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Comment by cybrox | Hacker News Reader

This is really cool!

For people who don't want to go full scale sim and prefer a bit of a lighter interpretation of working with signalling screens, I can recommend Rail Route (https://store.steampowered.com/app/1124180/Rail_Route/).

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For people that want a railway simulator that includes game mechanics to drive a lot of complexity, try Factorio.

Or OpenTTD

https://www.openttd.org

Especially a fork called JGR's patchpack, featuring programmable signals and so much more.

OpenTTD's default signaling system is mediocre. "Path signals" which are "recommended" and the only signal system not locked behind a settings change, will get you into trouble more often than not. You can only put a path signal somewhere where "it is safe for an arbitrary train to park here", which is a problem more often than not. If you are used to block signalling, as used in real trains, path signals will repeatedly surprise you in unfortunate ways. You have to basically deprogram everything you learned about signalling and even build rather different track layouts to use them. Add to that, platforms are not integrated into path signals in any useful way, so a train will sometimes refuse to advance to it's destination platform if it is a "Drive through" capable station if it cannot reserve a path well past it's desired endpoint.

IMO block signals are much simpler to understand for simple use cases, even if it is hard to make complicated railways with them. I think for normal people picking up OpenTTD, they would be a better choice.

Path signals are closer to how a modern signaling system operates. They absolutely can allocate multiple paths through the same block as long as the position of switches guarantees no conflicts.

Pretty sure the developers of Factorio made a train game based around the train system in Factorio. Can't for the life of me remember its name but it looks rather good

Is it Sweet Transit? The about section mentions that the developer was part of Factorio.

Edit to add link - https://www.sweettransitgame.com/

Yes, that's the one. Never played it, but from my understanding its effectively just the train system lifted out of Factorio with a game built around it.

It even looks like the rail assets were lifted straight from Factorio. I mean if it's all above board it's fine - Factorio's train system is really good.

That said, they're also giving it major updates/overhauls in the upcoming update, so this one would be falling behind if there's no good relationships between the two.

The mechanics or more or less entirely unlike factorio. It’s this really weird city sim / train game hybrid that is pretty crappy at both halves.

He was one of the graphics contractors not a dev.

It is not very good. The game design is just and, failing to be either a good train sim or an interesting strategy game.

It basically flopped in early access.

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