MP Railroad System

[AlbertLooper]

I got interested in designing a 'monorail' yesterday, intended for multiplayer where a vast rail network allows the players to travel anywhere at high speed.

Some quick design pics:
Pic 1
Pic 2

However having little experience with a) MP and b) tracks, I'm afraid I've ran into some inevitable logistical problems. Derp.

I'm looking for a way to drive the train basically anywhere you want in a cube-gridlike system. And just like a road system there is a 'back' and 'forward' track.
If those two tracks would meet at a crossing it would look something like this:

- You drive on the right side of the track (black arrow on the bottom)
- When you meet crossing 1, activating both switch tracks would lead the train to the right.
- If not activated you continue to crossing 2, when that one is activated you follow the track and drive to the left.
- If both are not activated you continue straight ahead.

Technically it is possible, my problem however lies in how to control this "direction choosing". Especially in MP. Because in SP you could press a button before departure that sets all the tracks in the right position. I guess each location would have to have it's own unique path set but it's still doable. In MP however... if I set my (long) path it will mess up the path of someone else who's also in transit. I'm looking for a way to prevent this problem and could use some help.

1) Is it possible to somehow activate the switch tracks only when the correct train comes close?
I guess one way could be with some sort of delay that signals each switch motor (wirelessly), but that would mean you'd have to calculate the exact travel times (lol) and it would be highly dysfunctional with any kind of delay.

Another option I guess would be to create some kind of "track in use" delay before sending that second player towards his destination if the track he wants to use is already being used. This is probably possible with railcraft signalling though I'm not sure if it would be functional on a large server.
I'd love to hear more idea's. Are there any servers that handle a large rail network? (Not just from A to B, but many destinations)

2) Is there a way to steer carts/trains (Either Steve carts or the trains mod) yourself personally without any track switching like in the picture above? (ie: go left, right or straight manually)

Any suggestions or tips concerning this issue would be greatly appreciated!

 

[MilConDoin]

For 2)

http://stevescarts2.wikispaces.com/Advanced+Control+System

 

[AlbertLooper]

Thanks MilCon.
I gave the steering cart a try before but it didn't work. I now see that I need to use a special junction rail and not the railcrafts junction tracks.
The steering seems to work quite fine now though I'm not sure about it's use for multiplayer yet. A player standing on the rails can easily block it. But perhaps it's possible to change it so it passes through players?

Do you have any idea on how to make it work with traincraft locomotives as well?

 

[Abdiel]

Apologies for not using proper names of tracks, I haven't played with RC enough to remember them.

Put a track that stops the train before an intersection. Present three (or however many) buttons with a choice of destination to the player. Clicking a button sets all the track junctions on the intersection and releases the train from the holding track. If the player is idle, select a default destination after a timeout. It is quite unrealistic, but given the options probably the best you can do. Depending on the density of traffic on your server, you might want to place additional holding tracks to stop other trains from running into one that's currently picking a destination.

All of this can be made in vanilla, youtube should have plenty of videos. Therefore Railcraft & co. should only make the job much easier and the result nicer.