Automatic station orders screw up orders list

[Sushifresser]

Hi people,

since I've updated my OpenTTD portable to version 1.1.0 I played a short match last days. Soon I spotted the "new" feature of automatic station orders get shown in the Orders list of vehicles or trains and so on. First thought, well is great for debugging, but then I tried to build something more special than just delivering cargo from A to B.
I sent my trains circling around to choose a free pickup-station-platform for themselves. So the trains have to make a decision. Of course this is why I cant give them fixed station orders, because they have to choose a free one.
So they only get the order to cirlce around for the next waypoint. Normally they choose a free platform for loading cargo, pass the checkpoint, check if they are full-loaded and then decide where to drive on. This idea is built after the wiki-article by MARK. By the way great thanks for this genious idea of yours.
When releasing the trains out of the depot they find their path and collect the automatic station orders in the shared orders list. The adressed order of the conditional order of course jumps downward for the needed ammount of rows. But as soon as some trains change the orders in the first lines everything gets difficult. The conditional order isnt correctly calculated and the number of the line changes. So the trains jump to the false order. They don't pass the stations as whished anymore an the whole system gets useless.
At first I guessed its a problem with the portable version of OpenTTD I use. Downloaded latest stable OpenTTD 1.1.0 and tried again. Same problem...
I attached a savegame for OpenTTD 1.1.0 where I built a sample track and predefined all orders.
I'd be very thankfull if someone could take a look at this and tell me, how to fix this issue.
But please keep in mind, i don't necessarily want to change the track-layout. I'm mainly looking for some fix of the false numbering of conditional orders. If anyone is able to implement a switch in the options where player can decide, whether automatic station orders shall be created/shown it would be worth a patch or even to be included in the upcoming release of OpenTTD.
Sometimes a new feature destroys some of good old working ones. That's sad but I'm sure someone is able to cure this little flaw...

[planetmaker]

Automatic orders DO NOT influence at all where a vehicle goes. That's why they're now called "implicit orders"; they merely record where the vehicle stops on its way while carrying out the orders it got.

In 1.1.0 there were sometimes inserted too many implicit orders, though - which cluttered the order view. And when there were too many of these implicit orders the vehicles could skip the real orders. This has both been fixed in 1.1.1-RC1.

[Sushifresser]

Yep, I know that they don't influence pathfinding directly. The problem I was trying to point out is, that in version 1.1.0 normal orders (more precisely, the refered order-lines of conditional jumps) got cluttered by the huge amount of automatic orders appearing and disappearing in the list.
I just tried the same thing with 1.1.1 RC1 and no problem occured. So the reason for all this mess seems to be cleared. Thanks for the tipp of using this new version. Now that this is working fine I'm really getting a fan of automatic station orders or, as they seem to be called now, "implicit orders". Nice thing to see, where trains drive along. Good for debugging tracks, also simply interesting...
Now I just need to wait until a portable version of 1.1.1 is available and building can continue...
Gonna keep my fingers crossed for a soon release of the new stable version.

Greets and thanks
Sushifresser

[planetmaker]

Now I just need to wait until a portable version of 1.1.1 is available and building can continue...
Gonna keep my fingers crossed for a soon release of the new stable version.

What do you call a 'portable version'? OpenTTD is portable without any modification. Just unzip OpenTTD onto your USB stick (or whereever), put the base graphics files into the accompaning data dir next to the binary and you're set... Or what do you need more?

Btw, we also have a bug tracker. Thus if you find bugs (like the one reported here), that's the usually better place. There the true bugs won't be forgotten. Of course this forum is a good place, if you're not actually sure

[Lord Aro]

planetmaker: probably something to do with this: http://portableapps.com/apps/games/openttd_portable

Sushifresser: for the record, you can get OpenTTD from the official site here: http://www.openttd.org (along with planetmaker's suggestions in the above post)

[Sushifresser]

Downloading the archive from the homepage and unzipping it onto my USB-Stick was the first thing I tried to make this game portable. Didn't read the readme-file ... as always... and got an error when trying to start the game. This made me looking around for a solution and I downloaded the portable version from portableapps.com. This worked fine and the whole apps-suite from this webpage is absolutely comfortable.
Now that you wrote how to make the original OpenTTD portable I tried it again after reading the readme-file and it worked. Thanks for that!

[LMB]

Yep, I know that they don't influence pathfinding directly. The problem I was trying to point out is, that in version 1.1.0 normal orders (more precisely, the refered order-lines of conditional jumps) got cluttered by the huge amount of automatic orders appearing and disappearing in the list.
Greets and thanks
Sushifresser

I'm with 1.1.1, and "Implicit orders" are still pointles, and in my way of doing things. Try to change the route when you have 40 stations in the timetable instead of e.g. 6.

Why not add an option to disable them?

[planetmaker]

Yep, I know that they don't influence pathfinding directly.

Try to change the route when you have 40 stations in the timetable instead of e.g. 6.

Yes, what about that? Please explain. I change the explicit orders... and what else?

[Sushifresser]

well maybe he just means that all the implicit orders in the list make the whole thing a little unclear. As I said often I think implicit orders are GREAT for debugging tracks, no doubt. But in SOME cases when you've got an order's list that's allready quite full, then the implicit orders let everything look a little messy. So in my eyes it would be the cleverst solution to simply implement an option in the advanced game options where implicit orders can be hidden in the orders lists. This way everybody can turn them off and on as liked. Maybe this can be done via a downloadable online content. Don't know if thats possible.
any other suggestions? ....

[Transportman]

well maybe he just means that all the implicit orders in the list make the whole thing a little unclear. As I said often I think implicit orders are GREAT for debugging tracks, no doubt. But in SOME cases when you've got an order's list that's allready quite full, then the implicit orders let everything look a little messy. So in my eyes it would be the cleverst solution to simply implement an option in the advanced game options where implicit orders can be hidden in the orders lists. This way everybody can turn them off and on as liked. Maybe this can be done via a downloadable online content. Don't know if thats possible.
any other suggestions? ....

The downloadable online content is not for updating OpenTTD to a newer version or providing new settings. Implementing such a setting to enable/disable automatic/implicit orders will go via nightly->testing->stable. I think such a setting should be like it is for service intervals: Advanced set the default value, but it can be modified for every individual vehicle.

[Lord Aro]

I have to say, i think a way of hiding the implicit orders would be good, if only to stop all these 'bug' reports