Welcome to the first installment of the Advtrains Newsletter. This newsletter compiles last month's events in Advtrains and gives small tips. It may exaggerate some parts for comedy purposes.

This newsletter is aimed at those who use Advtrains, such as server admins or singleplayer players.

Definition: Simply, a commit refers to a unit of change to a repository. Commit history means the history of changes.

A bugfix related to the on_joinplayer handler has been pushed to the master branch.

Distant signaling has been partially implemented in the new-ks branch. It is possible to manually assign distant signals. The branch is currently considered unstable and not recommended for production use, but it is stable enough for basic testing.

In addition to Advtrains, doxydoxy released version 0.4.2 of his Minitram mod, with Czech localization and a few bugfixes.

There was a 3-hour conference on 2022-06-25, aimed mostly at organising the fractured livery system. Full conference notes can be found in the corresponding wiki page.

Liveries are a relatively new feature to Advtrains. There are three seperate Livery systems in Advtrains, each belonging to different trains.

The first and most simple system is the E231 painting. Using a bike painter, one can change the colour of a E231 train's stripe. A very real use of this is that on 56i-mtserver, the Anarchy Mountains Metro colours the trains based on their map colour. This makes the complicated interchange station at the centre very easy to navigate.

The second system belongs to DLX trains, which allows one to select between age and company of trains.

The third system (Doxygen-spammer Mintiram) also uses the bike painter, but allows one to select the component coloured using different combinations. This is a very complicated system.

As such, these three fractured livery systems are entirely seperate and a solution to this was a main point of the meeting.

In the conference, the first 30 minutes were spent waiting around, with hold music provided near the end of the wait by one participant.

Then the meeting began. It was agreed that there would be a copy of the bike painter for advtrains to prevent users from being forced to use the bikes mod.

A train painting interface from the tracks is under consideration. One solution is to use a special track. This approach can easily cause servers to run out of space on track layouts, as this approach would invite future changes to require different tracks. If a station had separate “Slow down”, “Open door”, “wait”, “close door”, “speed up” tracks, this would be very inefficient.

An extra feature includes the ageing of wagons, which would introduce even more immersion. The wagons will age based on distance travelled, but 56independent suggested that there should be a configuration option for units of ageing. This feature is less important then the livery painting feature.

Related is the vandalism of wagons. Graffiti will be drawn above the ageing of wagons, reflecting how graffiti is applied IRL.

56i managed to derail the topic (continuing his very unsafe railway practices) and discussed anarchy servers allowing players to write graffiti on trains. This led to a heated argument on whether Advtrains would work on anarchy servers.

Whenever Path v7 Paths mix with advtrains tracks, bad things happen. A track may cut through the path, making dangerous falls, or there may be am level crossing, where people must cross the track to continue their walk.

This creates a very unsafe environment as trains are often very silent. Auxiliary warning systems must be made.

When a path interacts with a rail line, ensure the path is level with the rail. Use crossings from the platforms mod to allow crossing to occur on designated bits.

Build a little canopy and portal opening the path onto the railway line, as in the image below.

The canopy allows for signs from the Britsignal (VERY WIP) mod to be used and makes a visual reminder that people are entering a space where they must be cautious.

Use the code from Level Crossing to control the Andrews Cross.