Synchronized Stations don't work passed 8 stations

[CoasterCrazy]

Hello openrct community! In making a 10-way dueling coaster I found out that when I tested them 2 trains always remained at their station while the other 8 left normally, It started out being the outside most 2 on either side but for whatever reason has switched too two on one side as you see in the picture.  When I close the 2 that aren't going and test oddly enough only 7 go normally and 1 stays at its station, but when I close and unsynchronize the 2 that weren't going the other 8 go normally.  

Thanks for reading and any feedback! 

[giraty]

So....hmmm. There was a similar problem like last year but we fixed it. To put it in context, RCT1 could handle 8, Vanilla RCT2 could handle 9. IIRC when I tried 10, 9 will go and 1 will stay. Not anymore huh?

Is it possible to increase the sync maximum?

Edited July 10, 2017 by giraty

[jensj12]

https://github.com/OpenRCT2/OpenRCT2/pull/4291

[zaxcav]

The max number of synchronised vehicles is set by a #define (SYNCHRONISED_VEHICLE_COUNT) to 8.

When I fixed up the logic in the above PR I left this limit as I found it.

I honestly don't know if this is tied in any way to the SV6 savegame format - if it is not, increasing it is a trivial matter.

Hopefully a developer with knowledge of the save/load code can confirm/deny this for us.

 

What is described in the original post about which stations sync is expected behaviour.  The logic is triggered by a single station which then searches in both directions for appropriate syncable stations until the limit is reached or no more stations are found. Closed stations (with the sync box checked) are considered syncable but won't block open/test rides from syncing and departing. When there are more than the max stations, which stations get synced and which get left out depends on which station triggers the check, which can vary.

[CoasterCrazy]

4 hours ago, zaxcav said:

The max number of synchronised vehicles is set by a #define (SYNCHRONISED_VEHICLE_COUNT) to 8.

When I fixed up the logic in the above PR I left this limit as I found it.

I honestly don't know if this is tied in any way to the SV6 savegame format - if it is not, increasing it is a trivial matter.

Hopefully a developer with knowledge of the save/load code can confirm/deny this for us.

 

What is described in the original post about which stations sync is expected behaviour.  The logic is triggered by a single station which then searches in both directions for appropriate syncable stations until the limit is reached or no more stations are found. Closed stations (with the sync box checked) are considered syncable but won't block open/test rides from syncing and departing. When there are more than the max stations, which stations get synced and which get left out depends on which station triggers the check, which can vary.

So 8 is the max synchronized stations possible on openrct? 

[giraty]

That makes me curious.

[Gymnasiast]

I'm quite certain this limit was there for performance reasons. Obviously, the performance concerns of 2002 are quite different from the performance concerns of 2017. So I think we could raise it to 12 or something.

[CoasterCrazy]

2 hours ago, Gymnasiast said:

I'm quite certain this limit was there for performance reasons. Obviously, the performance concerns of 2002 are quite different from the performance concerns of 2017. So I think we could raise it to 12 or something.

I have basically finished the coasters but wouldn't want to cut it down to 8 if you wonderful people were going to increase the limit  if you could let me know if you do or not id much appreciate that! 

Thanks for taking your time on this post!

[jensj12]

2 hours ago, Gymnasiast said:

I'm quite certain this limit was there for performance reasons. Obviously, the performance concerns of 2002 are quite different from the performance concerns of 2017. So I think we could raise it to 12 or something.

Why not remove the limit altogether? If performance is the only reason, we can leave it to the user to decide what still works and what not. There's still a limit of 255 because the map is not bigger.

[zaxcav]

Performance? Possibly, but the performance ovehead of searching a bare handful of locations for adjacent stations and searching through the vehicles of those rides encountered is negligible in comparison to, for example, the pathfinding heuristic search function (for each peep the search limit is 15000 tiles!). More likely 8 was considered more than enough "room to play". But that's only my opinion.

I think it's great that @CoasterCrazy is working on a 10-way duelling coaster. Push the boundaries :-)

We can trivially increase, but still leave a limit, by changing the #define to a larger value.

Making it unlimited would be a much bigger change.

The physical construction of the stations themselves (a classic such form is illustrated in the original post) implies a practical limit related to the max station length.  The max station length of a sample coaster I tried was 32 platform pieces. With only an entrance and a couple of platforms gap for the track to connect to the platform from under the entrance (as in the original post), the max number of working adjacent stations you could physically construct is 22. Using a coaster with single tile 90° track turns you could increase this to 32 working adjacent stations.  I can't think of a working layout that would allow more.

I'd be happy to throw together a small PR to increase the limit to 16 sometime in the next few days.

[jensj12]

It's possible to use dummy-coasters between station (in RCT1 that worked, not tested in RCT2) and thus have 22 stations followed by 2 dummies and another 22 stations. This way it's possible to have 220 synced stations.

[CoasterCrazy]

3 hours ago, zaxcav said:

Performance? Possibly, but the performance ovehead of searching a bare handful of locations for adjacent stations and searching through the vehicles of those rides encountered is negligible in comparison to, for example, the pathfinding heuristic search function (for each peep the search limit is 15000 tiles!). More likely 8 was considered more than enough "room to play". But that's only my opinion.

I think it's great that @CoasterCrazy is working on a 10-way duelling coaster. Push the boundaries :-)

We can trivially increase, but still leave a limit, by changing the #define to a larger value.

Making it unlimited would be a much bigger change.

The physical construction of the stations themselves (a classic such form is illustrated in the original post) implies a practical limit related to the max station length.  The max station length of a sample coaster I tried was 32 platform pieces. With only an entrance and a couple of platforms gap for the track to connect to the platform from under the entrance (as in the original post), the max number of working adjacent stations you could physically construct is 22. Using a coaster with single tile 90° track turns you could increase this to 32 working adjacent stations.  I can't think of a working layout that would allow more.

I'd be happy to throw together a small PR to increase the limit to 16 sometime in the next few days.

Thank you for going to increase the limit! I think 16 as the new limit would be great! Cant wait to finish the coasters and landscape it and get it on my youtube channel  

[zaxcav]

22 hours ago, jensj12 said:

It's possible to use dummy-coasters between station (in RCT1 that worked, not tested in RCT2) and thus have 22 stations followed by 2 dummies and another 22 stations. This way it's possible to have 220 synced stations.

I didn't know that. That's insane! :-D

The OpenRCT2 code I started from did not support this - at least it's not obvious that this would work.

[zaxcav]

I've submitted a PR to increase the limit to 16. See PR #5877. Once this PR is merged the new limit will be included in all new builds.

I even tested it with a simple 10-way duelling coaster (I ran out of steam at that point - building that many coasters already took lots longer than changing the code). It was working as expected.

Edited July 12, 2017 by zaxcav

[CoasterCrazy]

2 hours ago, zaxcav said:

I've submitted a PR to increase the limit to 16. See PR #5877. Once this PR is merged the new limit will be included in all new builds.

I even tested it with a simple 10-way duelling coaster (I ran out of steam at that point - building that many coasters already took lots longer than changing the code). It was working as expected.

That's awesome news! Thank you very much!!

[Gymnasiast]

Zaxcav's pull request has just been merged. The new build should be available soon.