I'm sure I've already mentioned this, but the logic of passengers in TSW needs a massive revamp. The overwhelming majority of DLC for TSW focuses on passenger transport. And since most of them are driver-only operated, while in the rest TSW still doesn't simulate the work of a guard, the player is forced to interact with AI passengers, whose logic is implemented in a way that can only be described as absolutely hopeless. I don't know if I can hope that TSW6 will finally fix this issue, but I'd like to point out the things that spoil my gaming experience the most. 1) Please reprogram the AI passenger logic so that they leave the carriages at the final station rather than the starting station. This will prevent trains from leaving Glasgow Central completely empty during rush hour and prevent them from going to the depot or shunting on the sidings with passengers on board. 2) Please link the presence of passengers on platforms to the timetable. a) First of all, passengers should not appear on the platforms after the last train of the day has departed. b) The same applies to platforms from which all trains depart to the same station (e.g. Kirkhill on the Glasgow Central - Newton line), where all passengers should board every train and not wait foolishly for the next one. c) Passengers should also arrive at the platform a few minutes before the scheduled departure of the train, rather than an hour or two earlier (e.g. Blackpool Branches). Exceptions to this rule may be made at large stations such as Glasgow Central or Preston, there are always passengers around. 3) Please correlate the number of passengers boarding and disembarking at particular stations with the time of day. Please also estimate which stations are busier and which are less busy, and adjust the number of passengers boarding and disembarking accordingly. 4) Please fix the problem that no passengers ever appear at some stations (e.g. Croftfoot) and that after a longer period of driving without returning to the main menu, passengers are no longer spawned at subsequent stations. I guess this issue may be somehow related to the Unreal engine, because exactly the same problem occurs in "City Transport Simulator: Tram". And before I am attacked here for expecting the impossible, let me remind you that all these features were present in a very old simulator released fifteen years ago by two students from Berlin!
There's also an issue on Southeastern Highspeed at Stratford "International" where AI passengers get off the train and just stand there.
Drives me insane on BCC when you're a 3-car train stopped halfway down the platform and you watch passengers walk all the way to the other end of the platform and either stand there or walk all the way back to the train. Especially annoying when it's raining and they're standing out in the open with cover at the other end of the platform.
There's so much that is wrong with passenger behavior that quite honestly I've stopped paying attention to them. I drive passenger trains largely oblivious to what passengers do or don't do. I don't know whether DTG can solve the myriad problems with NPC's, but they're clearly not a priority because they're rarely if ever addressed in the forum. The OP makes valid points but, like all the other players who've raised similar issues, I have to say he's " whistling Dixie " at this point.
Probably the biggest problem with the passenger system has nothing to do with the passenger system and more to do with the amount of routes and DLC's created. DTG have kept kicking that Can down the road, at this stage it is a whole blood recycling centre they are kicking down the road. It would take some serious man hours to fix this I am guessing. DTG are trying to keep TSW running, fix optimisation, create DLC's, stop crashing, fix bugs and a whole load of other things. We need a passenger DLC, maybe subcontract it out to another company, would that work?
I agree with the OP. One of the reasons why I don't use conductor mode is due to the unrealistic behavior of passengers on the routes that have them and the fact that more often than not, a train that is supposed to be busy during rush hour is completely empty. Subway Sim 2 has way better passenger behavior than TSW. Passengers get on and off at their respective station and they all get off at the terminal station. One thing I have noticed when playing the Harlem Line is that passengers do get on and will actually stay on the train for basically the whole trip to Grand Central which is actually realistic. They do get off at the intermediate stations but they do not all get off at the next station and leave the train empty like on other routes. If the train is going to the yard, there are no passengers so it seems that the behavior of passengers depends on the route. I hope they will improve passengers for TSW 6, but they said they would do that for TSW 2 rush hour and TSW 5 and that hasn't happened despite multiple threads about passenger behavior popping up so I'm not gonna hold my breath that there will be improvements made across the board
This has already been reported and discussed numerous times with no apparent success. TBH if DTG are still comfortable having passengers walking all over the tracks then there is little chance that any of the other issues people have pointed out will be corrected. I'm just very surprised that TOCs are signing up to a game where trespass seems to be the norm?
Since DTG obviously isn't listening to us players, better bring those suicidal passengers to he attention of the PR department of those TOC's. I doubt anybody in those PR departments plays the game to check what they've licensed. It takes only a few YT videos, whether fake or real screen recordings of 'my tally of killed ped's' with some branded trains and stations goin viral to catch a fake or real news site's attention ... Perhaps those TOC's can check the implementation of their license and give DTG more convincing arguments to remedy this situation?
I did an ECS run on ECW the other evening, from Brighton to the station sidings. After going through the wash plant I walked back through the train which was… still packed with passengers! I mean how hard is it to insert a command in the runtime, “If final station all passengers alight”. Or similar?
Yes and no because yes it might cause a bit of weight to the subject, but no because it could destroy the hobby all together.
Really it shouldn't be that complex. Design passenger settings that allow stations or services to have certain designations - eg. All pax here will board, last stop etc - then someone run through each timetable applying them. Might take a day per route, but hardly too demanding and would make an enormous difference. Could even add lots of extra pax 3d models and charge for an add-on.
You see, because I mainly drive suburban trains in driver-only mode, I have no other choice but to either look out of the window or even go out onto the platform (class 314), or alternatively watch the passengers through fake cameras under key 3 (class 380) to close the doors. You know, this is a simulator (although a senior DTG representative once said honestly on YouTube that TSW is not a simulator but a hobby for collectors), and I like to play <as real as it gets>™. I also meet passengers on the siding in Neilston when I go to the other end of the train to change cabs. You don't have this problem in a locomotive. If you're sitting in a separate locomotive, you can pretend you have a guard and close the doors for him, pretending that the guard closed them. Then you only see passengers when you enter the platform. But in year 2025, do we really still have to pretend such basic things in train simulators, or should they already be reproduced in the game? For God's sake, the first train simulator for PC (Microsoft Train Simulator) already had simulated guard work, even though it didn't even have simulated passengers yet!
If they really want TSW6 to feel like a "new" game then absolutely this farce with passenger behaviour has to be sorted. I don't really touch freight services so all my immersion involves carrying passengers. Sure it doesn't make much difference in the scheme of things as I'm in the cab but there's something a bit pointless about driving an 86 or 87 between Preston and Carlisle pulling 10 coaches with literally nobody on board. Or arriving with a buy service at Blackpool North - where there is literally nowhere else to go - and passengers stubbornly refusing to get off - I know Blackpool isn't everybody's cup of tea (for the record I love the place) but surely the passengers went there for a reason, other than to just sit there and head back to Preston !
I’m pretty tolerant of a lot of bugs, but passengers in places they shouldn’t be, especially on the tracks is the one thing that really annoys me. I like the fact that there is life on the platforms, but if it kept them off the tracks, I’d almost prefer them being static. The movement is not that realistic anyway. My other issue is the complete absence of any passengers at some stations, particularly Euston which almost a year after launch is still a ghost town. I can live with them still being in the train in the depot as I honestly never look, but it’s pretty poor really. If not a complete revamp, at least give us some improvements.
The worst is those excursions with photo stops that appear as scenarios. “Stop to allow passengers to photograph xxx” and when you do a fly by along the train it’s totally empty. There should really be no excuse in a scenario when compiling the parameters… “Train full, every seat occupied”..
With tsc you can go into the platform properties and set how many NPCs are on the platform depending on the time of day. Is this option non existent in tsw editor? I'm not saying the passenger system on tsc is better because it's pretty basic compared to tsw yet tsc passenger behavior seems a lot more realistic. Even if they do just disappear when boarding the train.
