I remember DTG binning off steam locomotive development because the physics were supposedly wrong. The only steamer I've driven in game is the Flying Scotsman, and it feels almost too easy to drive. Does anyone know what the core problem with the physics is?
Let’s start with no coal or water consumption. No visible change in boiler water level or fire mass or even simulated for that matter. Running at 75% cutoff on full regulator other than immediately pulling away would destroy the fire. Would not start wheelslipping if more than 10% regulator or start wheelslip at high speeds. Sound does not deteriorate into a muffled roar above 30 MPH. I’m sure others will be along to flesh that out.
To all intents and purposes there are no steam physics. It's not really possible to give a list of what's wrong as nothing is right.
That's not exactly true. All of that is actually simulated, but some things are intentionally turned off by DTG, because whole system was never finished properly. Water levels in boiler and tender are simulated, but boiler is set up to always have constant level, no matter what. Coal is being consumed and it's amount in the tender is even animated, but you cannot see it unless you run for many hours, because you always have full tender at the start of the game. The fire itself is also at least somewhat simulated -- it has separate numbers for total amount of coal and amount of burning coal, and possibly temperature of the fire too (I might be wrong on the latter). Draft is also simulated. You cannot really see the fire going out when playing, because fireman has near infinite speed with which he loads coal. Basically, he can load hundreds of kilograms of coal a second, so every time you open firebox door, your fire immediately gets fully replenished up to a predetermined high amount. Besides, there's a bunch of different failure conditions. The easiest one to get is, of course, fire dying, which can be achieved by never opening the firebox door. But there are others too, for example, you can melt fusible plugs if water level gets too low, and it works, if you remove automation of water levels in the boiler. There's a mod that fixes a lot of these problems for 4f and Scotsman. It turns off all of the automation of water level, adds controls for injectors, turns fireman into a normal human, who can only scoop 5 kg of coal every couple of seconds, allows you to see amounts of coal and water both on tender and in the boiler/firebox, and adds some other quality of life stuff. The mod can be found here: https://www.trainsimcommunity.com/m...-steam-improvements-flying-scotsman-fowler-4f It doesn't magically make simulation perfect, since each part can still be set up incorrectly (like rates of coal/water usage etc.), but it makes driving 4F and Scotsman a much nicer experience.
One of the devs posted this on Discord a few years ago: The steam simulation apparently works (sort of) but gets more inaccurate the faster the train goes, and instead of fixing it DTG just scrapped all development instead There doesn't seem to be any reason why they disabled manual injector control, water consumption or the HUD showing coal and water levels when it was all already implemented
Cheers for all the responses - I remember when Dovetail officially binned steam simulation I got the feeling that they did so because it would be extremely difficult and complex to get it right, but the problems listed seem fixable.
