good times!

This. Also passenger trains aren't as fun without the cargodist mod, which upgrades them from simple cargo into actual passengers with destinations

yeah but transporting it between city makes way more money especially for small towns

@@frederickgrenier2367 yes but it's good for growing the city when using this script I did it myself with the mods he is using and 1 truck is enough

Yeah, that's not a bad idea.

@@strictoaster glad you might use it :)

Artemiy Karpinskiy if I stop playing the game for a while I forget how signals work and have to hunt down a tutorial video to learn again. I open some of my old saves and the signaling looks super complex because I figured it out at the time and have since forgotten the mechanics.

@@simondann7371 Oh that's a giant mood for any game of that sort.

Seriously same I *NEED* some kind of mod that like Visualizes exactly what the signals are doing and how stuff will go though them And maybe just makes them for me lol

@@DogsRNice There is a setting in the vanilla game that shows which blocks are reserved by a train. I don't remember what it's called though.

My main issue with timetables is that what you are describing sounds like a lot of work for not a lot of gain. As long as buses have a decent profit of margin, that's good enough for me. It only gets easier as cities grow.

​@@strictoaster I make more money from vehicles than anything else by a factor of about 10. Given, I am playing a desert map and am currently being completely unsuccessful in supplying food and water (simultaneously) to towns not near water (which need that), so they also need a water tower, but I digress. My buses are making £387k and costing £75k and my trains with their insane convoluted routes and loads are making £494k and costing £412k to run. So by using auto spaced timetables on all my buses, they are all making money and the backbone to my attempts to get food and water to any town with a water tower. I am losing by the way and could lose that game. But really all I need to do is buy more buses in the one town that grows. I've got bendy ones and triple ones. It's all about bussing passengers to make the easy money in ottd. Trams on the other hand, I can never make profitable.

OpenTTD's timetable system is a complete mess. It's still not 100% perfect (in my opinion), but the best system I've seen so far for this kind of thing is that used by Cities in Motion 2 (I assume the first game has roughly the same system, but I'm not sure.) Obviously, that being limited to a single city, the day-night cycle makes having a timetable make more sense, but it's just plain a better way to organise vehicles in a lot of ways... I wonder if the logic and UI behind it could be ported over to OpenTTD (even if it's as an optional mod) There's still several things wrong with CIM's logic though. (elements of the game design don't work together too well in general, needing fine-tuning, and lack of easily accessible statistics makes adjusting the timetable to be efficient more troublesome than it needs to be.) Some of it would be redundant in OpenTTD, but the general idea is still sound. Basically it works like this: You define a route without any vehicles - just stations/stops. You then define a timetable for the route. You can either auto-generate one based on how frequently you want a vehicle to show up at a station. (The game then calculates how many vehicles are required for this frequency.) You can also further tweak things in that you can set additional vehicles for the morning and evening rush hour, and set different schedules for morning, afternoon, evening and night, as well as a wholly seperate weekend schedule that also has all the elements. (you can specify what the times are for each of these categories) Once you've done that you also specify the type of vehicle to use for each section of the timetable. - this isn't exact; you simply specify if you want a small, medium or large vehicle. (you can also specify you don't care) You can tweak this timetable as much as you like, but a basic one is simply to set your desired interval. The final step is that the route must specify a depot. The route starts at the first station, and the game calculates the time taken to get from the depot to that first station. When it reaches the calculated time for the next vehicle, the depot sends out a vehicle that fits the requirements of the next required trip in the schedule. If it can't find an appropriate vehicle of the right size, it sends out anything at all that's in the depot. If there's nothing in the depot, it sends you a warning message. When a vehicle reaches the end of the route, if it's suited to running the next service in the schedule, and there's enough time, the same vehicle generally goes back to the start of the route. Otherwise, a new vehicle comes out of the depot for the next scheduled departure, and the vehicle that just reached the end of the route goes to the depot. For each scheduled service you can also specify whether it's an all stations service, or an express service that skips some stops. (with you being able to specify which stops the express services skip when defining the route.) In theory, multiple routes can share the same depot, with the vehicles it contains being shared amongst all the routes using that depot. In practice, the depot capacity is limited, and because the demand on most routes is such that you quickly need all the vehicles from the largest depot type to keep up (and sometimes from more than one depot, if demand is high enough - which requires duplicating the route), you tend to end up building a depot per route. Quite how this could be transferred to OpenTTD I'm not entirely sure, but it'd make route planning far more interesting and probably more efficient. But, it'd need a lot of tweaks to the logic to get it to work in OpenTTD... Still, could be worth a try. XD

@@KuraIthys CIM1 doesn't auto generate the vehicles for you, buying vehicles is a big part of the game. I went onto the OTTD forum to suggest some changes but they were kind of rude and accused me of not understanding that programming is hard and 'you can't just do anything' blah blah. But the timetables in OTTD become the core game if you want to play it to it maximum but you get bogged down by moving the windows around so much setting up so many bus routes it can get confusing. I would say it is still worth doing the auto routes even if you will be learning it more or less continuously. It's like signals, like I don't know wtf gate signals are for but I can use all the other ones now and that seems to be enough. The only problem with the auto timetable system is it is so manual. But once your schedules are in place it's very satisfying to have all your bus stops full because the buses are properly separated. Also profits!

I am aware of that. CIM2 still involves buying vehicles, trying to decide what kind to use, and assigning them to depots. But the defined routes still cause the game to pick a vehicle from whatever's available in it's assigned route or in the assigned depot, and vehicles are categorised into size categories. The only way to ensure you don't get an unintended vehicle on your route is to ensure the vehicles in the depot are always of the type you actually want. Still, the system makes a lot of sense. Also those people in the forums huh. Go figure they'd be asshats. 'programming is hard'. Yeah, no kidding. I've been doing it for 20 years... But that's no excuse to not even try... XD If everyone had taken that attitude, OpenTTD wouldn't exist, and wouldn't have 90% of it's current features...

Yeah, no kidding.

I'm trying to find a balance between what "looks good" and what's "efficient". At this point I'm mostly concerned about getting the town to grow, whatever it takes. I'll probably go back and tweak stations and tracks for them to be a bit more realistic and better looking later.

Yeah, but realistic designs just aren't all that effective ingame. It's a real awkward tradeoff.