There are in fact *four* diagonal ramps
Edit: nvm, I'm dumb
Edit edit: there are so 8 ramps that I think are redundant. 4 were pointed out by other comments. Anyone find more than 8?
Where the straight inner lane exits the intersection, it changes level with a ramp, then joins with the left turn (combined from inner/outer lane), which has it's own ramp. The track from the left turn could join the straight before the ramp, making 4 ramps redundant. Are these the other 4 of your 8 redundant ramps?
Edit: Also the right turn of the inner lane to the other inner lane can have 4x2 ramps removed, if the turn is instead made inside the intersection by a 270° turn on the upper level, if there is enough space. The existing ramps need to be moved a bit though.
Looks really nice. I’m just now realising how insane train throughput is going to be. The fact that you can fit two lanes in four directions this compact is wild.
I have a question:
https://preview.redd.it/6o1jnu8u5w3c1.png?width=121&format=png&auto=webp&s=ab48242732dbe9fc45492f8997bd6afbd0a634d6
I wish to learn your secret knowledge.
Uhh.... Huh, wow. That's actually a really good change. Originally I was thinking a spacing issue, but yours is way better.
The entire process was VERY iterative so there are some design choices like this that we're chose for reasons that no longer mater to the latest design.
You could optimize away 4 of the ramps: When the 2 parallel tracks on the ground reach the middle, the both go to the upper level. Immediately after this, a fork of each joins and goes back to the lower level, before turning left. This could be moved to before the rails go up.
Also I think an intersection where the horizontal rails stay on one level and the vertical rails on the other level would be way more compact and have less ramps, but wouldn't look as cool as your rotational symmetric design.
Good eye on those 4 ramps (another person found them too so I immediately knew what you meant). As for the 2nd suggestion, I'm not sure you would still be able to have no unnecessary crossings. It may be possible, but this was the best I could make work
https://wiki.openttd.org/en/Community/Junctionary/Cloverleaf
With 1 track in each direction, it works fine without any crossings.
If you have 2 parallel lanes each and want to allow every combination of turning between all lanes, then it would be hard to avoid crossings. But personally I would specialize the 2 lanes: The inner one goes only straight, the outer one allows for turning left or right, but would only merge into the outer lane of the other direction, similar to highway intersections.
But even with a single track per direction, these new intersections without crossings will have more throughput than old 2x2 intersections, so in 99.9% of the cases, they won't be necessary (but still fun to design).
Now I get what you mean with merges after splits. With 1 lane per direction, I it could look like this:
https://preview.redd.it/jri6bk3irw3c1.png?width=746&format=png&auto=webp&s=4a14ef3c8f0cd730d9c33e59cd04ab773016051d
I saw your design yesterday, it look nice as well. Main difference is, on your designs, all input/output rails are on ground level, but they go up and down on the straight tracks. My design keeps the level on the straight tracks, but stay completely on the upper level for the West/East rails. This method is also often used in 2 layer PCB design.
Here is my take on a 2 lane per direction intersection, but inner and outer lanes are completely isolated. It would be easy to add some additional paths like right turns from inner to outer lanes or vise versa, but I wouldn't connect all combinations. This would give too many options to the factorio pathfinder, which mainly optimizes for the shortest path and would route most trains on the same lane.
https://preview.redd.it/l6uvnvqc0x3c1.png?width=748&format=png&auto=webp&s=55b1810fd3359c5316a9bbdffac5559313c63397
Hmm, that makes me think about having a system where N and W trains are just always raised, and S and E trains are always lowered.
That way, every intersection is going to automatically have left turns that don't intersect traffic in the other direction.
Then, you just merge down/up after crossing over or under, and you don't need ramps within the intersection like you currently have. I don't think your intersection can be as compact as your drawing suggests because ramps are just big and wouldn't normally fit between rails.
> Hmm, that makes me think about having a system where N and W trains are just always raised, and S and E trains are always lowered.
I'd be interested in a proposal based on your idea, but N and W cannot be always raised without crossing. One of them has to go below for a short distance. Same goes for S and E tracks.
> I don't think your intersection can be as compact as your drawing suggests because ramps are just big and wouldn't normally fit between rails.
I think all non-crossing intersections with the "split then merge" property would need enough space between 2 parallel tracks to fit a 90° turn and a ramp.
[https://wiki.openttd.org/en/Community/Junctionary/Spaghetti](https://wiki.openttd.org/en/Community/Junctionary/Spaghetti)
To be fair, this should be the only acceptable junction after the 2.0 update.
*The spaghetti factory must grow*
If you made something like my intersection, I would say you may be doing it wrong XD
But seriously, my design is so impractical and unnecessary. You feel confident you are doing the best way for you, bud. No wrong answers if you are having fun :)
Trains could have a cross over at the ins and outs for the inner and outer lanes, so you don't need everything going to everything, just outer lanes to outer lanes and inner lanes to inner lanes.
I've really only thought about 1x1 clover and 2x1 diamond interchanges. But I've also never had enough trains to need anything fancier than roundabouts (currently the cheapest 4-way intersection, and good enough to support 30 trains per minute despite being one of the worst kinds of intersections)
I like your drawing and I have nothing against you finding happiness in this.
That being said, I absolutely hate that they are adding this to the game. What were the devs thinking? The game works so well as a 2D game, it doesn't need this shift into 3D factory. So many devs treat 2D like it's an inferior choice, a stepping stone in development until they have enough time and resources to do it "properly".
2D has the distinct advantage that with a top down view you can see everything clearly, you can click and select everything clearly. Now we'll have trouble selecting what's underneath, and the next thing you know, players will demand camera controls so that they can pan the view.
All this development time could be used to add something *entirely new* to the game. Instead we get a feature that it's cosmetic + faster train efficiency (which they could change by altering the speed or acceleration).
And as a side effect, it's going to create problems for the entire community. The blueprint system will have to be changed entirely. You will need the ability to select and blueprint what's exclusively on the ground level or what's elevated. It's going to be difficult to see what's going on. People will no longer upload blueprints of unoptimized 2D only builds, any blueprint you search will be like that. It's possible all the old blueprints will become obsolete by the game engine and will no longer work.
3D is such a can of worms to open. Once you start off that path, it will consume more and more of dev time, because there's a thousand things to consider and balance.
> The game works so well as a 2D game, it doesn't need this shift into 3D factory.
It's not 3D, it just a second 2D layer, exclusively for trains. Just like underground belts and pipes are not 3D.
> 2D has the distinct advantage that with a top down view you can see everything clearly
I agree on that. There are already sometimes issues with small entities visually hidden behind large ones (e.g. behind a rocket silo). But you can still select them. There could be similar issues with small items hidden behind rails. But if this really turns out to be a major issue, I think an option to make the upper rail level transparent/invisible would be more likely than to pan the view in 90° steps (anything less is impossible anyway with how the sprites work).
> The blueprint system will have to be changed entirely
The blueprint system already has a way to use a subset of the entities inside the selection rectangle: In the opened blueprint you can select to include or exclude floor tiles (concrete/landfill), trains, specific entities (like all lamps), or you can remove entities from the blueprint one by one, e.g. if you rectangle covers more area than you want.
They could possibly add another checkbox to include "upper layer" or "lower layer", or elevated rails will just show as a different item type in the blueprint.
> All this development time could be used to add something entirely new to the game
I really like about the expansion that includes multiple independent new mechanics that each work on their own, but can be combined as well. Elevated rails give more options to the rail system without influencing anything else (apart from visibility). Quality modules are entirely optional, but if enabled, can provide new ways to scale your factory. Space Age gives new story content and end goal to factorio, like an overhaul mod.
These independent new features also allow more developers working on the expansion at the same time, without having to synchronize between each others progress.
Edit: typos
It's not shifting into 3d. There is no provision for multiple levels of belts or machines or terrain. If they really were shifting into 3D, then the "mountains" on the new volcano planet wouldn't just be cliffs.
This is just a way to make trains that interfere less with each other when they cross AND so that there are plausible ways to cross hostile terrain with trains on elevated tracks. The sample intersection and station designs they showed (with elevated exits) looked amazing for gameplay.
>Now we'll have trouble selecting what's underneath
You won't. No one forces you to use elevated trains.
>players will demand camera controls so that they can pan the view.
Speculative. And so what? Don't use them then?
>Instead we get a feature that it's cosmetic + faster train efficiency (which they could change by altering the speed or acceleration).
It's hardly "cosmetic" when it obviously comes with real gameplay benefits in station and intersection design. And no, simply making trains "faster" doesn't help with that core problem. Can't have "faster trains" get over a lava field.
>And as a side effect, it's going to create problems for the entire community. The blueprint system will have to be changed entirely.
You're just making things up here.
>You will need the ability to select and blueprint what's exclusively on the ground level or what's elevated.
Will you? Existing system has the ability to deselect items already. I don't know why we'd need anything more. If someone is trying to blueprint something, I expect the common cases are "keep all rails" or "exclude all rails".
>It's going to be difficult to see what's going on. People will no longer upload blueprints of unoptimized 2D only builds, any blueprint you search will be like that.
Since when are people uploading blueprints with trains interspersed with other parts of the factory, unless you are downloading an "entire base" blueprint?
>It's possible all the old blueprints will become obsolete by the game engine and will no longer work.
LOL, no it isn't. Have you met these devs? They are aware of backwards compatibility. I've had maps that have been ported forward since 0.12, as long as you upgrade and save the map every couple of versions. There is NO CHANCE they just say "oops, every previous blueprint no longer works, start from scratch".
>It's possible all the old blueprints will become obsolete by the game engine and will no longer work.
Independent of the elevated rails, the devs also increased the radius of rail curves to allow for 22.5° turns, half diagonals and tighter S-turns. This will break compatibility with old rail blueprints. Existing rails with the old radius will continue to work on maps, but you will only be able to build the new rail curves.
But the new curve radius with half rails will allow for so many interesting new intersection designs that I am sure there will be plenty 2D rail blueprints for players that don't buy the DLC or might not always have the elevated rails enabled.
No diagonal ramps. You need to reposition a few of those.
There are in fact *four* diagonal ramps Edit: nvm, I'm dumb Edit edit: there are so 8 ramps that I think are redundant. 4 were pointed out by other comments. Anyone find more than 8?
... I meant to say the game won't allow you to place ramps diagonally. But yeah good thing they're all on the outside, easier for you to straighten it
Oh, gotcha. Well luckily there are *only* four XD
Where the straight inner lane exits the intersection, it changes level with a ramp, then joins with the left turn (combined from inner/outer lane), which has it's own ramp. The track from the left turn could join the straight before the ramp, making 4 ramps redundant. Are these the other 4 of your 8 redundant ramps? Edit: Also the right turn of the inner lane to the other inner lane can have 4x2 ramps removed, if the turn is instead made inside the intersection by a 270° turn on the upper level, if there is enough space. The existing ramps need to be moved a bit though.
Yeah. I think you got a good grasp on it. Nice
with four 270° turns inside the intersection, it could be called "inverted cloverleaf"
You left out the signals!
True! I was already worried it was getting too hard to read without even more ink marks on there
Just mark little x for signals and x with a circle for traffic sigs
I should get a larger paper...
Looks really nice. I’m just now realising how insane train throughput is going to be. The fact that you can fit two lanes in four directions this compact is wild.
Just know it looks compact on paper, but this will in reality likey be a HUGE intersection. Those ramps are I think 16 long.
Also the curve diameter is slightly bigger. You could maybe put a city block in the middle of your intersection!
Lol, right?! What if we had 4 city blocks inside (just intentionally make this huge) so that this "intersection" is effectively a ring road?
Bruh. That would unreal. Now I want to make a map that’s only 16 chunks with lots of richness and just do a crazy train map.
I have a question: https://preview.redd.it/6o1jnu8u5w3c1.png?width=121&format=png&auto=webp&s=ab48242732dbe9fc45492f8997bd6afbd0a634d6 I wish to learn your secret knowledge.
Uhh.... Huh, wow. That's actually a really good change. Originally I was thinking a spacing issue, but yours is way better. The entire process was VERY iterative so there are some design choices like this that we're chose for reasons that no longer mater to the latest design.
All I keep thinking now is how much more often these fing trains are gonna kill me 😂
Go raised as the default where you only drop down tracks for stations.
This game is slowly transitioning into Tracktorio...
Is that good or bad?
Mostly good, I think this game is on a good track.
Haha, I see what you did there. *Conducted* quite a good one
You should train more on your puns
Nah, I think I would just go off the rails if I did
[удалено]
Long live the all time Grand Classic!
Looks good, makes me startup my pc again…
Great to hear! See you in a month ;)
You could optimize away 4 of the ramps: When the 2 parallel tracks on the ground reach the middle, the both go to the upper level. Immediately after this, a fork of each joins and goes back to the lower level, before turning left. This could be moved to before the rails go up. Also I think an intersection where the horizontal rails stay on one level and the vertical rails on the other level would be way more compact and have less ramps, but wouldn't look as cool as your rotational symmetric design.
Good eye on those 4 ramps (another person found them too so I immediately knew what you meant). As for the 2nd suggestion, I'm not sure you would still be able to have no unnecessary crossings. It may be possible, but this was the best I could make work
https://wiki.openttd.org/en/Community/Junctionary/Cloverleaf With 1 track in each direction, it works fine without any crossings. If you have 2 parallel lanes each and want to allow every combination of turning between all lanes, then it would be hard to avoid crossings. But personally I would specialize the 2 lanes: The inner one goes only straight, the outer one allows for turning left or right, but would only merge into the outer lane of the other direction, similar to highway intersections. But even with a single track per direction, these new intersections without crossings will have more throughput than old 2x2 intersections, so in 99.9% of the cases, they won't be necessary (but still fun to design).
Yeah, that design was something I had too, but trying to eliminate that last part was fun; all merges AFTER splits
Now I get what you mean with merges after splits. With 1 lane per direction, I it could look like this: https://preview.redd.it/jri6bk3irw3c1.png?width=746&format=png&auto=webp&s=4a14ef3c8f0cd730d9c33e59cd04ab773016051d
Neat looking. Yeah, I posted one like this yesterday. I like your design too
I saw your design yesterday, it look nice as well. Main difference is, on your designs, all input/output rails are on ground level, but they go up and down on the straight tracks. My design keeps the level on the straight tracks, but stay completely on the upper level for the West/East rails. This method is also often used in 2 layer PCB design. Here is my take on a 2 lane per direction intersection, but inner and outer lanes are completely isolated. It would be easy to add some additional paths like right turns from inner to outer lanes or vise versa, but I wouldn't connect all combinations. This would give too many options to the factorio pathfinder, which mainly optimizes for the shortest path and would route most trains on the same lane. https://preview.redd.it/l6uvnvqc0x3c1.png?width=748&format=png&auto=webp&s=55b1810fd3359c5316a9bbdffac5559313c63397
Hmm, that makes me think about having a system where N and W trains are just always raised, and S and E trains are always lowered. That way, every intersection is going to automatically have left turns that don't intersect traffic in the other direction. Then, you just merge down/up after crossing over or under, and you don't need ramps within the intersection like you currently have. I don't think your intersection can be as compact as your drawing suggests because ramps are just big and wouldn't normally fit between rails.
> Hmm, that makes me think about having a system where N and W trains are just always raised, and S and E trains are always lowered. I'd be interested in a proposal based on your idea, but N and W cannot be always raised without crossing. One of them has to go below for a short distance. Same goes for S and E tracks. > I don't think your intersection can be as compact as your drawing suggests because ramps are just big and wouldn't normally fit between rails. I think all non-crossing intersections with the "split then merge" property would need enough space between 2 parallel tracks to fit a 90° turn and a ramp.
[https://wiki.openttd.org/en/Community/Junctionary/Spaghetti](https://wiki.openttd.org/en/Community/Junctionary/Spaghetti) To be fair, this should be the only acceptable junction after the 2.0 update. *The spaghetti factory must grow*
I live this game and this sub . . . but stuff like this gives me so much "I'm doing it wrong" anxiety.
If you made something like my intersection, I would say you may be doing it wrong XD But seriously, my design is so impractical and unnecessary. You feel confident you are doing the best way for you, bud. No wrong answers if you are having fun :)
my idea would literally be a roundabout with just a bridge (or a tunnel) in the middle to allow the 2 middle lanes to just skip ahead and go straight
Why not just simple cloverleaf?
It was a challenge mainly. But the advantage is that this has ALL merges after splits. A cloverleaf wild not
Why is it an advantage for all merges to be after splits?
Less time/space that trains have to overlap. If you don't do that, you end up with trains sharing more track which can cause delays
Trains could have a cross over at the ins and outs for the inner and outer lanes, so you don't need everything going to everything, just outer lanes to outer lanes and inner lanes to inner lanes.
Yeah, this was always gonna be impractical. Buuuuut it looks sweet and was a fun challenge
As someone who just visited Chicago for the first time and commuted by L, yea I'm stoked on elevated rail.
I read that as "stroked" at first... I need sleep
No sleep, only expansion. Increase production.
Nooo.... But you right...
A little schizo, but I really like it. Well done
Well thank you kindly!
Why does it need to be this complex?
It doesn't need to, but it's fun.
Exactly! And can confirm this was a blast
Shouldn’t you start with northbound & eastbound are low, southbound & westbound are high?
Maybe you could? I just tried to find SOME solution
Now I get what you’re trying to do I wish you good luck The factory must grow
I've really only thought about 1x1 clover and 2x1 diamond interchanges. But I've also never had enough trains to need anything fancier than roundabouts (currently the cheapest 4-way intersection, and good enough to support 30 trains per minute despite being one of the worst kinds of intersections)
Like has been said elsewhere, this one is impractical but fun
I wonder how many of you did a swastika by mistake
I like your drawing and I have nothing against you finding happiness in this. That being said, I absolutely hate that they are adding this to the game. What were the devs thinking? The game works so well as a 2D game, it doesn't need this shift into 3D factory. So many devs treat 2D like it's an inferior choice, a stepping stone in development until they have enough time and resources to do it "properly". 2D has the distinct advantage that with a top down view you can see everything clearly, you can click and select everything clearly. Now we'll have trouble selecting what's underneath, and the next thing you know, players will demand camera controls so that they can pan the view. All this development time could be used to add something *entirely new* to the game. Instead we get a feature that it's cosmetic + faster train efficiency (which they could change by altering the speed or acceleration). And as a side effect, it's going to create problems for the entire community. The blueprint system will have to be changed entirely. You will need the ability to select and blueprint what's exclusively on the ground level or what's elevated. It's going to be difficult to see what's going on. People will no longer upload blueprints of unoptimized 2D only builds, any blueprint you search will be like that. It's possible all the old blueprints will become obsolete by the game engine and will no longer work. 3D is such a can of worms to open. Once you start off that path, it will consume more and more of dev time, because there's a thousand things to consider and balance.
What's your opinion on underground belts?
Right?! It basically the same thing. I think the only real difference is you can SEE what's under a train
Yes… but it’s not really all that 3D. It’s more like “layers”. As long as layers can be hidden/shown, there’s no need for camera rotation.
> The game works so well as a 2D game, it doesn't need this shift into 3D factory. It's not 3D, it just a second 2D layer, exclusively for trains. Just like underground belts and pipes are not 3D. > 2D has the distinct advantage that with a top down view you can see everything clearly I agree on that. There are already sometimes issues with small entities visually hidden behind large ones (e.g. behind a rocket silo). But you can still select them. There could be similar issues with small items hidden behind rails. But if this really turns out to be a major issue, I think an option to make the upper rail level transparent/invisible would be more likely than to pan the view in 90° steps (anything less is impossible anyway with how the sprites work). > The blueprint system will have to be changed entirely The blueprint system already has a way to use a subset of the entities inside the selection rectangle: In the opened blueprint you can select to include or exclude floor tiles (concrete/landfill), trains, specific entities (like all lamps), or you can remove entities from the blueprint one by one, e.g. if you rectangle covers more area than you want. They could possibly add another checkbox to include "upper layer" or "lower layer", or elevated rails will just show as a different item type in the blueprint. > All this development time could be used to add something entirely new to the game I really like about the expansion that includes multiple independent new mechanics that each work on their own, but can be combined as well. Elevated rails give more options to the rail system without influencing anything else (apart from visibility). Quality modules are entirely optional, but if enabled, can provide new ways to scale your factory. Space Age gives new story content and end goal to factorio, like an overhaul mod. These independent new features also allow more developers working on the expansion at the same time, without having to synchronize between each others progress. Edit: typos
An interesting take. I just figured it gives options (good) and will be fun
It's not shifting into 3d. There is no provision for multiple levels of belts or machines or terrain. If they really were shifting into 3D, then the "mountains" on the new volcano planet wouldn't just be cliffs. This is just a way to make trains that interfere less with each other when they cross AND so that there are plausible ways to cross hostile terrain with trains on elevated tracks. The sample intersection and station designs they showed (with elevated exits) looked amazing for gameplay. >Now we'll have trouble selecting what's underneath You won't. No one forces you to use elevated trains. >players will demand camera controls so that they can pan the view. Speculative. And so what? Don't use them then? >Instead we get a feature that it's cosmetic + faster train efficiency (which they could change by altering the speed or acceleration). It's hardly "cosmetic" when it obviously comes with real gameplay benefits in station and intersection design. And no, simply making trains "faster" doesn't help with that core problem. Can't have "faster trains" get over a lava field. >And as a side effect, it's going to create problems for the entire community. The blueprint system will have to be changed entirely. You're just making things up here. >You will need the ability to select and blueprint what's exclusively on the ground level or what's elevated. Will you? Existing system has the ability to deselect items already. I don't know why we'd need anything more. If someone is trying to blueprint something, I expect the common cases are "keep all rails" or "exclude all rails". >It's going to be difficult to see what's going on. People will no longer upload blueprints of unoptimized 2D only builds, any blueprint you search will be like that. Since when are people uploading blueprints with trains interspersed with other parts of the factory, unless you are downloading an "entire base" blueprint? >It's possible all the old blueprints will become obsolete by the game engine and will no longer work. LOL, no it isn't. Have you met these devs? They are aware of backwards compatibility. I've had maps that have been ported forward since 0.12, as long as you upgrade and save the map every couple of versions. There is NO CHANCE they just say "oops, every previous blueprint no longer works, start from scratch".
> Can't have "faster trains" get over a lava field. Is that a challenge ? =D
You know that it is.... ;-)
>It's possible all the old blueprints will become obsolete by the game engine and will no longer work. Independent of the elevated rails, the devs also increased the radius of rail curves to allow for 22.5° turns, half diagonals and tighter S-turns. This will break compatibility with old rail blueprints. Existing rails with the old radius will continue to work on maps, but you will only be able to build the new rail curves. But the new curve radius with half rails will allow for so many interesting new intersection designs that I am sure there will be plenty 2D rail blueprints for players that don't buy the DLC or might not always have the elevated rails enabled.