Additional Rail Types

[Transportman]

I was going to give a response, but then I saw kamnet's response, which says it perfectly.

@Translink: just curious, why is this idea so great that it absolutely has to be part of the base game and that adding this feature through NewGRFs is not enough?

[Sylf]

Adding my curiosity to transportsman's

What does adding rail types to the core game give us, when there are no default vehicles that can take advantage of them?
OpenTTD has been designed carefully so one can play with Transport Tycoon Deluxe graphics.
As soon as we start adding more rail types and vehicle types, we'll be breaking this backward compatibility. That, to me, is a very huge point.

[planetmaker]

I do believe the core game has already 4 different railtypes, so quite something to choose from. So how should the railtypes in the core game look different?
And why exactly that way you describe and not like what SwedishRails / NuTracks / DutchRails / SMITS / Vacuum tubes / wires / NUTS /... look like?

[Translink]

[quote|kamnet]Please lay out a list of all the many great and doable ideas that have been smothered because of the NewGRF system.[/quote]
Diagonal level crossings were proposed, but instead we were directed to an outdated patch.
I do believe improving the level crossing algorithm was also a proposition some time back, and Lt. Joker has managed to fix it in his patch, yet it hasn't been added to the base game?
When playing OpenTTD you have the choice between either Trams or Trolleybuses, you can't have both, thanks to the fact that they are clashing NewGRFs. Some people thought it was a good idea to put them in the game to make the gameplay more versatile and allow you to run both trams and Trolleybuses, as many towns and cities do, but we were told that there already is a NewGRF for it.
Rotating Airports were also shelved under the NewGRF excuse, yet once again, Lt Joker proved that it is very doable.

[Eddi]

... none of these even have remotely the causality you imply

[Leanden]

Well rotated airports are already in trunk (and useable with OpenGFX+ Landscape), but the original game did not include graphics for the airport rotations so it cant become a default part of the game.

diagnoal crossings has in no way been affected at all by NewGRFs, but a) its buggy due to the nature of how diagonal railways are placed and therefore not stable for trunk, and also once again b) there are no graphics for this in the base game.

In fact you have kindly highlighted two features that explicitly require NewGRFs in order to implement them. So tell mr again how they are smothering development.

As for trolleybuses and trams, im sure if you can come up with a roadtypes patch for the game the devs will be very eager to look at it, as noone has succeeded over the last 10 years to make it work.

[Pyoro]

And to make things complete, the level crossing patch basically fixes one situation where RVs get killed by trains, but creates another. Whether they happen with the same probability pretty much depends on your play-style (and where you place your PBS signals ^^).

Personally I wouldn't mind seeing the patch in trunk but it's not like it fixes all the problems - that'd need a patch that would create "real" multi-track level crossings (not a sequence of level crossings).