Note: this page should be about the discussion that took place during the conference itself. Comments should be written elsewhere, e.g. on the mailing list.

A developer conference took place on 2021-10-23 at 20:00 UTC. Only a few people were invited.

@orwell mentioned the timetable system as one of the current priorities. In the future, when the timetable system is mature, it might be possible to change the signaling system in a way that respects timetables (e.g. to prioritize late trains).

• Imre's pull request to add the “G” command (wait for a green signal as a specific position) needs review.
• A command to change the autoshunt mode was requested.
• The atcjit branch still needs some improvements and currently conflicts with Imre's PR.

@gpcf noted the following points regarding maintenance:

• Sourcehut also has a bugtracker that can be considered as a replacement for Hemiptera.
• PGP-signed patches/tags should be considered as it (to an extent) prevents people from impersonating developers and prominent contributers to send bogus patches. It is also relatively easy to set up.

Currently most parts of advtrains does not come with unittests. This has led to multiple cases where the introduction of new features unintentionally broke existing setups. However, as advtrains is a large project, it should be expected that unittests will be added very slowly.

The development of the dlxtrains mod led to a discussion on the train livery system, which is currently very limited. The following solutions were discussed during the conference:

• Keeping the current livery mechanism and writing another mod for advanced livery support,
• Using certain standardized fields in the wagon registration table, or
• Using a livery table where information on supported liveries is passed (@Blockhead).

Additionally, @gpcf brought up a few points that should also be taken into consideration:

• Certain wagons are designed to have variable models (such as the gondola wagons in his moretrains fork).
• In real life, changing train liveries is not trivial, and it is handled by multiple tools.

The following points were briefly discussed:

• Distant signaling in the new-ks branch will be removed as it is way too far from maturity.
• A “line speed” signal aspect (the maximum speed at which a train is allowed to pass a line) should be implemented, which should override the max speed restriction if necessary.
• The trainhud branch is ready for review, although the custom train HUD feature still needs to be tested.
• @orwell: Minetest currently lacks a mechanism for custom auxiliary keys.
• @orwell, @gpcf: IRL, some older trains can also accept data from newer signaling systems, although the controls need to be manually changed. However, this is not a priority, and implementing this feature would break existing setups (@Maverick2797).
• In the LuaATC punch event, it should be possible to send a message to the player who punched the operation panel.

The details of the next conference were not discussed yet, but it is considered that more people will be invited if possible.