So rather than having load limits, why not make the vehicles try to keep an equal distance between each other? If one tries to implement this using signals (only possible for rail, not for road vehicles), the train will "leave" the station (as in stop loading) and then wait for the next free block, instead of letting people board until it can depart. That time is usually chosen, so there's an equal (or another economically sane) interval between two vehicles.
In real life, there's no trains that wait till they're "n% full", they wait until a certain time and then depart. I know there's "minimum load", but that might make sense for goods, but not for passenger lines. If you leave this running for a while the second vehicle will be right after the first one, resulting in a highly unprofitable second vehicle and possibly overcrowded station.
Make any line with any vehicle in simutrans, add a second vehicle. Note that it feels like the latest release, 110, decreased the performance even more. In the meantime I play the game in a super small window which makes the performance almost okay. Discussing this a bit on IRC resulted in everyone telling me to use Windows, which is not an option.
#OPENTTD SIGNALS BRIDGES TUNNELS FULL#
Now note that the same laptop and same OS can run 3D games such as Heroes of Newerth at almost maxed out settings in full HD with no problems, getting around 70 FPS. Playing on a 512x512 map (pak128.japan) with my very powerful laptop (Intel i7 820M CPU, 4(+4) 16 GB DDR3 Nvidia GeForce GTX 560M 1.5GB GDDR5) on Ubuntu (11.10, 64bit) I get 10 FPS at max, and the UI is still not responsive (eg moving around the map hardly works), if I increase the maxfps setting to 50, the game becomes completely unplayable and trying to move around the map is next to impossible. This is my by far biggest problem with simutrans. Please see this as constructive criticism to improve simutrans, and despite me only pointing out the bad things here, simutrans is still great. So I thought I'd give my feedback on what for me are the most annoying things about simutrans. First of all, simutrans doesn't really suck, it is however not perfect either.