Rail / chain signals: visualize relevant paths.

[AileTheAlien]

TL;DR

When selected, rail / chain signals should show which paths affect their current color.

What ?

Rail and chain signals should highlight which paths contributed to them showing red, yellow, or blue. This will help newer players to more quickly understand how they work, and allow experienced players to more quickly debug misplaced signals. (Blinking signals would also be useful for debugging, but since those could involve areas where the signal can't divide a piece of the track, are left out of this suggestion.) This information could be shown when a signal is selected by the player, or hovered with the mouse. (Hovering is quicker. Selecting works for intersections large enough to not show all at once.)

For example, here the chain signal in the bottom right is blue because at least one path is open to take, and one path is taken by my debugging train car. The track in the bottom left is irrelevant, because a train starting in the bottom right cannot drive onto that part of the track, given how the intersection is constructed. Similarly, the track crossing from left to right is also irrelevant for this blue signal.

chain-signals.jpg (369.32 KiB) Viewed 937 times

Something like this would help with debugging and learning:

chain-signals-with-more-info.jpg (366.82 KiB) Viewed 937 times

(Note, this mod adds arrows to the train visualization for direction of track, but doesn't help with knowing colors of signals like I'm suggesting.)

Why ?

I've finished the signals tutorials, played with them a bit, and this intersection is fairly simple, so I know why the signal is blue. I still spent half an hour debugging a more complex intersection, asking "why are you red?" and "why are you blue?" before cheating myself some items to make this feature request. Newer players, like my friends who only play the game for multiplayer, would be able to understand trains much more quickly. The trains themselves are deterministic, and relatively easy to understand, but because the game doesn't show you this extra information for signals, they are much harder to learn or debug.

With an expansion pack in the works, this would be a decent time to add this feature. I'll definitely be bugging my friends to play our old save file again, after the expansion is available for purchase!

[FuryoftheStars]

For example, here the chain signal in the bottom right is blue because at least one path is open to take, and one path is taken by my debugging train car. The track in the bottom left is irrelevant, because a train starting in the bottom right cannot drive onto that part of the track, given how the intersection is constructed. Similarly, the track crossing from left to right is also irrelevant for this blue signal.

Maybe it's because I'm misunderstanding what you're getting at, but left/right and the bottom left are completely relevant. If any part of any train so much as noses into the pink highlighted sections of track, the signal will turn red.

[mrvn]

But it's not the reason the chain signal is blue. Note the tracks are still dotted so they are shown as belonging to the same block, just not belonging to the path after the chain signal.

[AileTheAlien]

Fury's right though - it's not only blue because of the adjacent signals, but also because of the state of the current block. (Inside of this intersection.) Thinking about it more, I still think that could be helped with this type of visualization. Knowing that the signal's red because of the current block, instead of all chained signals on the edge of the block is useful information, which the current visualization doesn't differentiate. If I've got my mockups correct, that should be these two situations. (Slightly different intersection, but should still be valid for this case.)

edge.jpg (390.99 KiB) Viewed 883 times

intersection.jpg (393.81 KiB) Viewed 883 times

[mrvn]

But now you are showing the general situation for all signals. I think that just gets confusing.

I thought the idea was to hover over one specific signal and see the paths for that one signal explained.

[AileTheAlien]

Yeah, I should have done my mock differently. For the last case with the intersection block occupied, but not the exit blocks, I think you'd want a different symbol like a square instead of an X. (Because squares are blocks. XD ) Then when you're looking at the one chain signal you can at a glance know if it's red because every exit path is red, or if just the intersection block is red.