Factorio Forums

I was watching a video from KoS recently, and noticed this strange crash. Something about this doesn't quite seem right, and I suspect there is a rare, subtle bug in here somewhere.

https://youtu.be/BiZB1O9PEUc?t=18m28s

Watching this frame by frame, I've been able to figure out what happened, to some extent. It seems like what happened is that the left train came to a point where it could not stop at the next regular signal, or possibly the first chain signal. It then "Reserved" the block, which caused the signal immediately in front of the human controlled train to turn red. I've included a bit of an illustration of this below.
There are a few possible ways to solve this. I suspect better signaling to reduce the block size would have reduced the likelihood that this would have occurred. But even better would have been if the intersection became blocked with a yellow when it was obvious that the human controlled train would pass the chain signal. I don't think a full stop would have been able to stop that at that point in time.

I know this is a small thing, but it might prevent a bit of damage for future use.

Thanks for the report however that's working as intended. Manual mode trains don't do any signal logic except "I am in these rail blocks". If you want them to do signal logic you have to switch them to automatic mode.

So does that mean that if you are driving a train manually and don't want to get run into, you have to be paying attention to trains from all around you? It seems a bit strange, I would suspect that being run in to when driving manually would be something people would want to avoid. Granted this is a big part of why I don't drive manual trains very often, but...

kd7uiy wrote:So does that mean that if you are driving a train manually and don't want to get run into, you have to be paying attention to trains from all around you?

Yes.

The reasoning behind this decision is that the game does not know, and does not want to assume where you are planning on going, you can choose to turn at a crossing at any time, so the game could either reserve all paths you could possibly take (potentially causing any other automatic trains anywhere in your path to stop) or reserve only the occupied blocks (like currently implemented) and force the driver to be aware of other trains.

It seems to me that the idea would be to reserve all of the blocks you might be able to travel in given the speed that you are traveling at, assuming you brake at full speed (Maybe give a half second reaction time?). That doesn't seem like it would affect things significantly, and I think given the rarity of a moving manual train it shouldn't affect performance, either of the base or of the computer, significantly. But maybe there's a crazy case that I'm not seeing.

To reiterate: this is working as intended. If you drive the train in manual mode then you do so at your own risk - you don't get protection like you do from automatic mode. That is 100% how it's intended to be and is not going to be changed any time soon.

my question to you, why are you driving manually?
set up passenger stations you can use. then just use automatic.
sit back an enjoy your favorite beverage.

[edit]damn, people need to start using Gameplay Help, instead of running to file bug reports that waste dev time.

To be fair, if you are driving manually, you aren't affected by signals at all. Even if the train system tried to set signals for where it thought the manually driven train could go, unless it enforced the signal network, (meaning you could no longer drive through red signals, or drive the wrong way on a one way piece of track) you could still cause accidents. And such restrictions would soon get annoying to players when they want to manually back up a train 3 metres.

In 0.16, you can probably use temporary stops as well, which (I'm assuming) will reserve blocks.

Jap2.0 wrote:In 0.16, you can probably use temporary stops as well, which (I'm assuming) will reserve blocks.

i'm sure it will. until we get temp stops, i just name my passenger stations with a ! prefix. circuit condition blank so they wait for my input.