Railroad

[kovarex]

We are saying everywhere, that the game is inspired by Transport Tycoon.
There is already some proof of concept of trains (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vmp66SmUztQ), but this is still far from transport tycoon.

I believe, that we could use the concept of transport tycoon in this area of the game almost completely.
Player would create stations and specify rout of the train, the train would stop at the station and wait until inserters have nothing to do.

This would help the game a lot for two reasons.
a) I like to play with trains, so I will enjoy the game more, there might be people like me out there
b) The game is missing some late game mechanism to transfer big amounts of resources from distant mining sites.
c) Diversity of logistics.

[MatLaPatate]

What about Armored Trains with integrated turret to defend a zone ? That's completly irrelevant with the logisitic thing, but I think that would be fun ^^.

[kovarex]

Armored trains would make sense as well, the enviroment is dangerous. I can imagine scenarios, where not including armored carriage to the train would be risky.

[Beppe]

Kovarex, You can´t do anything wrong by include more Transport Tycoon

[( Tchey )]

I support armored traiin with turrets and spikes and all !
So, if trains are avalaible, we also need stations, boards, lights...
And new monsters too.
And collisions with them.

[MatLaPatate]

I support armored traiin with turrets and spikes and all !
So, if trains are avalaible, we also need stations, boards, lights...
And new monsters too.
And collisions with them.

xD, collisions ^^. That would be fun . A bit like your car destroying trees ...
Wait ... WE NEED TANKS! Kind of advanced technology, but, above all, tons of Steel, and different more advanced metals . Would be epic for the 2v2 RTS thing planned

[Candunc]

Trains are a great idea, I enjoy driving them around in the alpha version, you can't go wrong with trains!

A suggestion though, there should be 'box cars' and stuff that the loaders load / unload items too and from that are made from a TON of steel and carry a fairly large amount of items. These should make it harder to accelerate / slow down. Just my opinion, I love the trains in Transport Tycoon.

For the logistics, you need signals and stuff to keep the automated trains from smashing into each other, and when they do they 'derail' and you have to manually unload cargo and break / place them back on tracks.

[Hanse00]

I definitely love the train idea, especially with having to set up signal systems and switches to be able to run multiple trains without running into each other.

[kengonakajima]

currently it takes to much time to build railway in a long distance, because
the player character movement is too slow.

Yes we can use blueprint to build stations, but it's necessary to build most part of railway by hand.
it takes about one hour to build rail route in distance at 1000~2000 blocks.

I think some way of automated rail-way building could be done by another blueprinting on the world map with rail path suggestion.

[ssilk]

Ever tried building railroad when you are in the train? For long straight distances this is real fun!

[CherryKiss]

I made my first train tracks/stations/trains in the playthrough I just completed. I got to say, trains are fun! But they are frustrating, less efficient than belts, and require monitoring all the time, lest some silly thing go wrong, and I find a bunch of copper and coal in my iron ore supply

The trains don't stop at the same place every time it seems...just a bit off and suddenly I'm inserting the wrong cargo into my wagons. Yes I know, sorting station, but then you get backed up on one good, and have to deal with things jamming up because you've got too much of one thing keeping you from unloading others....

It feels like the only thing trains add to the game right now, is simply, fun. They are fun. But I'll stick with belts in my next game for moving my ores, and rest better knowing the logistics will work without me having to babysit so much.

[ssilk]

@CherryKiss: I don't see why they stop at different places? What do you mean?

And yes, I see the following points as important for v0.10 or v0.11 (if not stated other):

- Rails:
--- Placing rails by dragging. They magically get places, even if you are not in reach. Something like every railroad-game works...
--- Placing rails while driving in the train. This is really fun and I think this needs to be better supported.
--- (not so important) A S-Curve, to switch one track-width.
- Trains:
--- A control about every train. I mean something like a "train network", where every train is registered and can immediately be changed at every time, even if the train is not reachable.
--- I can give the trains different names and (!) color or something, which makes me see, which route a train runs.
--- (not important) A list of routes. I can predefine a route and choose the trains, which should support it.
--- (not important) A working version of "I make many train stops with the same name", to be able to make working routes with high traffic.
--- A warning, if automated trains don't move anymore (blocked, no path etc.)
- Train stops:
--- Seeing, how the wagons stands at train stops, I can choose a train (from the list of trains) and it displays a ghosted train with lines which inserter would fill in which wagon/loco, so that I can place the chests etc.
--- (not important and takes more time to find good working solutions) Some predefined blueprints for train-station designs
--- Train stops, where train runs through and do not stop, just for routing them.

What's important from documentation side:
- Not every setup with trains is good. Very well working are setups with logistic bots as train station. Absolutely amazing!!
- Setups with belts for filling/emptying are ... very inefficient. Cannot recommend that, or only for special cases.
- All types of single-rail traffic is complicated. Can't recommend that.
- there are some general rules with signaling.

[CherryKiss]

@CherryKiss: I don't see why they stop at different places? What do you mean?

I mean, I set up the train station with loading zone, making sure my chests/inserters deliver to the right cargo cars, and then the train stops just slightly short, or long, and I have inserters delivering to the wrong car. Car 4 in my setup had copper, but ended up with some stone mixed in, which normally goes in car 5...then I end up with stone on my copper ore line, leading to the furnaces...messy...messy.

I had even taken care to remove chests/inserters that I thought were too close to the edge of one car/start of the next, but apparently I didn't do well enough, and yeah, the train did not stop consistantly at the same point in order to prevent this mis-loading

ON ANOTHER NOTE:
Funniest thing I did in my last game: trying to set up a second train before putting in rail switches....my first train came in while I was setting up and literally just ran through my second train, totally destroying it. Was pretty funny stuff

[kengonakajima]

> Ever tried building railroad when you are in the train? For long straight distances this is real fun!
Yes, I know it is fun! But after 0.9.0, the woods are frequent and dense, so I have to put curved rails more often.
Signals and electricity supply and time scheduling is also taking time...

[ssilk]

I had even taken care to remove chests/inserters that I thought were too close to the edge of one car/start of the next, but apparently I didn't do well enough, and yeah, the train did not stop consistantly at the same point in order to prevent this mis-loading

Hmmm, this is important! If possible you should make a bug ticket, because I haven't seen that.

Funniest thing I did in my last game: trying to set up a second train before putting in rail switches....my first train came in while I was setting up and literally just ran through my second train, totally destroying it. Was pretty funny stuff

Lol Yes, such stuff, happens with them.

[Zourin]

Only real problems I have with trains are that, for one, there's never enough practical space nearby to run them. I have to either dig through forests or route around lakes, or find someplace to even build what amounts to a fairly large, long stations to handle all the incomings and outgoings.

The other thing that rubs me is that there's no logistic support for wagons other than smart filters, and the trains themselves are not aware of their own loads. You can't have a train parked at, say, a remote pumpjack site until a cargo wagon is full. You're limited exclusively to one good per wagon, lest you invoke a chokeout scenario. I would *love* to multitask train wagons so that I can move just a couple of stacks on the same wagon and have it communicate with local logistics.

Eg.. a refinery needs steel, gears, pipe, circuits, coal, and incoming full barrels. It needs to export empty barrels, plastic, sulfur, fuel, regular engines, and electric engines.

So to fully support it.. you need a six wagon car coming in and six more for the out going. That's a massive space investment to build no matter the scale of the refinery itself. You can't, say, have a wagon that you can put only one stack each of steel, gears, pipe, and circuits. You can't put in just one stack of regular engines and three stacks of electric in an outbound wagon. Something invariably jams. You can't have a train wait at a station until one or more wagons are filled.

[kovarex]

Only real problems I have with trains are that, for one, there's never enough practical space nearby to run them. I have to either dig through forests or route around lakes, or find someplace to even build what amounts to a fairly large, long stations to handle all the incomings and outgoings.

The other thing that rubs me is that there's no logistic support for wagons other than smart filters, and the trains themselves are not aware of their own loads. You can't have a train parked at, say, a remote pumpjack site until a cargo wagon is full. You're limited exclusively to one good per wagon, lest you invoke a chokeout scenario. I would *love* to multitask train wagons so that I can move just a couple of stacks on the same wagon and have it communicate with local logistics.

Eg.. a refinery needs steel, gears, pipe, circuits, coal, and incoming full barrels. It needs to export empty barrels, plastic, sulfur, fuel, regular engines, and electric engines.

So to fully support it.. you need a six wagon car coming in and six more for the out going. That's a massive space investment to build no matter the scale of the refinery itself. You can't, say, have a wagon that you can put only one stack each of steel, gears, pipe, and circuits. You can't put in just one stack of regular engines and three stacks of electric in an outbound wagon. Something invariably jams. You can't have a train wait at a station until one or more wagons are filled.

I see.
This would be solvable by having circuit network integration. The train station would emit the amount of stuff in the train. The train station waiting condition could be also integrated into that.

[LoSboccacc]

What about a requester stop, a provider stop and a logistic locomotive?

[ssilk]

Kovarex & LoSboccacc: Yes, the direction is right. The details are the problem.

For example: I built a train station about 2000 tiles away, to see, which problems occur. I need over 250 green wires to connect that. And what I also need is to connect at the target station all chests, which takes another 40 wires. Alone the wiring took much over half an hour.

I need:
- connect a green/red wire to a logistic network, to see what's inside
- transmit that information (wireless? Via carrier pigeon? Snail mail by train?) to the source station (in that case) over thousands of tiles
- add that signal to the contents of the wagons (not loco)
- do not add it to the contents of the source station logistic network,
- connect that to requester chests in the source station (so that they request each some small number of items out of a list of needed stuff) and
- connect to smart inserters in the source station, which fill into the wagon what's really needed at that time.

And what would be good: change the requests for the target station from nearly anywhere every time... More or less as it is needed to control the trains nearly every time, everywhere.
Hmm... If the trains could send such messages - would be enough?



@zourin: I can't acclaim that there is too less space, because there is plenty. The current problem I see is, that everything is too tight, too dense. The resources, the forests, the lakes, the native villages. On the other hand: it must be currently like that, because of the missing automatism. We need to request resources over long distances to be able not to run see-saw. The ways get too long, we need to walk/drive back and forth, which takes long. 2000 tiles, this is 3 minutes by train. That's long and impossible to walk without skeletons.

But I really have p l e n t y of space, so much, that I can build tracks, which takes 10 minutes to surround the area.


I recommend to play with less resources, less natives etc. to see the difference in gameplay.

[Sir Nick]

Maybe this will work:

1. Introduce a new building. Let's call it a "Post Office" or PO for short. It gets its own name randomly or from the closest station.
2. If a PO is connected to a circuit network, it is part of this network. Not so sure about LogNet, maybe have a separate switch in the GUI.
3. If a PO is placed adjacent to track, any OTHER PO that is also adjacent to ANY track that is linked with this one can also "see" it (see below). What that means is the POs create a "track net" akin to circuit network, but not quite, because...
4. In the PO's GUI a player can select another PO. From that moment on, this PO is for all practical purposes a part of the network the selected PO belongs to. Thus it may be attached to wiring, LogNet etc.

A welcome addition would be a "selector inserter", which would insert items based on a certain condition. For example, "if red circuit network has less than 100 RepPacks, insert RepPacks OR If red CN has less than 100 walls, insert walls OR If red CN has less than 100 magasines, insert walls". OR stands for the fact that the conditions are separate and the inserter will work if ANY of them is met. This can be done with regular smart inserters, OFC,but requres more of them.