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update 1.
(semi) Complete List of Bugs and Usability Issues in Train Fever.
Updated to version 4831.
Graphical Bugs:
1. Vehicles with connecting rods ( such as steam engines or crocodile ) do not animate their connecting rods when being manually sent to a depot.
2. Bogies of TFV and DualStox do not follow the trackage correctly. This is most visible in tight curves.
3. Road vehicles are often not correctly aligned to roads. This makes them ride above the surface of the road, or sunken beneath the asphalt.
4. Vehicles with doors open all doors regardless of the side the platform the vehicle is stopped at.
5. Wheels of the A 3/5 steam engine are not round.
6. The Walshaerts/Heusinger valve gear on steam locomotives ( BR75 or A4 ) is not correctly animated. The valve gear in the game works differently then it is presented in game.
7. Roads in cities sometimes get adjusted to really awkward slope angles. Buses climbing 45* slope look very weird.
8. Track sections are often connected at an awkward angle ( not smoothly ). Usually near a railroad crossing. This makes rail vehicles jump when traversing such break of smoothness.
9. Locomotives which emit particles ( smoke, steam ) should not do so when stopped at a light.
10. Steam locomotives should not emit smoke from their cylinders when speed is above 5km/h. In reality steam from cylinders comes from pressure equalisation valves which are opened during a slow speed riding to protect locomotive from damage.
11. Electric locomotives with several pantographs should always ride with rearmost raised. On real railroads locomotives run with rear pantograph raised because that protects the machinery on the locomotive roof from damage if the pantograph breaks or gets torn off for whatever reason.
12. Shadowing distance is too short when camera has a very shallow angle ( looking parallel to the ground). This makes shadows flicker and seem appear suddenly at a distance.
13. Roads are drawn with very low polycount.
14. Near Clipping Plane placed in a way that clips away some parts of the viewed object.
15. Vehicles created by “Emu” consists with “reverse” property ( such as TGV or TwinDexx ) do not reverse their icons in build train window.
16. BE 5/6 Cobra is too long to fit tram stations. When stopped it overhangs the tram stop.
17. Floor of the depots is grass, should be concrete or similar.
18. Tunnel portals for 4 lane road tunnels is incorrect, makes vehicles on the outmost lanes run into a brick wall.Usability Issues:
1. There is no info about crucial gameplay elements:
– train length ( in carriages and metres ), both in build new train and replacement window
– train vehicle length
– average speed and average round trip time of a given line between each stop
– length of placed piece of track or road
– incline of placed piece of track or road
– curvature of place piece track or road
– no visualization of “main connections” is given
– industry increased/decreased its maxiumum production
– track and road speed limits
– track and road incline
– track and road horizontal plane curvature
– production of goods/freight should be expressed in production / time unit
– no info is given about speed limits and/or differences between narrow/wide/4 lane roads, as well as between country and urban roads. Rail tracks at least display a little speed limit sign when being placed. No such info for roads.
– no info is given about speed limits between normal and HSR track.
– no info about station capacities.
– when a vehicle is introduced, no info about its statistics is given.
– no info is given about new roads or electrification being available.
– line capacity ( amount of freight theoretically movable ) per default period
– line usage ( % of capacity actually used ) per default period
– currently waiting agents, and average wait time for a given line
– station throughput ( cargo moved per time period )
– average load % of a given line
– all lines which stop at a station
– train or truck is lost ( displays No Path ) is not messaged to player.
– tally of goods destinations produced by a given industry, Something like:Tiverton Forest: Production: 312 / yr, Maximum: 400 / yr
Destinations:
– Crewe Sawmill: 240 / yr
– Battle Sawmill: 72 / yrCrewe Sawmill: Production: 240 / yr, Maximum 400 / yr
Destinations:
– Crewe: 120 / yr
– Battle: 80 / yr
– Looe: 40 / yr– tally of passanger destinations from a given city. Something like:
Tiverton: population 1000
Destinations:
– Tiverton: 425
– Battle: 160
– Hunstanton: 120
– Crewe: 120
– Looe: 50
– Hedon: 75
– Newbury: 502. Too much info is shown at times:
– Running costs ( red floating numbers )
– Sound of a cash machine when income is generated
3. Game is inconsistent with its use of time. Sometimes it is expressed in years/months/days ( train age ), sometimes in minutes/seconds ( frequency ), sometimes not at all ( industry production ). Be consistent.
4. No info is provided how to convert years/months/days into realtime.
5. The “20 minute rule” is not messaged anywhere in the game.
6. When saving a game it is possible to overwrite an existing savegame since no protection is given.
7. Not possible to turn off snapping of built structures ( such as stations ), which is annoying when one wants to do precise placement of a station.
8. Impossible to build a level crossing by dragging a road over a railroad track.
9. Impossible to upgrade a road on a railroad crossing.
10. Dragging a track/road across track should automatically create an overpass bridge.
11. Land modification tools are very awkward.
– modified area is not highlighted
– “Level” tool should level all terrain to height from the point of beginning of the drag
12. Clicking on currently followed vehicle ( after clicking the crosshair icon ), to bring up its properties, should not unfollow that vehicle.
13. Build Road, Upgrade Road and Remove Road tools should be merged to a single, context based tool. Possibly as with a key combo ( build + Shift – upgrade, build + Alt – destroy ). It is extremely annoying to be forced to switch between those three tools when rearranging a city. Similar issue with track placement tools.
14. Clicking on “Automatic Vehicle Replacement” in lines window should automatically open the “Vehicle Replacement” tab on the “Line” window.
15. Add “Replace Now” button to “Vehicle Replacement” tab.
16. Add “Electrify” button to “Line” window in train line
17. Add “Upgrade to high speed track” button to “Line” menu of train line. Similar button for trucks is also suggested.
18. “Running”, “Stopped”, “Reverse” and “<Target station>” on vehicle properties should have a button frame.
19. “Go to depot” button should be on the same tab as “Running”, “Stopped” and “Reverse” buttons.
20. Interface is too small in most places. General rule: use % of screen vertical size, no less then X pixels to size UI. Icons in “Menu” menu are kind of right size in 2560×1080 resolution, but once people switch to 4k screens then those will become microscopic as well. Those include, but are not limited to:
– Icons showing production and consumption of freight by industries
– buttons on most windows
– “Cargo”, “Land use” and “Contour Lines” buttons
– Finances, city directory, industry directory etc
– Most tooltips and texts.
21. It is not ergonomical to place the game tools UI on the side of the screen when most of the action of those tools happen in the middle of the screen. Most people have panoramic screens these days. Sometimes in the 21:9 format. I shudder to think how bad it is on eyefinity setup. Having tools along the upper or lower edge of the screen, somewhat in the middle is much more user friendly.
22. Money display box has too little contrast. Green on blue is bad. Red on blue is abysmally bad.
23. There is no possibility to review messages and info boxes once they were closed.
24. There is no way to check and/or redefine key bindings. How many people know that ‘Del’ closes all windows?
25. Display ONLY supported resolutions on the resolution selection window. Moreover. Check if the selected resolution is still supported when starting a new game.
26. Vehicles with “multipleunitonly = true” property should not be introduced with a message.
27. Multiple units should be introduced with a “wow” message, just like regular vehicles are.
28. It is not possible to adjust order of train cars in “Vehicle replacement” tab.
29. Scrolling of trains along their length in “Depot” window and on “Vehicle replacement” tab is very misleading for long trains. It is better to start adding cars in another row below the locomotive instead of adding a scrollbar.
30. “Depot” window for trains should always have widith of a 160m long train.
31. Limit train length at 320 metres ( or to the length of the longest station available ).
32. Warning should be emitted if a train is longer then shortest station on its line.
33. Autosave period is not configurable nor possible to turn off.
34. Error messages should be avoided.
– If there is a “collision” or “not enough space”, and colliding object can be bulldozed, mark it for destruction on “apply” of building. I want to build that 5 track 320m station in the middle of Battle even if that costs 100 million.
– If there is a “vehicle in the way”, then schedule the change to a moment when a vehicle will be out of the way.
35. Key bindings do not work at the start of the game or after saving a game.
36. Right-click dragging of the map does not work correctly. It is based on absolute movements of the mouse while it should be based on movement of collision point of ray cast from the mouse pointer along the axis of the camera onto the (x,0,z) plane. Or in short – right click drag should be resistant to camera pitch angle change.
37. New windows should open around the mouse cursor to shorten the path from the cursor to the new window.
38. Mark focused window somehow.
39. The “main connection” feature does not give any info what is considered a “detour”. This leads to lots of confusion, especially since there is no info what are the statistics of roads.Gameplay Bugs:
1. Game will sometimes route several lines through the same platform on a station while leavng other accesible platforms unoccupied. There is a workaround for trains, but trams, trucks and buses suffer from this bug.
2. It is not possible to drag track from a converging end of a railroad switch if we remove the little stub of track remaining after the switch construction.
3. Vehicles replaced by auto replacement will sometimes emit info about “being too old and needing replacement” even if they are 10 or so years old. It seems that age of the vehicle they replaced is taken into consideration. Usually happens with the ‘25%’ rule.
4. Cargo has no weight. Allow for either configuring weight of an unit of cargo in a config file, or to configure empty/full weights if a vehicle in the model meta data.
5. Multiple capacity vehicles allow for loading of both types of cargo at the same time.
6. “Main connections” are often not feasible to upgrade to newer road type.
7. 4 lane roads should always be of the same size.
8. Performance is generally very bad. Especially when:
– Tracking a vehicles through a city
– Having several ( more then 1 ) cities in the viewport.
– Opening ‘Lines’ window
– Opening several vehicle windows with “Render to texture” feature enabled. Hint: Transport Tycoon did not allow more then 6 vehicle windows to be open. Messages with “Render to texture” should replace one another. Window with no focus can display just a static ( grayscale, for extra style bonus ) image and turn into “Render to texture” viewport when activated.
– Lod system appears to be very simple. It should not only be based on distance from camera, but also on pitch angle. The closer pitch is to 0 degrees, the less distant objects should be visible. I tried to check how Lod is calculated for buildings, but LUA code you are exposing does not seem to show such data.
– Removal of particles, visible passengers and private cars seems to improve performance in some cases.
– The game is CPU limited, and the little experience I have in 3d suggests it is batch-count constrained. Simulation runs quite fast even with 6-7k of passangers on the map and about 1000 units of cargo with ~400 vehicles.
9. Responsivity of the game is very poor. Too often it happens that game stutters because something needed to be done.
– Do all cities need to rebuild themselves at the same time
– I don’t really need the info, that all 400 of my vehicles cost me $Texas with overlays and floating texts.
– Sending 40 trucks to depot for sale makes the game pause for a few seconds.
10. There is no easy way to unstick mutually blocking trains. Allow to manually “send to depot” order, which would magically move a train to a designated depot.
11. A train should not peek out of a depot if it cannot continue out of it in its way. This leads to mutually blocked trains when one peeks out of the depot and another is heading to it.
12. Trains should not EVER reverse on their own. Instead of trying to reverse, a train should turn translucent, not block other trains passing through it and emit “Train X is lost” message. Automatic reversal always leads to a cascade of blocked trains.
13. Trains on a track, when assigned to a line that cannot be resolved ( beacuse, for example, there is a trackwork in progress and that line cannot be resolved at this time ) should turn translucent, do not block other trains and emit “Train X is lost” message.
14. Agents should not disappear when a road is upgraded, station electrified etc. Cargo should not disappear from an upgraded station as long as its placeholder still exists.
15. Sometimes city may build buildings within the footprint of the railroad/station/bus stop. After bulldozing that structure it is impossible to rebuild it.
16. Vehicles in depots or which are “stopped” should not cost money to run. They are “stopped” after all. Let them rust in peace.
17. There should be a throttling mechanism for amount of cars a city can generate. Currently sufficiently large cities can pretty much grid-lock themselves.
18. Faster road vehicles should be able to overtake slower ones.Well.
This is the part where I say “LTP” 🙂
This is not OTTD. This is TF. It follows different approach for its cargo model and traffic management. The binding of lines to platforms is actually a feature. I have already discussed that dynamic allocation of platforms can be as much of a detterent as it is a feature: http://www.train-fever.com/forums/topic/suggestion-platform-selection-and-more-platforms/ . Wise use of waypoints, to sort lines by their speed and target, in order to ensure least amount of switching, can achievie statistically better results.
In your case, the niche approach is to have a “main” and a slower “detour” if main is occupied. However, this is suboptimal. If an empty train occipies “main” then loaded train will have to use the much slower “detour” immedietly degrading line performance. Unlike in TTD, where in such case you’d get less payment, in TF you’ll pay with slightly diminished production at the source.
In TF it is best to optimize the “loaded” path for maximum speed at all times. Thus such optional pathing would be a detterent. Also, take into account that in TF, unlike in TTD, you can control the speed at which train goes on the “off” direction of the switch, or even create a symmetrical switch, so both branches of the passing loop would have the same throughput.
Just don’t create 46km/h switches everywhere.
As much as I detest this practice. I will suggest LTP 🙂
You can use 120 km/h switches on your passing loop, or use the “slower”part to handle empty traffic.
I really don’t see how this can be useful outside of this quite niche situation.
That would only work if you could run your network like a clockwork. And since you cannot…
Anyhow – the better solution would be to make totally dynamic system:
– only one train of a given line can access the station
– platform is chosen dynamically
Theoretically that would work even better. However such system breaks down quickly due to switching costs. As frequencies go lower, the time spent on the switches before the station entrance would be more and more of a constraint. The most vile example would be having 6 lines on 3 platforms (as you suggest) and then a slow local train being dynamically assigned to the station opposite to that train’s track of origin, effectively blocking the station entirely because that little train needs to go through several 46km/h ( because we want to be compact 😛 ) switches on the way to its platform.
I think it is quite possible that on heavily laden stations ( especially terminus type stations ) dynamic assignment would be more of a problem then a solution.
Anyhow – I need to eat crow. The platform selection issue still exists. Not for trains, but it does hurt for buses, trucks and trams.
What he said 🙂
To make his point hit home.
My current game on small map has 60 trains, about 300 trucks and buses and over 6000 simulated people. My 4ghz Xeon has some struggle handling that.
You would need a really beefy machine to saturate big map. People with top shelf machines run into performance wall on big maps. To comfortably run an even bigger map you’d need something close to 30-40 ghz single core machine and I guesstimate about 100 gigs of memory.
Sooo – no. Nobody modded the game to handle “bigger” maps.
Never. Large maps requre more then 4 gigabytes of memory. 32bit OS cannot use more then that. Unless devs make some drastic memory conservation effort – there will never be support of large maps on 32bit systems.
There are no “86bit” systems.
x86 is a moniker for compatibility with Intel 80×86 architecture ( 8086, 80286, 80386 etc ) which is a 32 operating bit system.
This is a bug in the game. Sometimes trains lose their destinations when you start reorganizing their trackage.
The workaround is to:
– stop the train ( click on the “running” status )
– reverse the train
– start the train
repeat if the train is facing incorrectly ( against the ribbon of its line )
If that does not work, point the train into a depot ( build one if you need to ) and send it there. Then reassign a line.
Generally speaking. In such case you need to fiddle with the train controls and/or reassign the line to such train.
Most of this is already in the game.
1. Cargo does move by itsself. Or at least, it should to balance the world and give some indication where cargo should go. Railroad Tycoon did this beautifully. There are limits to how much you can simulate, and economical entities that produce stuff want to ship it one way or the other. If you are not moving the stuff, someone else will.
2. Except for some perishable goods, feright does not care all that much about speed. Average speed of 30-40 km/h is common for railroads. in this day and age. Trains are good at moving lots of freight cheaply, not necessarily fast.
3. Factories should. This is an usability issue of the game.
4. 20 minute rule for cargo is silly. 40 minute would be much more sensible ( in the current game structure )
5. You cannot do that. There are limits to how much goods a city can accept. If you want to reach maximum industry production, you need to ship stuff to several cities. 400 units of goods can feed about 4000 people. Most people will not see a city above 1500 population.
