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3.65 Experimental Features


experimentalfeatures, -XF

This switch enables some features of the patch that are still considered to be under development.

It is a bit switch. To find out how that works, see Bit Switches, or simply add up the values of the options you want. For TTDPatch version 2.0, you have the options:

Bit Value Meaning
0 1 Slow down trains before road/rail crossings to avoid collisions
1 2 Very experimental support for new stations (don't ask how it works yet!)
2 4 The TTD newspaper will be in colour starting from the year 2000
3 8 Vehicle orders can be shared or copied. See below.
4 16 A news message appears when a crashed train is cleared (with morenews on)
5 32 Colour-code vehicle profits in the vehicle list, see below.
6 64 Don't show company finances on every January 1st.

This switch is not enabled by default or by the -a command line switch, because the features are still under development.

How to use shared/copied vehicle orders:

  1. Open the vehicle orders window as usual, and click "Go to"
  2. Hold Ctrl and click on another vehicle instead of a station or depot.
  3. Now the two vehicles use the same schedule. If you modify the schedule of either of them, the other will change, too.

You can link as many vehicles as you want this way. For example, you can give the orders normally to the first vehicle of the route, then make the others share its schedule, so if you want to change the route later, you have to do it only once. You can tell wheter a schedule is shared by looking at the last entry. If it's "End of orders", it's a normal schedule. However, if it's "End of shared orders", it applies to more vehicles. Shared orders use only one entry in the internal order list, no matter how many vehicles are using it. This means it's a way to conserve the limited number of orders (5000) if you have many vehicles.

If you do these steps without holding Ctrl, the orders will simply be copied instead of sharing them. Then you can change the orders of all vehicles independently.

You can reset a schedule (to clear it or to make it unshared) this way:

  1. Make sure that no orders are selected in the schedule window, or the last one ("End of (shared) orders") is selected.
  2. Press the Delete button of the window. All orders will be cleared from the schedule.
  3. If you do this on a vehicle with shared schedule, only that vehicle will be affected, the others will still have the shared schedule.

This way you can unlink a vehicle if you don't want it to use the shared schedule any more.

Unfortunately, this feature won't work in multiplayer, except copying orders without Ctrl.

Colour-coded vehicle profits: TTD uses last year's profits of the least profitable vehicle that is at least two years old to determine part of the performance score. If the profit of the least profitable vehicle is the equivalent of 20,000 pounds or more, you get the full score. If it is zero or less, you get no score for it, and in between you get the appropriate partial score. With this feature, you can quickly see if you have any vehicles that cause you to not have a perfect score. Their profit will show up in red if negative, or in yellow if below 10,000 pounds. Vehicles with 10,000 pounds of profit in the last year will be green. Vehicles that are less than two years old will not be rated, and will be in black. This means that if any of your vehicles in the four categories is yellow or red, your score will suffer.

The first two features were contributed by Oskar Eisemuth, the others by Csaba Varga.