Distance - implementation idea

[thelordodin]

I also want distance between stations to be considered when scheduling.
I've seen your post where you sad that it's too hard to know real distance between stations: the distance train needs to go instead of just decard coordinates calculation of distance between two points.

So here is my the idea:
You get trains fuel store and trains current fuel being burn values at start and at finish and just substract them.
This way you can very precisely measure true distance because fuel isn't burned when the train is stopped on a signal.

Then you just make a table of distances, where you store averange of last 10 measurements.

For compartibility with other mods - if there are trains with unlimited fuel (electrical trains or some other) you can explicitly request having at least one train with no cargo wagons and which is fueled. This train will be used for measuring. This will give some more interesting gameplay - measure train: player can set it's waypoints - so this data is known to LTN.

When you don't know the distance - you just take any path.

Sure this will take quite a while for the system to learn of all needed distances. But after a while - it will.

What do you think of this?

[Optera]

To reliably update a train path table when players change their rail network, it would need to contain every rail piece. Otherwise it would have to be completely wiped every time a rail is placed or mined. In either case the effort far outweighs the benefits.

[Ringkeeper]

there is an (kinda) easy solution for your problem which also fullfills the often requested separted networks (i asked that question myself already and came up with this solution for me).

Use different train lengths.

My main trains around base are L-WWWW-L .
Now if you want to transport f.e. ore from far away to your base, you just use L-W*-L trains and build a transfer station. In this way you can have your L-W*-L depot close to the ore depots and the travel distance is keeped short.

For example on one map i harvest ores far far out. A L-WWWW-L needs 5 minutes to there, one way. So i build a L-WWWW-L-WWWW-L-WWWW-L train+depot+ore field stations and send this train close to the base where a transfer station is. This one train supplies now 3 L-WWWW-L stations there and my normal trains pickup the ore from that station.

You just need to set the min/max train length to the exact amount of the trains.

With this system you can have multiple Networks (4, 5, 6, Waggon etc ) for specific tasks with depots close by.