I just tried road vehicle/train collision and I get the accident news as expected.

News may occasionally be omitted if there are lots of ticker messages scrolling by

News may occasionally be omitted if there are lots of ticker messages scrolling by

That seems like the issue. Changing the OP to "don't ommit those reports" since in later game, once you news feed is busy, you basically after a while end up surprised, that you have no aircraft/cars left, because you missed those messages.

If there at something else get news it get these first.. Game not look these priority... tell that one loco wait deposit when it already changed new and go on back bussines??

Affects 20190723-master-g2e686ad5d5, also in that when the game is in fast forward, most (sometimes all) summary messages are not shown. This not only includes accidents/disasters but also company info, general info, and other messages marked to display as "Summary".

I confirm this. Even in multiplayer games, it happens that the opponents get the notification of some accident involving my vehicles far before that I get it, but it even happens that I don't get it at all.
And of course getting timely notifications about accidents is crucial to be able to replace the destroyed vehicle(s).

I also noticed in a multiplayer game that I was getting all the notifications for plane crashes (I didn't own any) and my friends were getting none. My company was the first in the list, in case this info is useful.
We were playing on a very competitive map (infrastructure costs, inflation, very expensive airplanes) so there were "really" few planes, like 5-10 in total given the costs to maintain them. The volume of notifications was relatively low hence I suspect that there is some bug.

I've noticed something similar when playing singleplayer games with AIs (albeit with JGRPP, although I don't know if the difference matters here). I get a very high number of notifications about plane crashes; it's actually quite difficult to see any other notifications as a result.

Did a bit of digging .. news is, as far as I can test and debug, working as intended. What you might be noticing, is this:

• News that has a popup cannot be interrupted by other news that shows a popup; in other words, there is no priority in news, so if there is something else that has a popup, it will not show the crashed plane
• If the crashed plane is cleaned up before the news is shown, you never get the see the news. This is because if the Vehicle is cleaned up, so are any news messages associated with the vehicle. This is including the news history!

The first in combination with the second can make it likely you don't see crashes. Cleanup happens relatively quick after crash, but news popups stay on for a very long time (relative). So if any other message pops up, it is very likely you are going to miss the crash.

The second alone is very annoying, as your history will just remove the crashed event as soon as the vehicle is cleaned up. Making it even more likely for you to miss this crucial event.

The problem is worse with FastForward btw, as news popups are shown for N seconds, not N game-days.

I am not sure what a proper solution is .. we remove the news, as the "viewport" in the news message is no longer valid, so that is a bit of a problem. We could extend how long a crashed vehicle is alive, but that also hinders other traffic to such airport. I have to think a bit about this.

@embeddedt : what you experience, really sounds like a you problem :D If you have enough planes to crash that it is constantly in the news .. sounds like something else is going wrong :) Either way, this is not part of this ticket, and I think even unlikely to be solved honestly :) If you want us to look into it, please make a new ticket for it.

@TrueBrain Full disclosure, I am not familiar with how OpenTTD code is designed, but I am a programmer so let me suggest a few things.

Would it be possible to
a) separate messages from their initiating vehicles? This would seem a better design to me anyways. But of course, you wouldn't be able to inspect the vehicle if you see the message to late. Any possibility to keep crashed vehicles in some "graveyard depo", so that the data can be accessed and the vehicle would not occupy the road? The user can then delete them as usual. The news viewport could be than tied to a particular location, where the crash happened and have a "button" to view the crashed vehicle in the "graveyard depo".

b) prioritize crash messages in the popup queue?
c) create separate / assign different place to show crash messages? Probably not a good idea 😁.

I just created a PR that indeed shows the news of the location the vehicle crashed; this now survives removing of vehicles. So there is that :)

The rest of what you suggest at a) we did discuss, and agree it would be better. But that is outside this issue, and a good feature request for anyone to implement. So if you feel up for it, and want to see how OpenTTD is coded, contributions are very welcome :D

b) is possible, but I am not sure if it is any solution. People could argue which news is more important .. I think with my suggested fix, it is already easier to spot crashed vehicles :)

c) is indeed properly not a good idea; the GUI is already bloated as it is :D

Tnx for thinking along, it seems that showing the news of the location it is crashed is the best solution for now :)

Might accually be a nice undertaking and contribution for me to do. Hope OpenTTD didn't decide to honor the Assembly language choice, that Chris did back in the day. 😁

So some kind of graveyard depo (not in the map if possible), which would accept crashed vehicles is within the capabilities of the design?

In your current fix, do you somehow solve for the fact, that user would get a crash news, but will not be able to found out which vehicle that was? Or more relevantly, reproduce its schedule?

Hope OpenTTD didn't decide to honor the Assembly language choice, that Chris did back in the day.

OpenTTD is largely written in C++, with some Squirrel mixed in for AI/GS support.

In your current fix, do you somehow solve for the fact, that user would get a crash news, but will not be able to found out which vehicle that was? Or more relevantly, reproduce its schedule?

Indeed; if you are too late to spot it, you won't know what vehicle crashed. This was already the case before my fix, and will be after :)

So some kind of graveyard depo (not in the map if possible), which would accept crashed vehicles is within the capabilities of the design?

Doesn't have to be a real depot, but you can hide a vehicle completely, while keeping it around. Details I have not thought out, tbh, but I guess hiding the vehicle completely, and allowing some way to list crashed vehicles and "rebuild at nearest depot" or something like that. It seems #8498 already discusses this a bit :)

Sounds good 🙂. I will try to get some free time on my hand and might get to it. Thanks for the chat and quickfix and all the best in 2021.

Having vehicle instances which are "off-map" such that Vehicle::tile does not necessarily point to a valid sensible tile for that vehicle type requires changing a surprisingly large number of places in the code.

e.g. if a road vehicle was destroyed on a level crossing, later put into a "hidden" state, and then the crossing was removed to prevent further carnage, many parts of the code would encounter issues trying to get the road/tram type of the road vehicle's current tile, even if the vehicle was crashed and not moving.

This is certainly doable (it is done for trains in my branch), but it requires a non-trivial amount of combing through the code.

my train of thought would be to teleport the vehicle into the nearest appropriate depot (hoping there is one).
that would avoid all the stuff about querying the tile the vehicle is on.

How about we continue this conversation in #8498, to not get away too much from the bug here, and possible features we like to have? Might be good for future-us! :)