[OpenTTD] NuTracks - Dev Thread

[Wahazar]

Doesn't sound that unreasonable for a high-speed line halfway across a 2048x2048 map - but I don't really play much at the moment, so I might be wrong here.

Basically steepness of all maintenance cost multipliers seems to be unjustified high.
Income of railway line is proportional to its maximal speed, or at least, to square of maximal speed.
Therefore, change of maintenance costs should not exceed change of income,
in other case, using high speed line become less profitable than low speed one.
Your change coefficient is 2.75x
Speed change 80 to 125 km/h is 1.56x, 125 to 180 is 1.44, 180 to 230 is 1.28...
Even if squared, it is still less then 2.75.
I suggest to put just 2x instead of 2.75x in maintenance costs.
Construction cost are OK.

[oberhümer]

Actually, looking at this graph and the associated wiki page, the income increase for high speeds is less than linear at probably any distance (this is 500 tiles):

Doesn't really feel right to me, but balancing issues I guess... maybe move the change coefficient all the way down to 1.5x then?
And is the additional maintenance cost factor for added catenary/third rail low enough? The idea is, of course, that on heavily frequented lines the increase in track maintenance costs is paid off by the reduction in engine maintenance costs.

[Wahazar]

This is income from one run, higher speed allow to achieve more runs in given time.
On the other side, higher speed is strongly affected by curves, slopes, stops etc.
You are right, 1.5 factor should be fine.
Catenary usually is more expensive in maintenance, however difference between electric and diesel locomotives is not very significant (except maybe power).
It need carefull study and test with different locomotive sets.
By now, just take 1.5 factor related to speed and make equal maintenance for electrified and non-electrified lines.

EDIT: increased maintenance cost of catenary can be justified, if base running cost are lower for electric then diesel and steam one.

[ens]

I haven`t found answers to these questions:


Is it possible to use nuTracks along with NewMonorail, WIRES and TransRapid newgrfs?

Is it possible to turn off the metro tracks? Is there a version of nuTracks without metro tracks?

[YNM]

No, NuTracks takes all the available slot for railtype (ie. electrified, unelectrified, or within NuTracks electrified and unelectrified with it's respective max. speeds) so either they won't show up or NuTracks won't show up. And I guess you can't eliminate the metro tracks... Haven't played a game with this grf for a long time so I'm not sure !

[Ben1338]

Can you give the option to disable the planning track via parameters? That track seems to mess up AI.

Also, the planning track doesn't seem to have any icons in the tool bar, which makes them hard to build with.

[Sankeyao]

Don't know if this has been reported before, I couldn't find the issue tracker for this newGRF. I've found a few little sprite bugs in the nutracks r277 release (the latest I could download) concerning the connection alignment of rails (excluding maglev):

Case 1:
Vertical rail lines, upon becoming a junction in the 2 positions shown (right-down and right-up), don't line up correctly with original straight rails. Only the Very High Speed rail type maintained correct rail connections (a bit hard to see with the catenary).

case 1.png

(52.87 KiB) Downloaded 9 times

Case 2:
Horizontal lines have every alternating tile misaligned. This time the Very High Speed rail had every 2nd tile replaced with the sprite of the High Speed rail, giving a zipper effect.

case 2.png

(34.59 KiB) Downloaded 9 times

Other than those little graphical niggles, these tracks are amazing to play with. Certainly gives the train infrastructure game a fun new level of planning and thinking (especially the huge financial jump from High to Very High speed rails)!

[oberhümer]

Dusted off the code, fixed glitches and adjusted costs (2x) as requested.
edit: issue tracker

[Wahazar]

Is it possible to have online-content access to this newgrf?
I would like to intensively test it on my multiplayer server.

BTW, in old 1.1.2 version there is bug: very low speed electrified track have 2x larger maintenance cost then any other type (all other have this same, low). Probably no maintenance was defined and therefore first two types have default maintenance costs.

[Voyager One]

very low speed electrified track have 2x larger maintenance cost then any other type

I don't see this as a bug. You lay cheap and bad tracks and it will soon fall apart and you'll need to repair it often...

Just joking...

[oberhümer]

I'll upload it as NuTracks 2 as soon as I manage to change the GRF ID (can't build nmlc right now, so can't really test), ans possibly start a new thread for it.

[NekoMaster]

I'll upload it as NuTracks 2 as soon as I manage to change the GRF ID (can't build nmlc right now, so can't really test), ans possibly start a new thread for it.

Why change the GRF ID? Shouldn't we make it so that you can't load NuTracks v1 and v2 together? wont that cause some problems if you tried to use them both?

[Morgs]

Can someone explain why Dual Volatge does not appear when the other 2 electric lines are available when using UKRS2?

[oberhümer]

Why change the GRF ID? Shouldn't we make it so that you can't load NuTracks v1 and v2 together? wont that cause some problems if you tried to use them both

Well, that's not very convincing, but I think I'll keep the old ID anyway. The new version isn't fundamentally different to the old one (except perhaps that planning and metro tracks need to be loaded via aeparate GRFs), so I don't see much value in separating the two.
Dual voltage tracks do appear with UKRS2 in the new version, which will be uploaded to BaNaNaS momentarily. Note that it's incompatible to the old version.

[oberhümer]

And done.

[MladenNinkovic]

I just saw that the new version came out but when i started up a new game very low speed rail is at the bottom of the list and i am used to it being the default choice wouldnt really say its bug but it is annoying.

[oberhümer]

All right, track types will be sorted standard gauge-narrow gauge-monorail/maglev and rising in speed in the next release. Not too much effort.

[Targaff]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't see another mention of it and it's only happening if I'm using NuTracks: are some of the tracks seem misaligned in the new version?

[oberhümer]

I thought I had fixed that, but everything except very high speed is still misaligned... Now fixed.

[oberhümer]

Track type sorting is now implemented.