Disappointment And Cold Feet.

Hate to spoil your morning, but the " promises " you mention are long lost to history. Don't expect them to be addressed in this millenium.

Such nonsense. Many services are well over an hour.

Because many of us have busy ( let's call that normal ) lives that frequently shorten our playing sessions.

You may remember Sam, who once said that the average playing session was about 30 minutes. That's often all I have before life ( usually my better half ) finds something else for me to do. Multiple save slots would make a big difference to me.

 

Pleased to see this thread has produced such a good response and that things have been kept polite and civil during the notorious unmoderated weekend period. It is clear that everyone contributing shares my burning passion for this game and wants it to be as good and successful as possible.

As human beings we are all fallible and I am not too proud to admit I may have been WRONG and unfairly quick to jump to a harsh judgement over the performance of the TSW6 Riviera route!

Just been watching a YouTube channel called "MattPlaysTV" and the marathon 10 hour stream on TSW6 by DTG Executive Producer Matt Peddlesden and the Riviera route as depicted ran really smoothly with only the occasional slight stutter. This matches how my PS5 version of TSW5 has been running since the very successful performance update patch a few months ago.

Whilst I am aware that Matt was probably using a top end PC, the difference between this stream and the official DTG route launch was incredible.

Conspiracy fans would suspect that he was streaming from a bunker in Nevada, USA at the Area 51 facility using an anti-matter based quantum computer built from back engineered alien technology. Personally I am not a conspiracy theorist and actually really respect Matt as a decent and very likeable gentleman who deeply cares about this game and all the users who share his love of railway simulation.

I have also watched a few other streams about Tsw6/Riviera and they also show performance infinitely better than the DTG launch event. As such I must assume that the official stream was just very badly set up and probably not a fair depiction of both TSW6 and the Riviera line.

Having taken a somewhat circuitous route, I have now come to a decision! I was always going to download the free starter pack of TSW6 and try out some of my many other routes but now will also buy the Riviera DLC.

This is by far my favourite stretch of railway in the UK and one which I have travelled on many occasions. I have honestly been constantly thinking about driving this route ever since it was announced for TSW6 and I could not bear the possibility of what the yoof describe as "FOMO", the fear of missing out!

I have gone through a form of emotional whiplash over this which as my Missus rightly points out is quite sad as it is "just a video game"! I suddenly went from childlike joyful excitement and anticipation to bitter resentful disappointment. Now I sit somewhere in the middle feeling hopeful but with fingers crossed.

Roll on TSW6...

 

Does it work with square miles like that, I can't believe it? Where I live, a square kilometer means 4 sides of 1 kilometer, so if some says 30 square km, it means a square with 4 sides of 30 kilometer. From what I found online, GTA5 is 75,84 square kilometer (km2), so that's huge.

 

Just Cause 3 had a 1000km2/400mi2 map and that didn't have much issue. There are a fair few huge games out there.

 

Surely not. 30 squ.km is a rectangle of 6km x 5 km or 3km x 10 km etc. or a square with each side whatever √30 is.

 

Square area is multiplicative, i.e. a square 8 feet on a side is 64 square feet (think of a chess board). The square root of 75.84 is 8.7 km, which is equal to, again, 5.4 miles.

For some relevant perspective, the switchyard at Hamburg, by itself, would stretch from the Los Santos airport to Paleto Bay

 

Not sure if its my instal or not, but has anyone noticed the light under the station canopy at Totnes dont emit any light LOL, they look lit but don't actually light anything up, the other station lights are fine but under the canopy is as black as night.

 

Pictures are saying more then words, 1 square km:

 

Which is 100 hectares, 10 on a side. Your point is?

 

Dave Gorman would really like this thread.

Train Sim World is goodish!

 

My initial reply was based on this quote "Huge? Not really. Game designers have a whole toolbox of tricks to make a pocket-sized world appear "huge", but it's an illusion. The entire map of GTA V is only 5 miles across."

At least in my country we never say, it's like only 5 miles across, we use it like 75.84 square kilometers (29.28 square miles). If you say 5 miles across, it sounds small, way smaller then 29.28 square miles.

 

Dune Awakening is an Unreal Engine game, and it's massive. Even though you will find stuttering issues reported if you Google it, this wasn't a game engine issue but suddenly started after launch. The developers did fix it but an Nvidia driver update has broken the fix.

The point being, both tile loading hitches (what many here call stuttering) and frame-related stutters are not an unresolvable UE issue. More technically experienced developers can get past such issues, especially by nativising code and not relying so much on UE blueprints.

So to say that such issues can or will never be resolved in TSW, or saying it is simply a UE issue, isn't strictly true. But it would take perhaps technical expertise the current DTG team might lack and a lot of extra work they might not have the time, budget and people resources to dedicate at this point.

 

Elite dangerous is absolutely massive at 1:1 scale of the milky way. Doesn't mean DTG can do a full 1:1 scale of the British rail network

 

Epic itself is blaming developers now for bad performing UE(5) games. Well, maybe they're a kind of right, as The Coalition (Gears) is able to make good performing UE games. However, Epic marketing tells you something like developing in UE5 is easy, but in reality you need a lot of optimization. How to optimize is not documented very well and there is also custom optimization needed, so developers have to find a way to solve issues. Developers like CD Projekt do get help form Epic for this kind of custom optimization, but I suppose smaller developers do not get this kind of help.

You really need a lot of knowledge of UE to make a good performing game, but a lot of game developers don't have this kind of knowledge. CD Projekt has devs with engine knowledge in-house, but even they need support from Epic.

 

The stable motion of the player train is not a luxury feature - it's fundamental. The camera angle shouldn't dictate whether the movement appears correct. I’m not blaming anyone; I’m trying to highlight a reproducible issue so that it can be investigated.

 

The detail you are concerned about is so borderline (developing at the boundary of the graphic) that it is quite feasible there are rounding errors as the assets come into view on the periphery. BTW most drivers focus on looking out the front whilst they drive

 

I have found so far that TSW6 seems a lot smoother than TSW5. If you watch some of the Dadrail streams, the stream is stuttery but as he says, it is running "buttery smooth" whilst he is playing it. Streams might sometimes do more harm than good, if there weren't any though it would be worse.

I would say TSW is running better than I have known it, although I have only tried a couple of routes so far.

Also, a handful of save slots would be good, even just three. I would certainly use them.

 

True, although I was referring to knowledge and expertise of nativising code to avoid reliance on UE itself. Taking processes off the main thread (the default on UE, I believe). Spreading tasks over multiple frames. Just examples. I'm not really cognizant of such things, but I recall these are a couple of things my developer sibling mentioned a long time ago.

He's worked on upgrading a game from UE4 to 5, too, which was a lot of work and initially saw a bigger performance hit than the UE4 version, which another team overcame (not sure if he was involved in that bit). He's been able to write machine code from an early age, and rewrote Sony's PlayStation 1 libraries, which probably helps with his understanding and other projects he's worked on.

 

Matt might consider doing streams on a 2-machine setup: one running TSW, feeding the a/v output by fast ethernet to the second computer which handles the streaming

 

Please just stop it with this nonsense. Imagine this type of bizarre excuse making with any other product.

“Sorry to hear the car you spent your hard earned money on has wobbly tires, windows that leak and an engine that randomly cuts out at higher speeds but unlike other brands that manufacture similar vehicles we unfortunately don’t have the time, expertise, staff, resources or the budget to build a better product.”

 

Who are the other suppliers for Train Simulation? For pc there are a few (e.g. Trainz ). They do not cater for the typical train enthusiast who use TSC and TSW. For XBox and PS not so much. What you get is what you get. You either spend your money or you don't. We cannot compare a simple pc game versus a $50k vehicle. It is just entertainment.

 

It isn't nonsense, and it isn't an excuse.

Firstly, I didn't say these scenarios were fact, hence I used the modal verbs "might" and "perhaps". But what reason would you have for DTG not achieving the same quality as other studios? Other than skillset (technical knowledge and ability), time, resources, budget – one or two or even all those limitations combined.

I haven't suggested anything that doesn't factually impact many games development teams and publishers, and I haven't suggested the issues can't be overcome.

Fact is, TSW has issues that could be resolved, given the right team, time, resources and budget... That isn't an excuse, but again the unfortunate reality that other games have faced in development and post-release.

Perhaps you think DTG can fix every issue right now, even if they don't have those factors already in place?

Either way, I hope they can make greater improvements going forwards and implement every feature we players hope for. That would be great.

 

Fully agree. Without sleights on any individual I do get the vibe they are struggling to match their ambition to reality. Whether because of cost cuts or other reasons (possibly driven by Focus) look no further than the UK route building which now seems permanently outsourced to Rivet. Yet back in the heady days up to TSW3 maybe even 4, the routes were being built in house and we even had the Preservation Crew to lavish love on the older content. So it’s not hard to make the leap if they axed production staff, they also cut back on technical or programming staff. Again, we see a portfolio of four titles (TSW, TSC, Catan and Fishing), of which only TSW now seems to get any programming time. I wasn’t joking the other week when I whimsically suggested Matt’s oft repeated mantra of “Passed to Engineering”, in reality is a phone call to an amenable hacker in Bucharest or Bangalore to fudge through some code changes.

I mean, how difficult otherwise would it have been to put in the extra save slots and the UI to support it?
How difficult to add a few more graphics settings for brightness, contrast and gamma?
How difficult to make adaptive eye a toggled feature?

I mean, I’m really enjoying TSW6 and the new routes but when the game loads up to all intents and purposes I could still be playing TSW5. Even the (sometimes grammatical incorrect) hints on the loading splash screen are the same as in the previous version.

 

there are indeed not that many train simulators on steam
but there is more then just Trainz and TSW like Simrail and ZDsimulator
plus a few more

 

I would say SimRail is number three in my go to list (TSW being No.1, TSC being No.2 and Run 8 No.4).

 

I believe he already does, or at least did when he was doing it regular.

Might be thinking of someone else though

 

They lost me allready, after tsw5 I feel deeply offended as xbox user... Although tsw6 pack seems bargain, it is not an option for me anymore. The money goes to responsible developers. And tsw made me fedup of trains thats it.