Bridgewater-Brunel game no. 3

[Ves]

Hi guys,
I'm away from home and have no means to connect to the server for the next couple of weeks.
If my company gets unlocked, would you please mind not cheating until I get back?  (and also please not be claimed by another player!  )

Thank you all, and have a very good summer!

[freddyhayward]

Hi guys,
I'm away from home and have no means to connect to the server for the next couple of weeks.
If my company gets unlocked, would you please mind not cheating until I get back?  (and also please not be claimed by another player!  )

Thank you all, and have a very good summer!

Oh dear... your railway is completely jammed! If it does get unlocked, do we have permission to unclog the railway to allow the free-flow of goods?

[Ves]

Boggers, thought I had cleared it!
Yes, of course, that would be very helpful! Perhaps one of you even could get my pw and clear it (and any future deadlocks) until I get back?

[freddyhayward]

Boggers, thought I had cleared it!
Yes, of course, that would be very helpful! Perhaps one of you even could get my pw and clear it (and any future deadlocks) until I get back?

I will volunteer to do it if you think I'm trustworthy enough!

[Ves]

Thank you!   

Well, you will just have to play by your conscience 

If you got any questions, or if anyone else wants to discuss something about it, type here as I can see this all the time!

Thank you

[Ves]

Freddy, did you get my pm? 

[freddyhayward]

Freddy, did you get my pm? 

Yes, I fixed the jam a while ago. I also made a few minor changes around winerworth and Lulington to better accomodate railways. I did all the terraforming with my company and only used yours to replace a couple of ways. If I remember correctly the total cost for your company was something like 2000c.

[freddyhayward]

I have just fixed a serious problem with your rail schedule - it was set to mirror, so trains would loop around the entire line to access the same platform in reverse. This probably caused the jam in the first place. i manually added the return trip using the opposite platforms.

[Ves]

Thank you, Freddy!
Btw, what year is it now? Is passenger railway a thing yet?

[freddyhayward]

Thank you, Freddy!
Btw, what year is it now? Is passenger railway a thing yet?

The year is 1810, and yes, passenger railways are emerging. There are currently three networks shown in these maps:

[Sirius]

What's going on with the server?
There have been a lot of desynchs today, a few crashes and it seems to be unreachable at the moment.

[Ranran]

I think the server crashed when I upgraded the bridge with cobblestone road.
(Unless someone else did something that caused the crash or another problem happened by chance. 2 other people were connected)

EDIT:
May have crashed again (´・ω・｀)
This time I just saw the depot, so I think it's another cause.

[Ranran]

I think one of the causes of dysync is the routing anomaly I've reported several times so far.
After disconnecting from the server, I found a strange traffic jam on offline state, so when I checked the schedule I found a lot of unusual [<<] inserted and the schedule was broken.
I immediately connected to the server hoping to fix it, and it was fine.

[Ranran]

As you can see on the bridgewater server, colliery and Ironworks are closing down one after another, the industry prefers to close, but nothing new or upgrades happen. Ironworks at bridgewater server left only the last one, which will also be closed in the near future. That is why I have withdrawn from those industries. I am afraid that industries that have passed their retired dates will be shut down in this way. The next big industrial decline could be in 1840.


EDIT:
Oh, my pig... The final ironwork was closed and many lost their jobs.

[Sirius]

Ťoday I cannot connect to the server.
It's either not responding at all or I get the "not enough bytes transfered" error after a few seconds of loading.

[freddyhayward]

I may have just crashed the server :(. some kind of array out-of-bounds error while buying vehicles at the rail depot.

[ceeac]

some kind of array out-of-bounds error while buying vehicles at the rail depot.

Should be fixed by PR #213.

[freddyhayward]

Freahk, there is quite a significant jam on your railway near Mount Greeninghill:
edit: there is also a big jam at olderminster, where I would like you to use the new outer tracks.

[Sirius]

Well I had no time to fix it this morning.
Drive by sight, the not-working method*

*Except for tracks without any intersections**

**More preciesely, intersections are okay, as long as these are perpendicular in ordinal directions and there is no terminus station involved

[Ves]

Im back now, thank you for keeping track of my company

So, what did I miss?

[Sirius]

Management in trouble

It's the year 1825.
Most of the active companies are running horse hauled passenger railway networks. The first steam engine that has an odvantage over horses just became available. Some companies are planning to run these, whilst others do still prefer horses for their much better braking capabilities.
In any case, all companies are expanding. All companies? No! Prominster Shipping & Coaches is in trouble.
They had been short of money since a very expensive investment just before the depression. The rivermetro was a money printing machine for two months, but then the dpresion turned that 5m investment into the biggest fail-investment in history so far. Prices had expanded by more than 3m above the expected cost due to over-restrictive road replacement rules, so it took 2m alone to get some roads upgraded into bridges.

The company recovered from this, now maintaining a fairly large railway network, now running into troubles again.
The management simply missed to order a new datacenter from the future to manage the company.

Due to this, the management resigned from the company.
For emergency cases, Far East Railways' manager Freddyhayward is managing the company. To date, it is unclear if the original management or a new management will continue operation of that company.


It was nice to play with you most of the times, but I suspect I have to leave the server already. My i7 6700HQ with its 16GB of DDR3-1866 memory seems to be too slow to keep up since yesterday. Sunday was the last day where I was able to play pretty fluently.

[Ves]

Im sorry to read that, it was very nice to have you in there!

But, my gosh, this is just some coincidence... Because I too have decided to leave the server game. Not because of the lagging like Freahk, but because my company have suffered severely from the competition when I was away, even though Freddy was managing it. This in it self is not a problem, as I truly believe it can be set right without too much effort, however I severely lack the time to do so. I too will give the keys to my company, the "Ves Transport Agency" to whoever who wants a great challenge in recovering a company.

I have reset the password to 1234

Thank you all for the time spent in there, it is a really fun place to be!


Freahk, this is just a strange thought: I came back to the game on monday, this is the day you say it started to trouble again. Could it be that you and I cannot be connected at the same time? If so, hang on to the server a few more days, we could do some experiments if you want to.

[Ranran]

My i7 6700HQ with its 16GB of DDR3-1866 memory seems to be too slow to keep up since yesterday. Sunday was the last day where I was able to play pretty fluently.

I don't think the specifications of the computer are related to the cause of this. I haven't played much these days, but even in my case the server can be responsive or very bad.
It is often said that players in Japan have network compatibility with each other, but I'm not sure if that is the case.
I sometimes get disconnected frequently, but I don't even know if it was my own operation.

[Sirius]

In my case I am quite sure it is the hardware, not the network.
I had the exact same symptoms a few weeks ago on my PC, so I started playing on my (much faster) laptop.
It worked ell there until yesterday.

Desyncs are a different thing. Even now I can stay connected for many hours, I just cannot practically build anything. The response times are just muc htoo long, it can be as much as 15 minutes, which is because the game on my laptop is running 15 minutes behind the game on the server.
Such huge delays are not a network thing.

[Ranran]

I have almost lost my motivation now. So I leave the server once. After a while the password will be unlocked.

The original purpose of my play was to confront the railroad by bus. Well that is the distant future of the 20th century. I wanted the concept of labor costs to be independent, as I started a dedicated thread before.
Without it, I thought it would be difficult to balance buses and railroads, and recombination system, these games and the economy.
In addition, the reason for the cost is difficult to understand, which means that it is easier for the player to understand.
After all, I felt it in the play of the previous era. For example, ship personnel, carriage personnel, drover, postboy, and why that cost is incurred.
When making a new pakset, the cost determination method becomes clear.

Regardless of that, old times, big maps, playstyle differences, competition, historical reenactment, it's been a good experience for me and has given me a lot of inspiration.
A lot of UI ideas have come up, but they haven't been worked on yet. I bring it back to Japan.

Also we ranran haven't used the overtaking feature at all so far, so I was able to find many problems this time.

Some play style differences are interesting.
One, the occupation of the land by the marker, such bad behavior of the manner is rarely seen in Japan. And it severely interferes with the marker function. Even in Japan, markers are used as a means of communication between players. As you can see in the other thread's discussion, simutrans's chat functionality is poor. Often there will be a dedicated area for communication between specific players. This creates a place where strange signs line up.
Returning to the reservation of the land by the marker, at least in Japan it is common to do that with add-ons such as fences, trees and promenade. This also has some balance issues regarding land reservations and costs, but at least it does not interfere with the original function of the marker. In addition, it is not possible to reserve land that is not leveled, so there will be no unnecessary obstruction work such as obstructing the construction of a bridge. If you do, you will pay the additional costs in advance. And there are few abnormalities in appearance. There is just a vacant land add-on under the viaduct.
Also, since this was my first time to participate in a pakset network game that reproduces a long history, I had never seen the act of making a reservation for a distant future.

Thank you for running the server and giving me this opportunity. See you next life. (´・ω・｀)

EDIT:
Don't worry too much. I'm not leaving because something went wrong on the server.

@Huitsi - I was aware of the demands of moving the road, but the frequent dysyncs couldn't handle it. And I was out on the weekend. I'm sorry.

[freddyhayward]

I have almost lost my motivation now. So I leave the server once. After a while the password will be unlocked.

This is sad to hear :(. I hope the accumulation of matters brought up by other players including myself did not cause this.
Despite the frustrating problems with road convoys in simutrans-extended, you led the most successful transport company until the steam age, and I'm sure it could have remained so with continued management. You also permanently reshaped the global road network, bringing towns closer together.
You have also brought up legitimate balance issues that I hope, given enough time, will be addressed.
I hope we see you in the future.

[prissi]

Standard removes lot of stupid chat messages upon saving and reloading, so only the player relevant messages remains. This has led to a much more useful ingame chat. You should aks makie on the current experience.

[Matthew]

It seems that several people have left this server at the same time.

The first thing to say is that it's a game and if a game stops being fun or real life is more important, then leaving is the right thing to do. And if you can't run the game, then there's little alternative.

Secondly, you could all have just disappeared without explanation. That's fine and Sim-Ex has procedures in place to deal with that (bankruptcy, password expiry, and takeovers). But you have left with an explanation and succession plans, which is courteous. Thank you!

I would like to say that these departures might make room for new players like me, but actually I suspect my participation will be brief as Freahk's experience suggests the game will soon be unplayable for me too.

[Sirius]

This town decided to build a new road bridge - at whatever the cost!
The bridge did even cut train routes along that line.

[DrSuperGood]

I wanted the concept of labor costs to be independent, as I started a dedicated thread before.

As far as I am aware that has always been an intended feature. Just due to lack of development it is not a high priority feature.

The feature is required for correct operation of multi-unit trains since they can have cab units connected back to back with only a single driver at the forward end of the entire train.

This town decided to build a new road bridge - at whatever the cost!
The bridge did even cut train routes along that line.

That needs a bug report...

[Sirius]

That needs a bug report...

I do only report bugs that I am able to reproduce, otherwise I'll be told to provide a reproduction case, which I am not able to provide in this case anyway.

[Matthew]

There has been some discussion here and in the Discussion thread about the problems of using chat and markers. The Simutrans chat system was probably state-of-the-art at one time and I'm grateful to everyone who created it (prissi?), but it does have weak points. A couple of days ago I asked Leartin (server admin) whether they could add a Bridgewater-Brunel channel, and Freahk independently had the same idea yesterday. Great minds think alike! 

Several players have already found it, but I thought it was useful to raise it here, so that everyone is aware of this innovation.

For those who haven't used it before, Discord is a live chat system that was specifically designed for use in multi-player games. I haven't used it for multiplayer, but I've used it for other purposes (e.g. K-pop and language learning) and it's one of the best bits of software I've ever used. The advantages for us:

• Free (as in beer).
• Works on all major platforms (Android, iOS, Linux & Windows).
• Available when the Bridgewater-Brunel server is down.
• No limit on message length.
• The chat is searchable and easier to scroll through, so it's easier to catch up.
• You can share screenshots and other files, which is great for discussing building plans and possible patches.
• You can edit your display name to display your Bridgewater-Brunel company.

The disadvantages:

• You have to run two programs rather than one, which makes it even more difficult for people with low-spec systems to play on Bridgewater-Brunel.
• Closed-source, proprietary protocol.
• You have to open an account with a US company (though one with good GDPR compliance).
• This forum is a public record of Simutrans development and practice; if the Discord server was banned/closed then the info would be lost forever.

IMHO that makes Discord a good replacement for in-game chat, but not for the forum. The particular setup of my system means that I can spare the CPU cycles, and so can Freahk, but I think that's the biggest issue and I worry that it makes B-B even more socially exclusionary.

For those who wish to try it out, you can join the Simutrans server using this link: https://discord.gg/fpXY772 .

[Sirius]

James, could you please adjus the max diversion tiles number to a (much) larger number?
Once it was possible to temporarily cheat-cut routes, it was not too much of an issue, but now it is.
With the current number, it is virtually impossible to build cut-and-cover railway Lines, which was and is rather common practice in the real-world (sub-surface tube lines for example)

Further, the discussed bridge replacement/upgrade issue in cities could at least partly be solved by this.

This would be the simplest and best temporary solution I can think of until there is a better way to modify existing PROW ways without cutting these.

[VOLVO]

Since after the update of today, the server keep crashing and rolling back, it has happened 3 times in 2 hours.

[Sirius]

Have there been any changes to simuconf?
A few days ago, global passenger numbers suddenly doubled.

I am now in the situation that I'd need to increase capacities of the majority of my lines in order to handle this. Especially oversea lines seem to be affected.
I am somehow unsure if I should do those major adjustments to my lines.
If this increase was intended and will remain, I should definitely do so. Otherwise, it's not worth the effort.