the best feature this game would have is a full scale recreation of Europe and the USA, with every single railway to exist, and travelling around by rail should be good, all you do is select the town you would like to start in, get in your car, go to the train station, wait for a train, get on one and go to your destination. Features: a car for you to drive around in. motorways and roads for if you are a car jockey and like to travel around places by car. every single route and railway that currently exists. another way to actually think of Train Sim World. possibly heritage railways with Steam Trains aswell. and not to forget the famous London Underground and the heavily busy New York Metro!
Given how long it takes to produce a single route, you want them to knock up a complete, detailed recreation of the whole of Europe and the US, plus you want cars to use... in TRAIN sim? Why not planes too? Helicopters? Maybe a space shuttle? I presume you're trolling and don't think that's a serious suggestion?
If we assume that the time to make a route is linear and a function of route length, then at the current rate of around 7 months to build 40 miles of route, it would take around 4 years and 8 months just to build the UK's rail network. That would mean no new content, no bug fixes, no editor, etc. until at least 2024. If we can trust the 2016-17 UN report, then the length of just Europe's rail network is 217,000 km, or around 130,000 mi. Again, assuming that the time to create a route is linear, then it would take almost 65 years to accomplish this task. That's not including the time it would take to build rolling stock for every single railway company in Europe, and that also doesn't include the US like your proposal would call for. Many passion projects from developers can take many years to build a comparatively short section of line in TS1. The longest route project I can think of at the moment is the Montana Rail Link project which is a little over 900 miles and has been going with 5 people since 2016, with no end in sight. The vast majority of this route is just empty countryside with towns sparsely scattered along the line, with the biggest cities being Spokane and Bozeman, both relatively small with populations under 250,000. Flight simulators can model the entire world because they can get away with doing custom scenery for the few largest cities, and then basically just randomly generating the rest. This isn't really possible in a train simulator because you're not cruising above these towns at 25,000 ft, you're driving through them and potentially stopping at stations, etc. A higher level of detail is required so that it doesn't feel like you're driving through a barren wasteland.
But if Microsoft who now makes a flight simulator (FS2020) , will make train simulator in the future. it will be much easier to do so because so much in the graphics is already done. But it will not be so good graphics as TSW but still. But it is still lot of work with laying tracks and signals.
It's unlikely that there will be any carryover between the landscapes in a flight sim where buildings are basic boxes, flown over at hundreds of miles an hour, and a train sim where trains need to travel slowly between detailed buildings, using functional track, points, safety systems, signals etc.
Now Dovetail owns the rights for FSX:SE right? So they could use that, if you want to drive your train in 2d track, no signalling and through flat ground or low-res mountains and hills.
I dont think is impossible in future. But not dovetail. Who thought Microsoft would reflect the entire globe med FS2020 not me But now we know they doing it. Over 2 Petabytes data Satellite imagery worldwide down to 3-5 cm accuracy
This seems like one of these tasks we could do once we have quantum computers and true AI to be honest.
It's not just about having the imagery though - having a really detailed picture of the whole world is good and well from 30,000ft with just the airports modelled in detail, but if you're driving a train through a location, you still have to model all of the buildings, tracks, signs, lights, fences, junctions etc, and have it all function with the simulation. TSW and FS are apples and oranges.
Picture from FS2020 Link Link If I could drive a train over whole us. and I'm happy with "mediocre" fs2020 scenery. I am pretty sure FS2020 scenery would suffice. But the track signals someone must do. In TSW i can drive just now very short routes.
Show me a photo of that same industrial estate from near ground level - I'm sure "mediocre" would be a very generous description of its quality at that range.
There is no near picture yet outside airports besides the one I linked to above But listen what Squirrel Have to say about it Link He he flew over his own house. Check the whole video you see what it can. I think this is future. I really hope Microsoft do Train simulators later. Now they have even snow that is being built up Link
All that I can see the FS2020 world to be good for in a trainsim is background scenery, so you'd see for example the skyline of Manhattan fully and accurately in the background on LIRR. Things like that. Anything close to the tracks would still require custom handcraftet models. Though, FS2020 scenery still looks stunning from WAY closer than 30K feet, so it's not quite as useless as some deem it to be.
FS Scenery is much lower resolution, default is mesh points every 5m in high resolution areas, much of the world is far lower resolution. Also DTG no longer have the rights to FSX, no bad blood or anything, the agreement was for a fixed period and the rights have reverted to Microsoft.
Asobo Studio are tapping directly into Microsoft’s Bing Maps dataset. Flight Simulator will draw from two of the service’s three available petabytes of geographical information. That includes satellite imagery and 3D photogrammetry data, with some resolutions down to just three centimeters. Lowest 5 cm I have read For the tech-savvy, many of the scenery areas boast a resolution of 3 centimeters per pixel, while the default in FSX was about 1 meter per pixel. Throw in 1.5 trillion trees, individual blades of grass modeled in 3D, and a complete overhaul of lighting and shadows, and the result is an unprecedented level of detail for a flight simulator of any kind. True VFR flight, day or night, with real-world landmarks is now possible everywhere on the planet.