I noticed in London commuter there are planes flying over head at Gatwick, the planes are not very good, they are just wrong. So I thought, how about the other way around, how do flight simulators do trains? The train looks American despite it being a UK airport. London Stansted Express?
They were allegedly modelled intentionally wrong to not interfere with licensing, although the speed they approach there makes me shiver every time, expecting to hear an explosion few seconds after they leave the screen. TSW5 routes have licensed and properly modelled airbuses.
They look like a flight sim person would think an "average" generic commuter train would look. The buses aren't a specific brand either. Can you imagine the work to try to recreate every "accurate" car, bus and train you fly over in the entire world? It's not a bad design to be fair for a static asset.
Well, it's a flight simulator, and the focus isn't on a completely accurate representation of trains. Conversely, for me, in a train simulation, airplanes don't need to be depicted with 1:1 accuracy; the main thing is that they fly overhead somehow. Furthermore, it's somehow noticeable that in games other than railway simulations (shooters, GTA, RDR etc.) the tracks always look kind of strange.
They do an okay job with trains in GTA, RDR and ATS/ETS... for what they are. I mean they're not drivable (well without mods) but you can even railfan a bit on those if you want.
Apparently, (euro) truck simulator (2) and OMSI the bus simulator seem to have decently designed trains, a friend has showed me...
I noticed this also looks at the ETS2 console store page trailer. Theres a screenshot of a freight train going over although the logo is "BB" (hard to see here but clear on my Xbox)
That's an intentional logo choice. They don't use corporate logos unless they have the license for them. So for example in the game they have "Scania" trucks because they have that license, but they don't have "Wal Mart" stores so they use "Walberts" for the super markets. In this case they don't have "DB" for German trains so they use "BB" and a slightly different shade of red to get around licensing. It's actually something the players look forward to since the in-game brands tend to get well known.
MSFS also done cars and although like the trains I guess they can't copy branded products, but more effort was put into the cars. BMW 1 series-ish, Smart Crossover-ish
External/free camera ? PS : you can "get" there at ease if you have landed nearby (and you can land almost anywhere).
I'm sure you do it anyway ! I have ripped out so many high-voltage lines this way... (well, I suppose...)
Is that the default airport textures or the modded one? I only fly to Heathrow or London City but some of the mods are pretty good. And as a member of the MSFS community an forums, I can promise you they complain about the little details that you rarely see just as much, and probably more, than anyone does on these forums (especially for 3rd party content). There are threads there that discuss the inaccuracy of certain tree types in obscure places that are seen maybe .01% of the time and the reactions to it are as you’d expect.
Color is one thing and was a separate conversation regarding seasons (which were added more properly in 2024). I’m talking about general height and location, things you don’t see all the way up from the air. It also wasn’t meant to put down the requests, but just to show how detailed the asks/complaints are over there and how they now go into things that have nothing to do with the actual flying. I started with FS95 and it just makes me laugh when I see those things because we were happy if we even had trees at all back then.
Not sure how people can demand much more from a game that is supposed to be viewed from thousands of feet away.
Yeah I would say the view of the ground from most planes is pretty restricted. By the time you are high enough to get a good view of what's bellow, you are too far away to see it in detail. I do get where you are coming from and yes they could do better but what's the point? Most flight simmers are proper hardcore, they take off and climb to high altitude. I do fly at low altitude myself but don't take much notice of what's on the ground, apart from trees and buildings I would like to avoid. I will say tsw does a much better job of what's in the air than msfs does of what's on the ground.
I would not go that far. A single airbus is not really the global scale that MSFS works on. The other maps have what... zero planes? Not that they NEED them, but it's unfair to try to apply an unrealistic standard to MSFS. And anyone complaining about the up close details as a "hard core simmer" shouldn't be illegally flying low and "cheating" with the camera. You want the view of an airline pilot, you will see things down low for just about 3 minutes on final approach and that's it =-) Can't have it both ways! It's like the people in TSW who want "full fidelity" from the train drivers perspective and then stop the game and look under the bridge to see if you can see fish in the stream. Like THAT is something you would be able to see driving by in a train over the bridge....
"They could do better" and "I will say tsw does a much better job " a) There's no point, and it'd just hurt frame rates and increase work for no benefit, and b) No they don't. People just haven't been able to stop TSW and get a meter away from the "airbus" to complain about all the "discrepancies." Which is fine. Demanding unrealistic levels of impractical perfection in tiny details is often detrimental to game performance...which most people DO care about. How many people playing will notice the license plate on the car in the parking lot at the airport? Now how many will notice a 10-20% drop in fps performance? Or "blurriness" on a train run?
Yeah I did kinda say there's no point of making better train models. On the other thing, I'm driving along in a train and you can clearly make out what the plane is flying around, not that I know much about commercial airlines but my son who's crazy about them will say that's a a380 etc. on the other hand I look at that train on the op's image and I have not got a clue what it's supposed to be, I know it's a train I've never seen in the UK before. So I would say dtg have done a better job. And like I was saying in my original post a high level of detail of what's on the ground on msfs is pointless. And yes I prefer FPS over a high level of detail on msfs, tsw on the other hand I prefer a high level of detail over FPS. Like I do not need to be running at 180fps on trains that travel very slowly compared to planes.
That's what the "blurry textures" and "stuttering" are though that people complain about most. Low FPS. And yet many of the same people wanting "more detail" usually are also complaining about "low fps" on their older systems. I still say that TSW is a tiny fraction of what MSFS covers (ie the whole world) so licensing every train in the world would be rather problematic to meet the same standard as TSW...which is one plane. It's like comparing a hot dog cart to McDonald's. Yes that guy with the hot dog cart might make a nice hot dog, but that's all he has... hot dogs... at one cart.... 3 hours a day. Saying he does "better " overall is subjective and impractical to compare. There's just no need for MSFS to license every train in the world when 99.99% of players won't even see them, let alone obsess over them.
I got a delightful feeling of glee the first time I stepped outside Waverley station in TSW and found the "Weatherfork" pub.
I'm not from Scotland. Is that a real thing? Despite many trips to the UK, I haven't made it to Scotland or Cornwall yet. Been mostly me on business trips since the missus is not a fan of planes. =-)
'Wetherspoon', often referred to in the plural, is a chain of many pubs known for cheap food and drink, and an often, shall we say, interesting clientele.
Yeah I agree, there's no point in having realistic train models on msfs. The blurry textures are a console thing, basically a lack of memory. Being a pc user I've come to realise most game developers don't care if it will run on ancient equipment. It's always been a case of suck it up and buy new hardware, something I've always done. Not enough vram, buy a new GPU, not enough ram, buy more. Obviously you can't do these things on consoles. And dtg should be doing something about it but I think it's got to the point they can't! Stuttering is just part of tsw, I've seen people playing it on hardware that should smash tsw yet it still stutters, you can lower all the graphics settings and it still stutters. I can't wait until metro rivals drops, I'm interested in the game yes but a lot more eager to see if ue5 runs it smoothly.
Somehow I doubt it'll change much. Devs I've heard from say it's not really that much different despite the hype. Although they're entirely different games so I can't say how they compare in performance. Not sure they're as detailed as TSW is. I'm glad they're working on the memory "lock" issue, but it's made worse by all the extra content that has to be processed in the first place. If your truck already needs a tune up, loading an extra 1,000 lbs on the back isn't going to improve performance. There is probably a limit to what they can "offload" though since to some extent the game is literally tracking more "things" than it ever has before. More pieces in the vehicles, more physics, more assets, more systems, more layers. Yes the new features like conductor mode, suspension, passenger announcements, background noise, etc are "nice" but each one is a little bit more for the game to track. It adds up, and people NOT expecting to have to upgrade are in for a rude awakening. If people want to play on a 2015 system, expect a 2015 game to run on it well. If they want a game that has 50% more happening it, then expect to need 50% more system performance to handle it. I think the air sim people are a little more knowledgeable about this. I wonder if there's a huge difference on console between MSFS24 on PC and consoles? I have only played it on PC.
Or indeed, more concisely, as "Spoons". I guess the TSW version is known as "Forks" "I'm off for a pint and a curry at Forks tonight!"
Ten handpumps on the bar but probably all connected to the Doom Bar barrel, despite what the labels might say! (Only joking). Still at £2.10 a pint as opposed to nearly or more than £5 in "normal" pubs, the appeal is not hard to see. Some are better than others... The Savoy in Swindon can be a bit rough, but go to Gloucester and down the heritage Docks area and the Lord Constable is a nice venue. My only complaint about Spoon's food is they don't do some more conventional pub food like normal sandwiches or a Ploughmans Salad.
Do they have different local names, just owned by the same company? Or are they all called Weatherspoons?
Wetherspoons (no "a") is the parent company and branding but each pub has an individual traditional name, often linked to the original building's use (they tend to buy up old property and convert to a pub). For example, the "Savoy" in Swindon used to be the main town centre cinema, before it closed down and moved operations to a multiplex in the outlying area.
I remember watching Tom Nicholas' video where he did Land's End to John o' Groats only eating in spoons and sleeping in spoons hotels. When he got to Newcastle and upon waking up the next day, walked a minute down the road and had breakfast in objectively the worst spoons of his entire trip, I was sitting watching in horror just like; "Mate, if you had walked literally another minute up the same road you'd have got to The Five Swans, an objectively vastly superior Wetherspoons!" (Yes, there are three within a couple of minutes of each other, it is truly the Starbucks of Beer)
Depends on what you mean by "a high level of detail". As for myself, I'm not a hardcore flight simmer, I only flight really small planes at very low altitude just to look around, precisely to observe the details... If my PC cannot handle that, I buy a new one. It's as you said earlier. Spent 4000+€ in 2020, hoping TSW will run fine, and was then furious about that stuttering. And indeed, lowering the settings did not change anything.
