Juanjo wrote:JacobD88 wrote:... if the train length changes during the servicing, you can cause some problems with signalling...
I am afraid I may be wrong about that. I think vehicle length doesn't change in station refitting. So... no problems with train length and servicing at stations.
Sadly vehicle length changes on refitting with a few GRF sets; sometimes due to intentionally representing the differences between cargoes and other times simply down to mistakes with the sprites. It's still something that needs to be planned for and patched accordingly with a solution just to eliminate the chance of any problems as we shouldn't rely solely on expecting every GRF sprite for each cargo to stay the same length when refitted nor should we force GRF creators into planning for such an end.
@Eddi i agree, the underlying problem needs to be fixed. I'll have a think as to ways this may be done.
Off the top of my head here's the main issues that were holding myself and racetrack back all those years ago (In no particular order) that went beyond the simply changes to allow servicing/refitting at stations via a trains orders.
1) Vehicles leaving and reappearing on tracks affecting signalling/pathfinder and leading to collisions
2) Creating a standardised set of definitions for station tile types allowing for the addition of "Servicing"/"Refit" tiles, "Full Train Creation/Management"/"Full Depot" tiles as well as clarifying all other existing station tile types (track and non-track) as not allowing such features. Also, how would this affect existing station sets?
3) A clean solution to managing mixed tile stations:
- What happens when a station contains both sets of tile types?
- What happens if you have a track that includes a "gap" in a series of tiles E.g. Normal-Service-Service-Service-Normal-Service-Service? Does that track act as two independent points of entry/re-entry into a stations "depot" or does it count as one? How about Service-Service-Service-NonTrack-Service-Service-Service? Two separate "depots"?
- A Mechanism to detect and treat each track in a station as a separate "depot" or combine all "depots" in a station as one according to the users wishes whilst considering the above scenario. We conceived a situation where non-track tiles/buffer tiles could be used to break up sections, as well as adding a further station tile type to such ends, but never even began to code this feature as we didn't have a clean solution to all the perceived problems with it
4) A clean way of being able to quickly select between the "Station" features you normally get when clicking on a station and a "Depot"/"Servicing" set of functions. We had thought about single-click selecting the station as normal, shift-click or alt-click selecting the depot functions if you clicked on a tile registered as a "Service" or "Depot" tile
5) Making it easy to select between "Drive-Thru" Depot tiles (such as racetrack created) and "One Side-Entry Depot" tiles such as the half tiled sprites earlier i created in this thread in addition to the usual station "Track" and "Non-Track" styled depots. The best way we foresaw to do this was by releasing a patch, and accompanying GRF, that added both the functional features as well as the basic sprites based on the OpenGFX defaults and modified accordingly. GRF creators could then specify alternative sprites with their own files (Such as an updated version of my Bigger Depots GRF)
6) Keeping any new UI elements clean and easy to understand to new users and people already (O)TTD veterans; if we were to add all the "Ideal" Servicing Station features we'd be looking at a lot of new menus and alternate keys, it could get very complicated very easily and we'd want to avoid that whilst still adding as many "ideal" functions as possible.
There's many more minor problems, but these were the main ones IIRC
