Control "Full-Load" at Station rather than at Vehicle level

[papatech]

Greetings.
I've read and I've searched. I'm not much of a programmer - but...

Here's my suggestion;

Control vehicle loads by setting a station-wide override. Say, setting station to hold and load all vehicles until they are (slide-bar adjustable?) 50% full, 25%, 75%, etc. so that vehicles don't leave empty or near empty.

I'm looking forward to everyone's thoughts.

-C

[FooBar]

What happens if a train comes in and only needs to drop something off? That train would be sitting in the station forever, because there's nothing to load it again.

[daniel3ub]

Well, the idea about the % full is good, even if applied on vehicle basis.
"left the station if is ??% full"

[Niek]

What happens if a train comes in and only needs to drop something off? That train would be sitting in the station forever, because there's nothing to load it again.

Maybe make an exception for trains with 'unload' orders, which would have to mean you'd always have to set 'unload' especially, of course.

[Yexo]

Say you have the following: a train with 2 coal wagons and 4 passengers wagons. That train arrives empty a station connected to a coal mine but nothing else. The full load percentage from that station is 50%. What should the train do:
1) Stay forever, it can't load 50% of the train.
2) Load 2 wagons with coal, as that's closest to 50%.
3) Load 1 coal wagon, 50% of all wagons that could be loaded.

As you see, it's far from intuitive what happens when a wrong trains enters a station.

[Toni Babelony]

I'd rather like to see an option for partially unloading than an option for partial loading. IIRC there was such an option in the MiniIN at that time... Very convenient IMO.

For example:
A train with vehicles (ECS vectors in which they are quite sparse) has to visit a few stations on a line and drops off a few percent of vehicles each time or a train with goods that visits a few towns and drops off a few percent at a time.

[k428]

Simply make an option on the station entitled "Partial Load." The user would then select the percentage of how much of each cargo to load and unload. The slider idea is one option, but a simple percentage dialog for each cargo might work better. This way, there would be no confusion about how much of any cargo to load. A similar option could be made for unload.

It would be really cool if I could start doing partial loads! Currently I have to estimate how much of the train can be filled in "days" and set the timetable accordingly. This is a huge pain, and it is not an exact science...

[athanasios]

Come on dudes, no need to argue. We all understand it is a nice feature and needs a lot of work to cover all cases.

[papatech]

This variable loading came to mind while observing the behavior of airplanes at airports.
I see the disadvantage of controlling the loading levels for releasing a vehicle and I see the advantages of control the traffic through releasing a vehicle from the station based on a time table.

A need to release a vehicle is (IMO) absolutely necessary when an industry dries up, when a city no longer accepts a certain cargo (it's happened to me). Maybe I'm missing something but the only way to catch a dried up industry is by monitoring your vehicle list and sorting by profits whereas you'll see there is a problem if your vehicles are in the red for this year or rather the last year profits. Another painful indicator of a problem is when you notice your graphs for profit and cargo delivery plummet.

Another example to express a need is when you have Iron Ore delivered to a Steel Mill. If the Ore delivery levels drop off you may have all your tracks blocked by trains waiting for Steel thus creating the backup. In this nightmare scenario, a control for releasing trains with a partial load is necessary to keep the traffic flowing. My "fix" for this scenario was to create a waypoint for steel carrying trains and have them cue up on a separate track (consumes a lot of real-estate) snaking back and forth to accomodate the dozens of trains.

Having a timetable or cargo load level based release from station are not fixes for a dried up industry and severe profit loss but when an industry is nearby a city, this will reduce the loss of profit by (ex.) not having 12 coal carrying trains block all tracks from a passenger train pulling in. Again, another catch would be to zoom out and see where your traffic jams are.

Or, is the only solution for vehicle loading and station blockage simply to not have "full load" toggled on?

There has got to be a better way..

Well, I'm pleased enough that this idea for variable loading and release from station got some attention.
I'm not much of a programmer but i'm pretty good at crash course self education.

While I'm looking for the doors to open to get into programming for openttd, does anyone have any pointers that may help me expedite this endeavor??

[Aylo]

There was such a feature in MiniIN, where you just had the full load option with a parameter, how much the train has to load (10% to 100% in 10% steps). The patch must still be anywhere in this forum.

I don't understand the problem, when a train never reaches the 50%. When a train never reaches this limit, then just don't give him the order. (has always been so, that when you sayed to a passenger train, it has to full load at a coal mine, that the train never will get the 100%)

mfg,
Aylomen

[Ameecher]

For example:
A train with vehicles (ECS vectors in which they are quite sparse) has to visit a few stations on a line and drops off a few percent of vehicles each time or a train with goods that visits a few towns and drops off a few percent at a time.

I was about to come and suggest something like this. I have exactly this case where I have a goods train that I'd like to load to full then have it unload x amount at stations along the route rather than having lots of small trains that take up more network space.

[k428]

When a train has no specific orders for a station, it just fills until there is no more cargo coming. Maybe there could be an option to "Fill to no greater than x%." This would either fill up to the given percentage and leave, or simply leave once the flow of cargo stopped.

[Frostregen]

To prevent steel and goods trains from piling up and blocking the mainline, I build overflow depots.
Of course you still have to separate steel and goods from the dropping lines, but this removes the tracks for train buffering.

See image. (for higher throughput you can extend this layout to 3 parallel depots)