Something I have been thinking about for a while, especially when arriving slightly late to a station, is that the passenger boarding could be improved to be more realistic and also more forgiving to players. In reality if a service has a long scheduled boarding time but arrives slightly late the train will often still depart on time because the train departs on the logic of doors closing either when passengers are done boarding or when train is scheduled to depart, whichever occurs latest. This means that if the scheduled boarding is 2 minutes but passengers only take 1 minute to embark/disembark the train could arrive up to a minute late and still depart on time. In TS2021 the logic is similar to what I described above but with the minimum passenger boarding time always being 35 seconds. In reality this will vary depending on time of day (rush hour might take longer due to more passengers) and type of train (a subway will have much shorter boarding time than a long distance service where people might have a lot of baggage they need to embark/disembark with). My suggestion for a realistic and slightly varied system is that DTG update the boarding logic to be Actual boarding time = maximum of (remaining time till departure, random boarding time). This "random boarding time" would then be a random value from a distribution with a mean that depends on the type of train (30s for commuters and 1 minute for long distance trains) and some variance. The distribution could be a normal distribution (most realistic but may? be computationally inferior) or a uniform distribution that varies between half of the mean and twice of the mean. This means that the commuter boarding could take up to a minute and as little as 15 seconds and the long distance boarding could take between 30s and 2 minutes. These values could be adjusted for more realism but you get the idea. Why change to this system? One reason is that (most of the time), if you arrived 20 seconds late with an ICE3, for example, you would still depart on time, so it would be more forgiving (most of the time). Another is that it would be more realistic. A third reason is that it would be more varied for the player (not just a robotic 1 minute or 30 seconds every time). EDIT: Readability.
The system you describe in this post sounds quite good actually. It would be cool to see some variation in the times you have to wait so it feels a bit more dynamic.
I can definitely get on board with this Right now it's absolutely impossible to do passenger boarding without the HUD on unless you meticulously note down your time of arrival, which isn't possible in cabs that don't have a clock, like the older British ones. How many times I arrived at a platform still pretty much on time, eyeballing the on board display for time, to then leave at the expected time and find out the boarding task needed only 1 measly little second more to complete which I now have to open and close for all over again. I would like to add though that I think updating this, and I sincerely hope they're adding this with Rush Hour, that the on-board displays with the route information will actually work! I want to be able to drive fully without HUD, even for something like checking stops and ETA's, by, when appropriate regarding if the locomotive has it, just checking the display.
I see what you did there But yeah, I would love for them to include the system with Rush Hour. I think DTG could implement many random elements to improve replayability, realism and to counter-act things becoming stale or predictable. For example I remember someone mentioning random variance in terms of rolling stock performance, since every motor/wagon etc is different. Another random aspect would be how well AI trains run on time. If DTG were to include random delays it could mean running a time table service would be different for each "realization" (or outcome if you will). Of course this would affect "fairness" of achievements etc so they would need to let users enable/disable the function.
