So on NTP, the 08 takes 2 coaches off a service from Sheffield at Huddersfield then does nothing for the rest of the day. I've always wondered if it did anything as AI. So I spawned at Huddersfield at 23:55 to see if anything happens to the coaches, nothing did. When I spawned in again but at 00:00 they had vanished and the 08 had reset back to it's starting position so I assumed that the route resets after 24 hrs. However I then thought, if I was to wait until the 08s first scheduled service, what would happen, would it break the game or would nothing happen? What does anyone else think?
The "services" on a route is fixed and run on a daily basis according to time, and nothing just vanishes out in thin air...
Spawn in while it's idle, take it over, and see what the game tells you its next scheduled service is.
I did this but It has no schedule. Maybe it doesn't reset and when I load into Huddersfield at 00:00 it is the start of the day again.
That's a question I've already asked myself. That would be a good question for a Q&A stream, if there is one like that again.
You could spawn in (before the reset) in a suitable location and record what's happening overnight (time it to end after the service has done it's thing so you don't get a 20gb file lol). If you set the framerate low enough (but not too low), the file won't be huge (think time lapse but slightly more "dense"). EDIT: I'm dumb, thought this was the PC forum.
None of the timetables cycle - they run from start to finish - some services will re-execute fine but others won't. Making timetables cyclic is exceptionally difficult and would lead to things actually not making much sense - e.g. you have to put everything back where it was, "undoing" those shunt moves etc etc As the tools for timetabling improve, it may become possible in the future to author say a full 7 day timetable and actually at that point it becomes a bit more reasonable for things to have moved around sufficiently to wind back where they started - and at that point you could then do a cycle on it. Services that just run portal to portal will continue to run throughout the following day currently no problem as they are technically back where they started the moment they're back in the vault again - so routes like HRR probably run quite fine. Matt.
EDIT: So Matt replied before me! My theory makes no sense now. I remember that Matt talked about this in a stream. The whole service mode resets at midnight and every train will be "cleared up". That's also the reason why no service goes past 00:00. So I believe technically there should be only one day in the game. If you spawn at 00:00, everything should be at their original position. Then trains goes up and down until 23:59, at which time all trains should have stopped. If you are still in the game, it would become 24:00 day one and so on. Therefore no train would operate at, say 31:28, according to the timetable. I have no idea about game techniques and this is my own theory. But in SEH, the last train from Rainham stops abruptly at Higham instead of Gravesend just before 23:59. So I guess this may be the case.
What about doing timetables a few hours longer than midnight? Many routes don’t have traffic anymore a few hours later (say like 2:30 to 4:30) but there are a good number of trains around midnight. This way fewer services from the original timetable are missing. Although I don’t really like night runs in TSW anyway because of the unrealistic lighting conditions at night so it’s not that big of a problem for me.
Matt discussed this in the PC forum, and IIRC he said that can cause problems as the timetable runs midnight to midnight, and doesn't realise the 00:00 is after 23:59.
Simsig gets around this by starting a 00:00 and then running to 23:59; 24:00 all the way to 27:00 I mean until we get to Thameslink and it's 24 hour timetable I don't think we really need to worry too much