Trains, tunnels and signals

[Jubilee]

Tunnels (for trains) are fine. It's fun to be able to build a 60-block tunnel (really, why not a 100 or 150-block one? Too much?). A small issue though. How do you place signals inside tunnels, so that trains waiting at the beginning of the tunnel do not have to wait for a preceding train to cross the whole 60 blocks in order for them to enter the tunnel? Ok, apart from the obvious one (cut the tunnel in pieces - lower the ground - so that some parts are in the open air and place signals there).

Would it be possible to have a setting to automatically place signals inside tunnels, every X blocks when the tunnel is larger than Y blocks? Also, would it be possible to have transparency for tunnels (i.e. hide the ground above them so that vehicles are visible)?

[mak]

Signals in tunnells and bridges available in JGR patch pack via settings.

[Redirect Left]

For what you're describing, you will need a patch pack, I believe its still not in vanilla, and honestly at this point I wouldn't suggest vanilla to anyone, patchpacks often have far more features available that, even to an average user, are pretty neat & useful and appealing to play OTTD to start with. They tend to also be more frequently updated than vanilla, at the risk of more bugs which are also usually minor and fixed pretty quickly. The most well known and possibly used at this time I believe will be JGR's patchpack you can see here - viewtopic.php?t=73469 - it has a big list of extra things on the first post there. Patchpacks are usually easy to install too, you just download and place the folder on your system (this is my experience with JGR's at least). Using JGR's you can also see trains in tunnels, as well as signals on tunnel & bridges. There are other patch packs, but I have no experience with them personally.

If you use a popular patchpack, and run into any problems, no matter how large or minor, we can usually give assistance pretty quickly in the thread for each patch pack.

[kamnet]

... and honestly at this point I wouldn't suggest vanilla to anyone, patchpacks often have far more features available...

And I'm at the opposite end, I would never suggest a patch pack to a player until they've mastered everything that unmodified OpenTTD client offers. I've seen far too many players who have little to no understanding of the basic game be nudged into patch packs, then become completely lost not only when they are playing the patch pack, but equally lost when they switch back to unmodified OpenTTD to play in multiplayer because there are so few multiplayer patch pack servers running on the same version.

[Jubilee]

but equally lost when they switch back to unmodified OpenTTD to play in multiplayer because there are so few multiplayer patch pack servers running on the same version.

Well, this is not my case (i'm usually playing the "standalone" version) but i have to agree with you here. This is indeed an issue with patches. I had faced it quite some time ago, when i had added some patches globally, started a new game and later on i wanted to remove them. Simply not possible. As you said, patches is something that in order to use, a user must know what he is doing.

In any case, mak and Redirect Left's proposal is something i'll certainly check out and see how it goes. Thanks all for your input.

EDIT: Perhaps it's time to checkout all existing patches and have a discussion (i'm talking about the developers mainly) if some of them (or parts of them) could possibly be included in the vanilla version???

[kamnet]

EDIT: Perhaps it's time to checkout all existing patches and have a discussion (i'm talking about the developers mainly) if some of them (or parts of them) could possibly be included in the vanilla version???

This discussion actually happens regularly, weekly even. Nearly all of the new features that OpenTTD has added over the last several years were started as patches which have received enough improvements and updates to be considered both useful and stable. Much of that is driven by the patches being picked up by patch packs such as the JGR Patch Pack and CityMania Client. Patch developers are also frequent contributors to the OpenTTD source code.

[Jubilee]

This discussion actually happens regularly, weekly even. Nearly all of the new features that OpenTTD has added over the last several years were started as patches which have received enough improvements and updates to be considered both useful and stable. Much of that is driven by the patches being picked up by patch packs such as the JGR Patch Pack and CityMania Client. Patch developers are also frequent contributors to the OpenTTD source code.

Great. Thanks for the info. I'll go and check the two patches you mentioned. Seem interesting...