v1.5 "Lost or bad orders"

[Keiji]

My understanding from the latest blog post is that if you edit a line, or maybe a train's orders, it will mark the runs as "stale" and then the train will have an automatic intervention (which also seems to be free?) to fix it. I experimented a bit and saw this did indeed happen.

But now, after editing a line I find that some of the trains are not just marked "stale run", but also "lost or bad orders". They sit still blocking the track and I have to manually issue an intervention.

Why don't these carry on to the end of their run, or just have an automatic intervention immediately? It's annoying having to manually fix these. At least I can filter the train list to "Only with warnings", but it doesn't happen immediately so I have to let the game run for a while until no more appear.

Edit: filtering isn't great because it doesn't update automatically... I have to change the filter to something else then back again for the new warning to show up.

[Yonsef86]

I found that too recently, but believe me it's already a lot improved compared to earlier in the beta.

I think the trains that go to lost or bad order somehow cannot continue their stale run. Not sure exactly how that works, but I have a theory:

-- the station number is fixed in the train order, so it knows that after arriving at the next station (#17) it has to continue to station #18 for example.
So if you change the number of stops in a line this has crazy consequences for the stale run.
-- Recently I made a line longer. My lines are two-ways, so this meant that on the way back the station numbers have changed now. If you would make it longer on the side of the first station, then there would even be a new #1 so then all the numbers will be different.
I noticed stale trains suddenly felt the need to go a random station far away. Probably they still continued from (for example) #17 to #18, just the station which was #18 had changed.
-- When I made a line shorter, I found a train that had a lost/bad order for seemingly no reason. My theory is, if the line had 20 stations, and you reduce it to 15, then the train going from #17 to #18 cannot continue the stale run and will block the track because it cannot find station #18. Even if the physical station which was #18 still is in the line.

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This is just one way I think this can happen, there can be other causes of course.

To Carlos I would say, that I am very happy already that he created this midway solution in the beta before. Yet this shows that it's not full proof yet.
The point is not that players would want to change timetables all the time during the day, but rather that there is no feasible way to change lines or timetables in a realistic way during downtime. Because when trains are having downtime at the depot, the next morning order is already enshrined in their system.
If there was a possibility to reset orders during downtime without the trains going stale, then all problems with stale trains would be the responsibility of the players trying to change schedule during the day. But as it is, the players have no option to do it in a realistic way.

That said, I think, for the time being, the current situation is workable. And big respect to you for the way you are handling this project.

[Weird and Wry]

Trains have always been capable of recovering from many line edits since line stop platforms were unique. But enough players complained during 1.5 beta that I removed that uniqueness restriction. This also disabled the train AI code to recover lost trains when the line changes, since it was based on destination matching, and in 1.5 it is no longer true that when knowing a train destination platform you can always find its position in the line. So trains must exclusively depend on the stop index to know where they are in a line.

[Yonsef86]

Originally posted by Weird and Wry:

Trains have always been capable of recovering from many line edits since line stop platforms were unique. But enough players complained during 1.5 beta that I removed that uniqueness restriction. This also disabled the train AI code to recover lost trains when the line changes, since it was based on destination matching, and in 1.5 it is no longer true that when knowing a train destination platform you can always find its position in the line. So trains must exclusively depend on the stop index to know where they are in a line.

Yes I recognize this. Stale trains moving to strange stops did not happen in older beta versions.

[Keiji]

Originally posted by Weird and Wry:

Trains have always been capable of recovering from many line edits since line stop platforms were unique. But enough players complained during 1.5 beta that I removed that uniqueness restriction. This also disabled the train AI code to recover lost trains when the line changes, since it was based on destination matching, and in 1.5 it is no longer true that when knowing a train destination platform you can always find its position in the line. So trains must exclusively depend on the stop index to know where they are in a line.

Ohh that makes sense. Count me among those who are happy with being able to assign a stop to a line multiple times by the way. :)

Would it be troublesome to, as before, search for the station/platform a train was already heading for in the line, and if multiple are found just pick an arbitrary one of those? That would at least mean the train would head to a sensible place, rather than head for some unrelated station (as others have been finding) or getting stuck (in my case).

[adlet]

Where I have seen going to a random off-station was a bit different fact pattern, and I wonder if you may have actually had it too. When you change the line the orders and therefore the timetable are automatically updated. If you do it in the middle of the day, instead of the train going from station #7 to #8 on run #4, now it is supposed to be going, for example, from station #13 to station #14 on run #3.

So the train auto-finds a way to get to station #14, and if this requires a turnaround, the shortest way to find a reversing platform or a loop may well be away from the line. Even though in concept it could simply accelerate or slow down and continue on the line to eventually reach station #14.

I once reassigned a train from one line to another and then deleted the first line as I no longer needed it. Unfortunately the train was still on it for this "stale" run. Since the line did not exist anymore, the train was stuck and required manual intervention. I suspect a similar thing could happen if the train is trying to reach a station on the line that no longer exists on that line. This is even if the train was not at the moment of change going to that line - simply because the timetable has changed when you updated the line.

Bottom line.... I would not make any changes to the line while any trains are running it.