 halt=2049 line=1025 cnvy=8193 ind_dns_prop=3816 act_ind_dens=16568 traffic=69457244]
Warning: karte_t::interactive: disconnecting due to checklist mismatch
Warning: karte_t::network_disconnect(): Lost synchronisation with server. Random flags: 0

--------------
DESYNCH #2, 10 game minutes later @ 14:59

Warning: karte_t::interactive: sync_step=38640  server=[rand=2641084098 halt=2049 line=1025 cnvy=8193 ind_dns_prop=3816 act_ind_dens=16568 traffic=69459539] client=[rand=2854961631 halt=2049 line=1025 cnvy=8193 ind_dns_prop=3816 act_ind_dens=16568 traffic=69459537]
Warning: karte_t::interactive: disconnecting due to checklist mismatch
Warning: karte_t::network_disconnect(): Lost synchronisation with server. Random flags: 0

--------------
DESYNCH #3, @ 19:17

Warning: karte_t::interactive: sync_step=38968  server=[rand=3498925062 halt=2049 line=1025 cnvy=8193 ind_dns_prop=3816 act_ind_dens=16568 traffic=69461045] client=[rand=3685045178 halt=2049 line=1025 cnvy=8193 ind_dns_prop=3816 act_ind_dens=16568 traffic=69461031]
Warning: karte_t::interactive: disconnecting due to checklist mismatch
Warning: karte_t::network_disconnect(): Lost synchronisation with server. Random flags: 0


Seems consistently a variance in the rand and traffic figures.
Current projects: Pak128 Trees, blender graphics