I watched your time table stream with interest this morning TrainSim-Matt and wondered about needing to run the simulations to determine where there are bottlenecks and clashes. You'd definitely need to do that towards the end of the process to ensure the game has interpreted what has been entered and there are no entry mistakes. Have you ever seen a diagram like this? This is from real working time table for a preserved railway I operate on. These string diagrams are great they show exactly where each train will be at any given time and if you're signalman at a station how many you'll have at your location at any given time. When you're planning a time table or trying to find a path for a special or to catch up late running, you can draw onto the graph and you can quickly see things like cornfield meets, too many trains for the capacity of a station, impossible paths, etc. We draw these using the time table data that is held in a spreadsheet which works great for us. I've seen commercial software that produces versions for busier railways with multiple tracks like the majority of those in TSW2. I thought I would post this in case you've not seen them and might find the concept helpful when in the planning stages for a new timetable or when you're trying to shoe horn in new services for a DLC added to a route or scenario. Paul
Hi Paul, Very much familiar with these and we've started experimenting with being able to output some of the data in that form as well. Longer term what I really want (and have on our internal tool dev list) is an actual editor based on the above - imaging being able to adjust it in real time and see the estimated outputs of it. Currently we don't have it though, so we rely on the simulation outputs to tell us how things went. Even then, without the above, things can be quite tricky - though we have enough tools to make it just about achievable. Creating timetables in the real world from scratch is *hard* as I'm sure you know - which is why we try to copy the real world ones as closely as possible, since they've already solved most of the hard problems. Matt.
Build that time table tool right and you might have a new sales option for DTG. There are commercial solutions but they tend to be cumbersome and hideously expensive. Large rail operators would use the full on products but I imagine there are loads of smaller railways that would love something "in the middle" of the range. I have helped in the past with time tabling on our railway - mostly in peer reviewing to make sure specials could actually fit the path they're given. That is hard enough. I could not imagine doing it for a full sized railway and know that real railways can spend a year or more building up a new time table with multiple people involved. I always love it when our state government stands up and says something like "we've told Metro to run more services and they are starting tomorrow" - that timetable going live "tomorrow" would have been a long time in the planning . I'm actually quite impressed at the simulation engine's ability to figure things out when you muck around in game, you nearly always seem to be able to get to the end of the route no matter what you do. Paul
