Thoughts About Removing Ai Trains And Reduced Timetable Series S

With the latest update for the BR Class 805, there are AI and even playable services removed from the timetable and the Series S now have a reduced timetable. So in fact you bought something with the information known at that moment and then they take it partly away from you. Personally I think this is not done and does harm to owners of this DLC.

How do you think about this?

Here is the changelog for this DLC:

Full Changelog
BR Class 805

• Improved timetable stability and reliability across multiple services
• Performance optimisation to help reduce crashes and memory issues
• Added settings for reduced timetable on all platforms to improve performance
• Added and corrected a number of Avanti and LNWR services
• Reduced the frequency of certain fault events
• Improved Class 805 speed limit behaviour
• Improved weather glass/mask visuals
• Fixed issues with brakes and AWS/TPWS self-test behaviour
• Fixed several service count, routing, timing, and destination display issues
• Fixed a propulsion changeover issue that could cause crashes

Developer Note: As part of optimisation work across all timetables, in addition to the above notes, the Xbox Series S timetable will be reduced to support optimal performance.

Class 805 – WCML: London-Milton Keynes Timetable Changes

• Removed LU AI at Queens Park
• Removed AWC nonstop Ai services to Birmingham, Manchester and Glasgow
• Removed a small number of playable 390 services at peak time

Class 805 – Brimingham-Crewe Timetable Changes

• Removed static AI
• Reduced AI at Crewe such as Northern, TfW and EMT services
• Removed some AI AWC services between Stafford and Crewe

 

Is this definitely just for Xbox series S the reduced timetable? I’ve seen people saying it’s all console users but as a PS5 user I’m hoping they haven’t reduced the timetable on there too as I never had any real issue with the full timetable !

 

In order to prioritise timetable optimisation where it counts most, in addition to the above notes, railtours have been removed from the timetable.

 

From what I get, they removed services on all platforms and the Series S got an even more reduced timetable.

 

I'm against it. We were promised a certain amount of services and layers. When they get removed for whatever reason I feel like I've been cheated out of my money.

 

Thank you for the reply, if that’s the case then that’s abit annoying as like I said I never really had any issues before with the full timetable and I’ve always enjoyed the busy timetables

 

haven't played Birmingham to Crewe since the update, but before then I had most layers off and it blurred till I turned the 350 off. Even now it blurs with the 350 on (according to some posts I saw in the feedback thread) but honestly I think All Aboard have there heads too far up their arses to realise that damn 350 is the bloody problem

 

This, it turns out like a false advertisement.

 

As soon as I enable the 350 on GWE, I also get blurry textures on this route. Maybe related, maybe not.

 

I’m not affected but if I was I wouldn’t especially happy. I just hope that the performance improvement is good enough to offset this disappointment.

It’s a tough one because some people will be happy to just have the performance and not be bothered by the reduction but his as many will be deeply upset I’m sure.

I wonder why they couldn’t have just given players both timetables and added a disclaimer to the original one that performance would be poor?

 

I’d be interested to hear from the dev team is if this is as good as it’s going to be or is work still going on to optimise further and the door isn’t fully closed on restoring atleast some of the services? And this is just an interim measure?

 

I'm also not affected as I don't own this DLC, but reading this in the patch notes was major red flag for me. This is not a way to fix problems and breaks the trust in DTG (what is left of it).

 

I hope DTG and AABS come out and give assurances to the community that this is an exceptional circumstance and moving forwards nothing like this will happen again. It’s concerning otherwise that what we buy can be modified and reduced in such a way.

 

I think the better option would’ve been giving the player a choice (a reduced time and standard one). Which they’ve done on some previous routes that couldn’t handle the standard timetable.

 

Seems odd that they didn't just create a new reduced timetable, at least for PC where specs vary significantly. The patch notes aren't very clear to me as to what has actually happened to which platform, but it sucks to have content removed when it seemingly worked well before. One interesting possibility though is that AABS has tested adding both the 807 and 70 to the timetable, and that the results weren't pretty.

 

I mean cutting services is bad enough to aid performance, but if it turn out that they’d been cutting services to be able to add additional payware would leave a very bad taste in people’s mouths and would be a PR disaster. Surely DTGs legal team would have something to say about such a thing?

Edit For the record I doubt that any party would even consider adding any additional paid content to this route without first being able to restore the cut content so this is purely hypothetical.

 

Wow, I really hope DTG can be open about this and share proper details if services WERE removed from all consoles. I would hate to see a route I bought just yesterday, which ran perfect and was really enjoyable, had a load of services removed (unless they were minor unimportant services)

 

Well having just tried the 350 on Birmingham to Crewe (original timetable) myself, I maybe take *some* of this back.

Just ran service 9Y78 with the 350/1. Between Crewe and Wolverhampton the only issue were that the "Max Speed = 110" and labels for switches behind the driver went slightly blurry (but not to the point of being unreadable), train exteriors (mine and and AI), and the world itself were fine.

But you see, Wolverhampton is where the problems started. Approaching the station it briefly went full unreadable labels and blurry exterior and world but then went fine. Then when leaving it did the same thing, briefly went to normal again, but then went back all the way to New Street (where it went back normal again, but it always did that). I don't think, at least, that previosly I could get that far with a 350 before major issues cropped up.

For context, I'm on Series S and had the following layers on

• WMR Class 323
• AWC Class 390
• EMT 158
• Cross Country and WMR Class 170s
• Class 220 XC Voyager

 

If enabling something on one route causes issues on another, that's a sign of serious issues in the game's code...

 

That's not what I mean, as soon as I enable the 350 layer on GWE, I get blurry textures on GWE. So it looks like the 350 is consuming a lot of resources/memory.

 

Well by removing services from the PC version which ran perfectly well with them included they've sealed their fate as far as I'm concerned. I'll not be buying Trent Valley and risk a future 'improvement' leaving me with with less than I'd originally paid for.

 

Wait a second! I’d completely misread and thought it was just consoles? If the PC timetable has been reduced as well then clearly it does affect me.
And yes I’m in the same mindset and would certainly need guarantees and promises before giving AABS any more of my cash.
How many services have been cut?

 

If you are surprised by this then you must be new or really haven't been paying attention to what happens on Series S. Another route where AI/static stock was reduced on Series S, after the route was released, was Shap. In both these cases anyone playing on Series S ended up having content removed that they had already paid for, but at least they were notified. Several other routes, including SRM and FTF, were released with less layers for Series S than other platforms, but Dovetail never bothered to let people know this ahead of time. Eventually we were told that cuts can be made to Series S that are so close to the release date for a DLC, that it never even gets communicated to the customer-facing team. So it can be impossible for anyone to know, including the people who work at DTG, if Series S will get all the layers, and if not, what is cut.

This has been going on for years and I wrote about it on the forum often as I was playing on Series S. Now I have Series X and the game plays better plus the risk of having things taken away is much less (but not zero). I strongly suggest to anyone who could possibly move to Series X to do it. I bought mine used and, after I sold my Series S, there wasn't a huge price difference. On Series S you don't ever really know what you're going to get, and whatever you currently have, can be taken away.

 

The Railtour services are gone but I don't have any way of knowing now how many other services there were originally.

 

I’m on ps5 and just had a look at the Evero 2025 WCMLs timetable and there’s an option for a reduced timetable and then the normal timetable. However looking at the normal timetable there seems to be more Pendolino and Evero services added! Alot of the previous AI non stop through Milton Keynes seem to be playable now and there’s some new Liverpool and Birmingham services added

 

This is not only about Series S. There are services removed from all platforms and the Series S got an even more reduced timetable. If they communicate in advance about what you get, then people can decide if they want a reduced timetable or not. In this case, they bought a DLC with a full timetable and then services and static stock where removed.

 

This is the result of ten years of DTG burying their heads in the sand about TSW's performance issues and bugs, and not wanting to clean up the general coding mess. It's got to the point now where it would cost them too much in developer time (and therefore money) to actually address the tech debt, and so the only financially viable solution for them is to remove bits of the game to shoehorn it into work on lower-spec platforms.

TSW7 is no doubt around the corner and with the change to UE5 it's no real surprise to me that DTG are unwilling to invest time in what they probably now consider a legacy product, especially if none of the current DLC can be ported over as we're assuming will be the case. So their approach to TSW6 now is to do what they can to make it hobble along on two of the platforms it's supposed to have been developed for, at the expense of PC users who are now needlessly losing services that were listed as a features on the DLC store pages.

I don't agree with it in the slightest. They should have left the existing timetables as they were and produced reduced timetables for the routes that needed it. It wouldn't have been a big ask, considering it would just be a copy with some services removed. Maintaining a reduced timetable in the long-run wouldn't have been much work as presumably they wouldn't be able to add any future layers to it anyway, leaving only the full timetable to be updated. If they wanted to do things properly they would have then added an option to disable the timetables you don't want to see.

We wanted performance improvements but instead we're seeing stuff we paid for being removed from the game. Not setting the best of precedents really.

JB

 

I don’t one the Evero and if I did I wouldn’t worry about the WCMLs timetable anyway, as I only play the OTS timetable on that route and that is out of era

 

From what AABS have said on Discord is that we have two TT for the Evero 805 TT for both B2C and WCML..One full which has not been touched then one reduced which has had many ai services stripped, while for WCML there is only one variant of the 350 to assist consoles, especially xbox Series S with the issues they have face since release.

For those like me on PC nothing has changed we still have the same amount of services and AI (and we might see even more once the 807/ 350-4 + 70 come out looking at the layers for each version

While to answer another question the railtours are still there for B2C 805TT

 

Some clarity here

No playable services have been removed from either timetable. The one exception is the B2C 2019 timetable where the railtours had to be removed outside of our control due to platform limitations due to mount limits. We can't have one timetable have them and another not because mount limits is different from memory issues. Should mount limits get resolved (which I believe dtg are working on) then we can look at adding things back to the 2019 timetable but at the moment we were left without a choice here and I totally get that is frustraiting.

The services cut from the 805 timetable were AI only and were only cut on the reduced timetables, not the full ones. So PC and PS5 users can use the full timetables as we are not aware of performance issues there. Xbox users currently may have to use the reduced timetable or select layers to turn off on the full timetable. The team have worked tirelessly to find solutions that work to improve the player experience. This includes optimisation on the B2C route, optimisation on our trains and even assisting DTG with optimising the Class 390.

Please refer to my response in the feedback thread on here if you have not noticed a change in performance and we will investigate that.

Thanks.

Note: I see it says a small number of playable services for the 390 were removed however please note that the ones that were removed were replaced by the new headcode services for Avanti following the uplift of services post september if I recall which means it now lines up with Trent Valleys timetable, if you find the service count numbers to be different, please please please let us know and it will be flagged with the team.

 

The 350 has been optimised, you are not considering the many other variables that can go into blurry textures. I gave a full outline of this on the feedback thread. Could there be more 350 optimisations that could be done? Possibly, I won't rule anything out personally but understand that blurry textures happen on nearly every route in TSW and I would like to hope that the teams recent work has shown improvements on B2C. If this is not the case then I please suggest replying in the feedback thread to my post.

Thanks

 

Thanks for taking the time to come and add clarity to the situation. I wasn’t aware mounting issues was even a thing on PC and thought it was purely a Console issue so every day is a school day.

 

Its only a PS5 thing to my knowledge but as a result we can't seperate out what is mounted on PS5 vs PC so unfortunately all platforms become impacted. It is very frustraiting for everyone involved

 

I hope the removal of rail tours doesn’t become the norm as they add so much despite being so small in the wider scope of a timetable. I can’t be the only one who enjoys passing them unexpectedly, least of all driving them. They’re usually the first thing I look for on the timetable of a new route

 

And as someone that has both platforms, this is far from the only game that has this sort of issue on the Series S vs the Series X. The Series S is a solid solution for lower cost and lower detailed games that aren’t heavy on memory, but with recent games that are more powerful coming out over the last 2 years or so, it’s really shown the difference between the power it has vs the Series X.

I’m sure there’s a better way to manage it to scale down other things to not impact the AI and trains much, but then again with how wonky the Series S memory can be, this might be the easiest and more sure fire way to do it.

 

Very true, and I have always said that it's not the fact that TSW routes might have to be scaled down to run on Series S that has bothered me. Rather, it's not letting us know it's going to happen, and letting us find out for ourselves after we have already bought it. Or, of course, taking something away after the fact.

This brings me back to the original intent of this post. There is no way to be surprised about TSW content getting removed from DLC when it has been happening to Series S for years. When I wrote about what was happening contemporaneously, very few people could be bothered because it wasn't happening to them. Now of course we have even more players affected, but the writing was always on the wall - just like what happened with the Epic games store, except that at least the community seemed to be united against that.

 

Nothing should ever be taken away from something we’ve already purchased and it’s a worrying precedent for all platforms but series S and Gen 8 players especially.

This is a result of a poor QA and testing process where DLC are being allowed by DTG to release in a state where they are unable to be handled by lower spec consoles. AABS can partially be excused as it was their first route and DTG allowed them to push the S beyond its capabilities. But this isn’t DTGs first rodeo and they should have known better.

 

Amazing, thank you so much for the clarity. Looks like AABS really have a good head on their shoulders. Best of luck with TVL (which i no doubt will get) and hope you continue to make great modern content

 

The Class 710 is still borked on the WCML:S Class 805 timetable...

 

Thanks for the clarification. As far as I know, the mount limit is only a PS5 issue, due to hard limits on this console. It seems the patch notes do not make clear, the BR 390 services are replaced by headcode services, with better communicaton from DTG, this part of confusion could have been avoided.

The concerns about removing AI services and static stock and the now reduced timetable for Series S are still there. Making changes like this after release of a DLC, are not making me happy at all. What else can be changed after you bought a DLC, making your purchase different to what you was told to get.

We all know about the blurry texture problem for to long now, but the cause is still not fixed. In the meantime additional DLC's for already affected routes routes are still released, making the problem worse, or those DLC are introducing the issue on not yet affected routes. This is more a DTG problem then a problem caused by the 3rd party dev making the DLC, but for doesn't matter for the end result.

Proper testing before release and see what is possible and what not, is in my opinion key here. Only then you can sell a DLC with the correct information of what you get, without the need to cut stuff afterwards. As far as I'm aware of, DTG is the one who ports over 3rd party DLC to console. So if this is right, DTG is also responsible for finding issues and adjust/solve this together with the 3rd party dev before release.

 

Am the same as you. I dont own it. But reading this i thought why even bother buying it now. Taking services away just to improve performance. I bet people that have the dlc will be absolute livid knowing what they paid for will be taken away a but. Unreal reading it likes
Tut tut

 

Would you consider releasing the full timetable with railtours on Train Sim Community, so that PC owners can download it?

 

When gen 8 goes, thats a chance to split the pc version from the console isnt it. Lose addons mgr for example.
The game is starting to become reliant on timetable modders to create a full experience.

 

I’m assuming the reduced timetables is a Series S only issue?
I was made to believe it was for 9th gen consoles and PC too.
I fired up a service last night on B2C and noticed I had all my layers intact.

 

I'm pretty sure you own WCMLoS, so you are missing the Class 87 timetable.

Do you own WCMLoS and/or the Class 86 pack?

 

Funnily enough, it goes against their own philosophy, which was held up high and mentioned quite often when something couldn't be done and as a justification for the new TSW iterations a few years back, as "we cannot take away something that was bought in a different state".

 

They're just making stuff up as they go along at this point. The core of the game is so busted it's a constant robbing of Peter to pay Paul, to use a very old phrase.

Not to mention, once again a 3P dev is out here having to defend DTG's mess while we hear crickets from the developers of the game itself.

Sad situation all around

 

As the PC version is sent to Steam for distribution and the PS5 version to the Playstation Store why can't they be separated? This situation makes a mockery of the statement by DTG a while ago that having TSW on consoles wouldn't lead to any 'watering down' of the PC version. Were they lying or didn't they have a clue what they were talking about?

 

Wonder if Just Trains know their content is being used as part of a bait and switch.