I built two engine fitting stations in parallel to match the output of my newly improved painting pipeline, but found that all cars queue up in front of station A, even though the B all resources and no car in it. Similarly, I had a situation where station B did get used briefly, but when it emptied, cars already lined up for A didn’t take the exit to B, even though it was still ahead of them.
I thought I’d taken a screenshot, then wanted to save the game before alt-tabbing but saving crashed the game, and the screenshot didn’t seem to have happened.
Is
8) Various improvements to the way route-finding works for cars on the production line.
going to address this?
I imagine the algorithm to do something as follows: when a car leaves a station, it checks what’s next on its checklist. Then it moves towards the closest station that is reachable and can install that (A* pathfinding, I suppose). And, ideally, cars should recompute their path whenever they reach an intersection, so they make a decision that is optimal right now, rather than half an hour ago.
The trick is that “closest” is not just distance by number of tiles, but by travel time: it should take into account the waiting cars on those tiles, and the duration of the thing those cars are waiting for. So, suppose a particular path is 10 tiles, a conveyor belt takes 2 seconds per tile (random guess), and there are 3 cars queued up on that path for a station that takes 15 seconds (minimum), then that path would take, at minimum, 10 * 2 seconds + 3 * 15 seconds = 65 seconds. I know this may still be an underestimate, because there may be multiple stations along this path etcetera, but it might be a reasonable enough heuristic.
Hi Thomas! I just found out that if you hit the print screen, you hear a shutter sound, and saves the image to your documents folder. Creates a sub folder, like games, or something for ProductionLine (not in front of me right now) 
I saw some interesting routfinding decisions too. Once i attached two parallel lines in both ways, and some cars just chose the longer distance, to travel to the same location.
I’m hoping this is much better in version 1.02, but if you find it isn’t, please tell me :D. The new algorithm does indeed weigh distance against car queues in order to make more sensible routing decisions.
Hello Cliff
My MegaFactory which is probably a pathological case (this being tested in version 1.02) - (designed to produce 1 car on a combined single production line every 3.63 seconds - the time it takes for two fit fuel tank stations with one lot of extra robots to produce 2 cars)
is having more trouble with the new path finding algorithm than the old - cars seem to be ignoring open production stations and joining queues and the queueing behaviour for the cars is resulting in my line splits being loaded very unevenly - before they werent great but better than before
This is my savegame (the line is in the process of being ramped up from cold) 1drv.ms/u/s!Aqt01UfokMBglSgo0b4NW6ZnOIAE
Particular areas ive observed odd behaviour is the triplet of quality control stations in the top left of the factory - along with the fit roof stations bottom left and the entirety of vehicle behaviour from paint undercoat => dry finish Im aware what ive done in that section is complex
1drv.ms/i/s!Aqt01UfokMBglSnsas28f2ThYnOO This is a montage of a few scenarios ive seen most of these are where im splitting one line into three and then a very complicated scenario where my intent is to split one line into 2 which then goes to three (so 6 stations in parallel) - ive marked on the images where the vehicles are expected to go - and the pair of images in the middle are before and after where a car ignores an open slot to instead join a queue.
PS are there plans to have an upgrade for faster exports? - in order to stop cars banking back ive had to connect my lines to 3 export slots
Also if anybody is interested this ( 1drv.ms/u/s!Aqt01UfokMBglSp2nTRlgHtFnkEA ) is a copy of the above production line with inputs flow slightly tweaked so it runs a little more smoothly (representing my favourite design yet)