How do the 'departure time' and 'scenario length' values work (when selecting a train to control)?

[Coasterfan312]

I don't know why, but I just cannot wrap my head around what the numbers mean. These are the main things I'm confused about:

• Is the 'scenario duration' the total duration, or how much time is left?
• What departure does the 'departure time' refer to? The start of the scenario?
• Why is the departure time not converted to your own timezone?

The last one is more a point for the devs, but if anyone can answer one or both of the others, it'd be very helpful. Currently I have to blindly take control of a train and hope the scenario doesn't just end within 2 minutes (which has happened before, despite the scenario duration not being that short).

Edited December 28, 2022 by Coasterfan312

[Gazz292]

Scenario Duration is how long you should get to drive the train for... if it's showing 0:08, you will get about 8 minutes, i regularly chose the EU07 EC trains with about 1 hour and 45 minutes of driving time, and do drive for that long.

Departure time... i've not figured this out fully yet, as the time can be in advance of the current time, or many hours behind the current time.

Timezone, because you chose a server to drive on, and depending on where it is in the world, you get put in a train at the local time, so it may be midnight in your home, but if you chose a server the other side of the world, your train will be driving in the daylight, so the time is refering to the local time of the server.

 

When your drive ends depends on a few things, sometimes you make it to the end of the portion of the map thats available in the playtest,
Other times you get disconnected from the server for some reason,
Then there's the server restarts, which happen every 6 hours, starting at 00:00 CET,  so midnight, 6 am, midday and 6pm are the restart times based on the time in Poland.

so if you are based say in the UK, where GMT is 1 hour behind CET, 
If you are driving a train at 18:59... in 1 minutes time the server will restart, and your drive will be over...  

BUT... the servers restart one after the other not all at once, starting with the PL servers,
i often drive in EN9 server, and that usually restarts about 20 minutes past the hour of restart time.
So depending on your server choice, your restart time could be anything upto 30 minutes after the start of server resets.

Edited December 28, 2022 by Gazz292

[Coasterfan312]

That is what I assumed the scenario duration was, but in the instance where I only got to drive for ~2 minutes, it ended with 'scenario completed', meaning there's likely some issues with the calculation of the remaining duration.

As for timezones, my problem is that the time at the top of the main menu and the server dispatch times are using different timezones (since I am in CET and there are no servers based within that timezone). That being said, if the scenario duration shows how long is left, the departure time is almost irrelevant.