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GAF PLAYS: Transport Tycoon Deluxe (or, the free OpenTTD on a GAF server)

I know, it was already like this in the previous game... But for people leaving the game for several hours, it's a useful feature, as someone has suggested...

But you can enable it in the options. Pretty sure it worked for me cause I never replaced vehicles due to old age.
 

cheesetom

Member
Thanks for rebooting the server, metalmurphy.

I have a bit of a story to tell:

I started a company by betting big on passenger rail. After putting down miles of track, buying three trains and connecting three cities, I noticed no one was riding it. Crap.

I took out all the loans I could get a hold of and started laying more track to connect some fruit to a food plant. But they also needed maize to produce stuff, so nothing came of that venture but more red ink.

Loans maxed out, all but 4000 to my company's name and losing more money every year, I decided to dismantle EVERYTHING. Sold all my trains, scrapped 90% of the track I laid. With that cash, I bought two docks and the cheapest passenger boat I could afford.

As soon as that slow ass boat landed on the opposite dock, I made $5000. Breathed a sigh of relief!

I've since rebuilt my rails and bought two trains.

GOD DAMN THAT WAS CLOSE

Soogood.jpg
 

JulianImp

Member
This is one of those games I loved playing when I was younger, but completely forgot about for quite a while. Back then I didn't even realize what the goal was and mostly messed with the AI (setting up traps for their buses sure was fun!).

I'll be creating a company for now, but if the server gets full I'll happily share it with somebody else.
 

Koren

Member
Server crashed?

Btw, I find the tropical map quite interesting (and more easy to read than the normal one). I still find difficult to make insane amount of cash (millions/year) from the trains, though.
 

dramatis

Member
Server crashed?

Btw, I find the tropical map quite interesting (and more easy to read than the normal one). I still find difficult to make insane amount of cash (millions/year) from the trains, though.
Metalmurphy's cleaning his graphics card. He took the server down for now.

Also, I couldn't help but take a screenshot of this:
iA2ob.jpg

Good stuff Capt.Haddock.
 

MrForgetful

Neo Member
I still find difficult to make insane amount of cash (millions/year) from the trains, though.

Yeh i know what you mean. I've spent a hell of a lot more time sorting out my train lines and am only getting 700k/year compared to the airports which are making 7m/yr and take minimal effort to get going.

Is it possible to turn airports off in the options when you set a server up? I think it would be a lot more interesting without them.
 

dramatis

Member
I took out all the loans I could get a hold of and started laying more track to connect some fruit to a food plant. But they also needed maize to produce stuff, so nothing came of that venture but more red ink.
I didn't know this until I played for a while longer, but you can supply a "producing" resource (food processing plant) with one of the resources it asks for and it will still produce what it is supposed to produce.

For example, Food Plant says, "Requires Fruit, Maize" but it's actually "Requires Fruit or Maize". So you can connect just fruit to the plant and it will still make Food.
 

Koren

Member
Metalmurphy's cleaning his graphics card. He took the server down for now.
I see...

Also, I couldn't help but take a screenshot of this:
iA2ob.jpg

Good stuff Capt.Haddock.
What are we supposed to see? Signals?

About that, do station have implicit signals, like the depots? I think I understand the principle of "blocks", but I am under the impression that the stations "cut" the blocks.
 

RayStorm

Member
Trains aren't that complicated either.

For Passenger-Transport: Make sure that "Coverage Area Highlight" is switched on when placing a station and then try to cover as much as possible. You can also increase that by moving a tiny part of the station closer to the heart of the city.

Aside from that, long trains, long distance.

Signals aren't that complicated either, you just need to be a bit tidy when laying track. I've come to quite like the "Path Signal".

Is it possible to turn airports off in the options when you set a server up? I think it would be a lot more interesting without them.

That is possible.
 

Koren

Member
Trains aren't that complicated either.
I wouldn't call them complicated, but you have to invest far more time to have just a fraction of what airports can bring.

For Passenger-Transport: Make sure that "Coverage Area Highlight" is switched on when placing a station and then try to cover as much as possible. You can also increase that by moving a tiny part of the station closer to the heart of the city.

Aside from that, long trains, long distance.
It can become difficult if there's 15 companies on a map, but that's the fun. That being said, how do you keep the % high when using long trains and long distance? The problem I have with this is that the service become quite poor.

Signals aren't that complicated either, you just need to be a bit tidy when laying track. I've come to quite like the "Path Signal".
Not that complicated, and many interesting options, but it require some testing, though, at the beginning.
 

RayStorm

Member
It can become difficult if there's 15 companies on a map, but that's the fun. That being said, how do you keep the % high when using long trains and long distance? The problem I have with this is that the service become quite poor.

I actually don't care about that at all. Or rather it's not a problem if you have enough trains and set them to wait for full load so that there's always at least one rain in the station being loaded.
 

Koren

Member
I just did something a bit crazy to test rail incomes, and mostly because it was fun to do... I've built a vrey long line with 23 (x2) bridges over the sea, 22 artificial islands. The line is over 1600 cases, and it takes 70 days to complete, travelling at 611km/h (and took me the better part of an hour).

For the longest possible train, not completely full (~85-90%), 2/3 passengers and 1/3 postal, it brings a ~250k for a trip. So that could mean 1.25M a year for each train.

Still less efficient than a plane (since they travel faster), and more bothersome to setup, but again, it was fun to do.
 
I just did something a bit crazy to test rail incomes, and mostly because it was fun to do... I've built a vrey long line with 23 (x2) bridges over the sea, 22 artificial islands. Over 1600 cases, and takes 70 days to travel at 611km/h (and took me the better part of an hour).

Not completely full, 2/3 passengers and 1/3 postal, it brings a ~250k for a trip. So that could mean 1.25M a year for each train.

Still less efficient than a plane (since they travel faster), and more bothersome to setup, but again, it was fun to do.

That can't be right. I did the same on the previous maps and trains were giving me close to 6 million a year each. (I had multiple trains running on the same track)
 

Koren

Member
That can't be right. I did the same on the previous maps and trains were giving me close to 6 million a year each. (I had multiple trains running on the same track)
Hidden parameters somewhere? I think the map was the same size (1024x1024)?

A full train (8x47 passengers, 4x37 parcels) is bringing me 296.900£. I don't think I can go faster (it's the quickest maglev, travelling at fullspeed on the whole track), it's taking more than two month. I may be over 1.5M per train per year, but nowhere near 6M.

Was your line on a diagonal? I'm wondering whether the distance is computed in "manhattan norm" (d= |X-X'|+|Y-Y'| ) while the speed respect the euclidian distance. That could mean traveling the equivalent of 1600 cases in 50 days instead of 70, and since income depends on time, you get lower travel time and possibly higher income.
 
Is yours making only 2 stops? My line was big but made several stops. It basically covered the entire bottom half of the map going by the borders of the map, only turning to stations on coast cities.
 

ksimm

Member
Hmmm I seem to recall the last game one of my Maglev trains was making just over 4mill per year with a very simple track over a fairly long distance.

What year are we in now on the new game. Our higher income could have been down to inflation in much later years.
 

JulianImp

Member
The first few years were quite the challenge, since a single train costing well over US$200,000 (it took me a while to realize I could borrow more money).

After building two or three trains, I was locked in a cycle of waiting until my operating units made enough money to pay for the next one, as I had borrowed the maximum amount already. Luckily, when I logged back in a day later I had more than enough money to cancel out my loan and build whatever I wanted.

By the way, what's the point of renewing old vehicles if breakdowns have been turned off? As far as I know, all age did was drop their reliability back in the original game.
 

Koren

Member
Is yours making only 2 stops? My line was big but made several stops. It basically covered the entire bottom half of the map going by the borders of the map, only turning to stations on coast cities.
Two stops, yes.

It's interesting to note that a far smaller line (500 cases ?) is making a bit more more money.

I put a station a bit before midpoint, it's bringing 162k, so the whole trip is a bit over 300k.

It seems that there's an optimum distance for lines ?
 

JulianImp

Member
Yeah, for each type of cargo there's an in-game graph somewhere that details the income you'll get when you deliver it over a set amount of days. The income goes up for a few days, but after a while it goes back down, meaning there's an optimum time your transports should take to deliver their cargo.

I think the income depends on the amount of tiles traversed as well, so that's why airplanes have such high income rates despite having low capacity (lots of tiles traveled in a very short amount of time).

I still haven't used airplanes, since whenever I've played there have always been quite a few crashes. So far I'm sticking mostly to trains, with a few road vehicles thrown in for short-distance travel.
 

Koren

Member
Many thanks, Metalmurphy, I'll try to study this...

Yeah, for each type of cargo there's an in-game graph somewhere that details the income you'll get when you deliver it over a set amount of days. The income goes up for a few days, but after a while it goes back down, meaning there's an optimum time your transports should take to deliver their cargo.
There is... It doesn't go up, though, it simply decreases over time. But that's for a given number of tile.

I still haven't used airplanes, since whenever I've played there have always been quite a few crashes.
Maybe you used a too small airport? There's a very big chance of crash of big planes in commuter airports, far greater than with a big airport.
 

JulianImp

Member
Maybe you used a too small airport? There's a very big chance of crash of big planes in commuter airports, far greater than with a big airport.
Actually, I haven't built any airplanes in this map so far. It's just that I often see airplane crashes in the in-game news feed.

Today I built a few ships to transport passengers across a small lake with no other activity, and ended up building an awful lot of ferries to keep up with each dock's supply. They turned out to be quite profitable.

It'd be interesting if the next map we played wasn't as flat as the current one, and we could try the game out with reduced breakdowns as well to shake things up. I think trying to find fast routes across a rugged map and making sure your trains don't clog up if one of them breaks down could lead to more interesting transport networks.
 

Koren

Member
Actually, I haven't built any airplanes in this map so far. It's just that I often see airplane crashes in the in-game news feed.
There was a lot of airplanes in the map (several hundreds), and since they have something like a 0.07% "chance" of crash when arriving (5% is the airport is too small for the plane), it's happening regularly, but not so often. That being said, the number is often reduced by 50% in something like 24h.

It's annoying only if you have specific lines with a couple of planes only. You have to remember where the planes were going when you replace them. If you have a big fleet doing a roundtrip of your airports, it's quite easy to manage.
 

RayStorm

Member
May I suggest for the next reboot to maybe increase the maximum station size, perhaps disable airports and (most of all) decrease the penalty for vehicles moving uphill.

Also two more things I don't know to be possible:
1) Start the game in the year Maglevs become available
2) Don't have old vehicles become obsolete
 
May I suggest for the next reboot to maybe increase the maximum station size, perhaps disable airports and (most of all) decrease the penalty for vehicles moving uphill.

Also two more things I don't know to be possible:
1) Start the game in the year Maglevs become available
2) Don't have old vehicles become obsolete

Why I'm not surprised you're asking things like these? :D
I'd like to see breakdowns, instead. And maybe a smaller map, just to make multiplayer a little more interesting (I don't say we should be aggressively competitive, but it would be easier to follow how others are playing). Else, it would almost be the same as playing alone.

That said, I should really stop playing this game. I see signals every time I close my eyes.
 

Koren

Member
A quick question: I have a city receiving food and water that I can't make growing. It also receive a lot of passengers and mail. Is it normal, and is there anything I can do?

May I suggest for the next reboot to maybe increase the maximum station size, perhaps disable airports and (most of all) decrease the penalty for vehicles moving uphill.
I'm now mostly using airports as a range extender for stations ^_^
 
Airplanes are a very easy way to make money, but trains are so much fun!
I decided to experiment a bit, so I created this nice junction (Windwheel Junction, the name came after I created it) to connect four crossing lines (up > down, down > up, left > right, right > left).
I didn't copy a specific layout, but I tried to come up with something myself. It's far from perfect, but it works well enough for me.


^^^ here's a bit clogged, 'cause I was trying to shorten some bridges around it and some trains got lost, but it rapidly unclogged itself.

The first version was this one down here. There's an elevated ring that can reroute trains from any route to any other route. The four "vanes" help trains get some more speed before entering the main route (it's just an illusion, probably)


Then I modified it a bit, adding bridges on the vanes to ready the junction for the next modification.


Since the elevated "ring" can get clogged quite easily, I added an outer ring using the clover junction idea of connecting tracks. Trains still prefer going through the elevated ring, though, but the outer ring helps with avoiding traffic.



And here's the evolution of this junction...

 

Koren

Member
Really nice...

Do you need pathpoints for your trains? (they have to turn left to go right, if I'm not mistaken)

But, when I was looking at Metalmurphy tracks and this design, I don't understand why trains are taking corners without slowing down. Is this because the acceleration rate is set to "original"? I've read that you need the length of the train between two 45° corners in the same direction (left-left or right-right) to avoid slowdowns.

And with realistic acceleration disabled, you must experiment some slowdowns on the central bridge for trains going NE-SW, no?
 
I don't use waypoints, 'cause (I was surprised myself) the pathfinding algorithm works very well with path signals, even without one-way signals (I used some just to make sure trains don't use exits as entrances for the upper ring, but it should work even with simple path signals). I must say that I haven't fully grasped the concept of path signals, thus there are probably some more lights than the necessary. You should be careful in placing depots, though, 'cause they tend to break pathfinding when the trains need servicing.

I don't know about the acceleration settings... If I read the wiki right, speed penalties happen when you have a 90° corner. In the windwheel I have only 45° corners (there's always at least one straight block between corners). Quoting from the wiki "Use at least a one-tile track segment between 45° turns; longer is better" and "S-shape bends do not slow down trains".

In my junction I have some slopes (the upper ring has very short zig-zag entries, which are a big slowdown element) and the two central bridges are indeed slowing down the trains going straight; the long vanes and the large outer ring help avoiding jams, but I know this isn't the perfect solution. I'll try to modify it just a little (tunnels instead of bridges for NE-SW, but I don't know if going down first helps getting more boost for the following slope). It must be noted that every complex junction has to deal with slowdowns, so, as a first attempt, I can't complain too much (and I like the way trains go clockwise in the inner ring and counter-CW in the clover-like outer ring) :D
 
I'm surprised that the original Transport Tycoon (Deluxe) isn't available on GOG or Steam. I know I can get OpenTTD but I'm kinda jonesing to play the original too.
 

Koren

Member
I don't use waypoints, 'cause (I was surprised myself) the pathfinding algorithm works very well with path signals, even without one-way signals
I was asking because I've had problems myself with pathfinding on a simpler ring (the trains have chosen a direction that was going nowhere then stopped). No depot, it was just a ~20 case line with nothing on it, for later purposes.

I don't know about the acceleration settings... If I read the wiki right, speed penalties happen when you have a 90° corner. In the windwheel I have only 45° corners (there's always at least one straight block between corners). Quoting from the wiki "Use at least a one-tile track segment between 45° turns; longer is better" and "S-shape bends do not slow down trains".
The "longer is better" is there because you need at least the train lenght between two 45° turns to avoid slowing down, but I'm sure it's only with "realistic acceleration on". On the map, there is no penalty even if it's 1 case between 45° corners, which surprised me.

In my junction I have some slopes (the upper ring has very short zig-zag entries, which are a big slowdown element) and the two central bridges are indeed slowing down the trains going straight; the long vanes and the large outer ring help avoiding jams, but I know this isn't the perfect solution. I'll try to modify it just a little (tunnels instead of bridges for NE-SW, but I don't know if going down first helps getting more boost for the following slope).
Unfortunately, not really. Not with realistic off, at least. Maybe that would be an interesting option to set in the next reboot.

It must be noted that every complex junction has to deal with slowdowns, so, as a first attempt, I can't complain too much (and I like the way trains go clockwise in the inner ring and counter-CW in the clover-like outer ring) :D
Any efficiency question apart, I find it really, really nice.
 

Koren

Member
Since we're speaking of design issues, one of my best junctions so far :

The idea was to create a junction without slowing downs at all: no up/down and at least 7 cases between two consecutive 45° turns. Problem: the throughput was not great, because some parts were under heavy use. So I added a couple of alternate routes. The result is above, and require a bit of explanation :

> going straight: red line, or alternate pink line if there's high traffic*
> turn right: blue line, or alternate aqua line
> turn left: green line
> U-turn: gray line (shoud avoid if possible, they make a large use of many parts of the junction, and there's a small slowdown near the center for longest trains)

* the opposite may be better, depending on the time lost with the down and up.


Now, I've to put some toughts into entry/exit pre-signals to improve the use of alternate routes under heavy use...


For a simpler design for small use, remove blue lines, pink lines, and the center square. It'll still work at fullspeed (except for U-turns), but it can slowdown trains under high traffic. If there's no penalty with close 45° turns, it can be done in a 10x10 square, maybe 11x11 or 12x12 to leave some room for more signals.
 
I like your use of the square shape as the base for your junction. And it's huge, wow!
Is it online? I'd like to see it in motion, because some intersections seems to be used by many different lines and I'm curious if they are causing some clogging.
 

Koren

Member
Is it online? I'd like to see it in motion, because some intersections seems to be used by many different lines and I'm curious if they are causing some clogging.
No, it isn't, since I haven't been able to join the server today before a couple of minutes ago.

I'm trying to increase the traffic to see if some clogging appear and if I can avoid it with signals.

I will probably try to create it online, maybe after the next "reboot" of server*, or at least a variation if we use the "original" acceleration model.


* when are we starting from scratch again, btw?
 

Koren

Member
I want a scripting language to handle the signals ^_^

The pathfinding make some strange choices sometimes, and it's quite difficult to explain the best usage of a junction even with presignals...
 

Koren

Member
At last, I've managed to find a solution to direct trains with presignal with a small change to the design, and it isn't clogging anymore, even with quite high traffic, and the tunnels/slopes are only used if there's no other solution available (so no slowdowns when there's not a lot of trains crossing at the same time)
 
If that's cool with everyone just let me know, I can reset it to the Snow map now. Steam sales have been keeping me busy so I won't be able to play much.
 

Milchjon

Member
Holy shit, that brings back memories. Second game I ever played. Didn't understand it in the least back then. Time to try again I guess.
 

Koren

Member
If that's cool with everyone just let me know, I can reset it to the Snow map now. Steam sales have been keeping me busy so I won't be able to play much.
I've mostly experimented on the last few days, I must say I'm not so much interested in investing five hours for a mere 3% increase in income, and there's not so many challenging things to do on the map anymore.

So I'm OK with it... And snow map would be an interesting change (mountains as suggested previously could be an additionnal challenge). If Versipellis come back on a new map, that's a huge plus, I enjoyed a lot looking at his networks (and others)

As far as I'm concerned, I would like to participate in the first few hours if possible, so I would prefer avoiding a reset in the next 24h, but that's just me, so feel free to do it anytime you want.
 
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