After a few months of being hands off with both OTTD and the online community, I was amazed to find this implimentation here. Simple proactive efforts like this make the game delightful, and really bring character to the community that surrounds this game. I was also pleasantly surprised with progress in my favorite projects and in trunk, but this caught me completely off guard. So thanks to Ms. Ayanami for having the inspiration and initiative to realize this. I hope the project progresses gracefully toward candidacy for trunk inclusion.
This patch got me to play around with OTTD again, but so far its just been experimenting with one network, centered on a hub with mainlines extending in two directions. I have been trying to use precise scheduling and the departure board to manage congestion, and allow express and local services on the same line. To maintain an acurate idea of where an express is relative to the locals that you want it to pass, it is helpful to schedule it as "non-stop via" at all of the stations that it will skip. However, this then leads to the "via" order showing up in large face on the departure board. While this is true, I find it spoils the effect of the board GUI, as express services become significantly represented by the stations they skip, where this would be more natural for local service nominclature. The problem is that TTD's "via" order is not exactly congruous with how this language is used on literature intended for passengers.
It would be nice if "via" was only used to denote a significant stop a vehicle made along the way to its terminus, however I can think of no good way to implement this.
Consider the following arangement: a rail line between A and E with smaller towns b, c, and d, along the route. The line is served by Local trains making all stops, rapid trains stoping only ant A, c, and E, and express trains going non-stop from A to E. vX represents an order to go nonstop via X.
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Line: A---b---c---d---E
Local: A---b---c---d---E
Rapid: A--vb---c--vd---E
Express: A--vb--vc--vd---E
My suggested behavior would be this:
Local: Station E, calling at b, c, d, E
Rapid: Station E, via c, calling at c, E
Express: Station E, calling at E
Practically, it might be better to omit the "via" alltogether, but if it is posssible to walk through the order list, and on finding a via order, count to the next revenue stopping station, listing that on the board instead could be interesting.
I have a few other ideas for this as well, but I feel the above is most relevant to my experience with the patch so far.
Best,