On the other side, I would have despised a riviera line set in an Earlier era. Would not have played it as much for sure. So its really hard to please every one.
You don't need to censor the word "Class" I'd never played the original route, so it was basically all new to me.
I heard they are calling it the @ss 90 on tiktok and adding the "Cl" so it blends in. Kids nowadays. Is that high res texture pack presumably hosted by a third party supposedly for free on a commercial product out yet?
Not sure why. There was far more infrastructure, at Exeter and Newton Abbot in particular. Up until the mid 80's most of the route was manually signalled with semaphores. A rich variety of traction, all of which took a bit of thought to drive and didn't easily cope with the gradients. Oh and made a rather nice racket in the process. Summer Saturday's saw trains running block on block along the sea wall, particularly once a bit of lateness crept in.
I have had posts that I was unable to edit previously without a mod checking it first for possible offensive content. I went through the post with a fine tooth comb and found nothing questionable and concluded that the censor bot didn't like the last three letters of that harmless "C" word. A while later the post was opened up for editing presumably after a mod cleared the content as OK. Oh and by the way Ducky I am probably old enough to be your dad and never use TikTok LOL. These Dovetail Direct presentations are released into the public domain and as such people are entitled to have opinions on it. I have just stated my honest impressions about the presentation style that has been adopted and make no apologies for it. If they start using a more level headed adult style that is less dizzy with back slapping "enthusiasm" I would definitely review it more favourably.
This I have to agree with, particularly as touched on previously, when negotiating with senior managers at rail and infrastructure operators to get the necessary permissions and licences. If they see some of the presentation styles, it's no wonder they think that's not a professional, responsible organisation and want nothing to do with it. A bit of humour is fine but if I was the Safety Director at MTA or somewhere doing a bit of fact finding and pulled up some of the past streams, well 'nuff said.
Honestly no idea about the texture upgrade partly because I'm on console and partly because I didn't buy the 90
I can't stand older traction. I love MML bur can't return too often because I really don't like the HSTs. Im just in awe of modern traction. Again that's just my opinion. I'm.happy for those that do enjoy those older style routes, and the JT content looks amazing but it's just not for me.
Agreed. Leipzig-Dresden and Frankfurt-Fulda are only two decent modern German routes in the game. I don´t return to any of the others at this point. Some of German scene has returned to TSC, because there is much more German content there. Same goes for the Dutch.
That’s my personal opinion, and I simply have to agree with ivor on this. These Dovetail Direct events have always been a bit cringe-worthy, and you get the feeling it’s like a bunch of children in a nursery left unsupervised. Or if I want to see two clowns behaving like that, I usually go to the circus. Except that in the circus it’s appropriate, whereas in a Dovetail Direct where you’re trying to promote a new product, it’s just laughable in my eyes.
I'm the same older and US freight are my lowest played routes all of them are level 9 or lower in my stats. And its not like I haven't given them a shot I do own TVL, NTP, WCL, BPO, Preston to Carlisle, SOS, Peak Valley, Linke Rhein, HSC, SPG, Sherman Hill, CJP, and Clinchfield. All the modern passenger routes I own are over Level 25. But I know I'm an odd duck so I get why others prefer it the other way as well and wouldn't say there is no market for it.
They treat it like its as big as a Marvel Panel at D23 or SDCC. I hope they have the fancy overlays and cut sequences again.
I keep hearing the apocryphal anecdote of people taking "days to download" but as mentioned before, there are limits. A console for example is generally limited to 1 TB, and all of TSW I think is half of that so there's only so much it can possibly be...and that's assuming you have most everything ever released for TSW and need to download it all at once. I know I don't download it all and I have an okay connection...simply because it takes up a lot of space and I can't possibly play all those routes in a timely fashion. Just download a route as you use it. I'm not saying it doesn't take some time... but always going to the worst case and rare example is not the best approach to a given situation. You also have to decide the most "probable" course as well for proper planning. Yes there's a chance you might get into an accident on a bus, but do you avoid all buses? A lot of games update every year. It's their marketing thing. I don't think it's necessarily the "best" way to do things, but it is one COMMON way of doing it that is honestly relatively easy as they can also use it as an update/version update at the same time. They'd have to find a better way to accomplish the same amount of buzz. As I said, I don't think that's the BEST route to take as it both introduces new players AND potential bugs at the same time... but that is how game releases tend to be these days. Star Citizen for example always do their "free game test for new players" at the same time as a huge sale, a version update, AND an in gme event at once which ALWAYS manages to be a total disaster. However, they do manage to get a lot of traffic (and sell quite a bit of product to people who buy it before they try it and it crashes) so financially and "stats" wise, it does "work" in that it does everything but be playable. It's a nightmare for the existing players who tend to avoid the whole thing for the launch week it's running...but it does accomplish the sales and player count metrics that the company tracks. I'm guessing it's similar for DTG as well as many many other studios. They can't "measure" fun or player satisfaction or whatnot very easily. They can however measure new sales, new players, and total logins and that does seem to track quite well with the yearly release schedule. If you want them to break them up into separate things (or even not do the yearly version update) then you'd have to propose something to replace that lost opportunity. I'm not seeing anyone as a "bad guy", it's just different perspectives. What you want works for you. What DTG want works for them. Sometimes it's the same thing. Sometimes it's not.
Yeah and no ... here it's just such a useless waste of time and bandwidth to download everything again each year. 95% of which data is exactly the same that's already laying around on the disk anyway. Why should the loyal user pay extra in time and bandwidth for the companies marketin strategy of rebranding the latest patch as new game - find better ways.
Any suggestions as to how you think it should be done? I mean, just telling people to "do better" generally doesn't get the result you want. When I was managing a large team I would never ask someone to simply "do better" because it gives no clue as to what "better" means.
I’m sure many people would love to do that, but it’s not that easy to put into practice. Because if I only set up a specific route that I want to travel on, that route is bound to be missing lots of trains or goods wagons that come from other routes. And I reckon that’s the case with every route – the route I want to run needs elements from other routes. And when it comes to activating shifts, that’s another issue altogether, because sometimes shifts are displayed that you supposedly don’t have, even though you’ve installed the route listed below them. And that’s when the problems start – trying to work out what else I need to install. And that’s exactly what DTG really ought to change: by providing a separate .pak file for trains and locomotives, a separate .pak file for carriages, and a separate Asset.pak file. Then these problems would no longer exist. But knowing DTG, that’s unfortunately never going to happen.
Their job, not mine. (Almost every other studio seems to be able do it, too) I'm not managin their team or get paid, I'm just some bloke that plays train simulators and that would prefer to not have to do this tedious "ritual" every year and it seems it's not just me.
Whichever version of TSW7 I end up getting, I will simply triage the routes in my DLC collection to download a few at a time. Much of the older content I will be leaving out anyway. On PC/Steam, so long as you task switch back to Steam after starting TSW and call up the DLC list and tick a few boxes, it doesn't stop you from playing the game.
No, but it's becoming increasingly common among studios since they see it working....for the things they are measuring anyway.
As I've said before, it takes a couple of hours a year. If you owned MSFS 2024 (and you clearly don't) you'd be looking at a couple of hours every update (nearly monthly at the moment). Football Manager takes at least 3 hours every year due to having to add skins, kits and facepacks to the new game. When I was your age it would take 20 minutes to load a game-up every time you played it. "Their job, not mine". Nothing helps the cause like an armchair expert and it really does feel like people these days have zero patience. Maybe clean your room, put a wash on, make some dinner or start downloading and go out and have a social life if it's that much of "a ritual".
As someone who lives in Devon and uses this line a lot, I love the Riviera line in TSW6. They did a great job. However, I would also welcome a 1950s version a la TSC that goes to Kingswear and includes the Brixham branch.
Wow, interesting collection of wild assumptions about me, including my age, while you obv know nothing at all about me. lol I'll refrain from going further into this. Enjoy your unecessary re-downloads, because we once had long loading times some decades ago. Agree to disagree.
You're not that old yourself then considering anyone into gaming pre-PS3 has some level of fondness for just being able to put in a disk and play the game. Heck, if you're a Nintendo player that's not changed, their first party output even on Switch 2 still consistently is sold on cart, and can be played off it with only minor downloads in 99% of cases. Incidentally why I still haven't went digital there, physical games are a god send for that system. Also, I have to say, on 2024 you're simplifying things a lot for your narrative. That game was restructured entirely because of the complaints relating to 2020's download size and times. You only need to download what's absolutely needed for the sim, with aircraft and scenery downloading as needed from the cloud. Now that the game's servers are actually stable honestly it's kind of a brilliant solution. The game loads way faster then 2020 ever did despite having to do those, while also being really light on a SSD. If downloading is absolutely needed then spreading it out with downloads while you're playing is a great solution. And thing is if you liked how 2020 did it you can still download everything to be less reliant on streaming if you so wish, everybody wins. This is what complaining and raising a issue can do, bring innovate improvements to the table. Flight sim is not perfect, but it's in a way better place than train sim is on the whole due to the fact players the constantly are vocal about wanting improvements to the game. Settling and saying "It is what it is" gets you a company as stagnate as DTG, that just refuses to ever move the needle more than needed to please its whales.
Further thought on Riviera Line as being discussed a few posts above. Having decided to give SimRail a rest for a few evenings and finish my TSW August mastery, I picked one of the Cucumber runs from the Journey list. Instantly started at Exeter on a pitch black evening with the rain lashing down, visibility about 10 feet in front of the cab. Whoever curated the Journey mode elements for this route was guilty of gross stupidity. One of the scenic routes in the UK yet what should have been the editor’s choice, so to speak, nearly all take place in conditions of poor visibility or darkness. Whatever the TSW7 route is, please use a bit more savvy when compiling the Journey list!
Agreed, although we PC users have the option of using the God Mode mod to change weather settings on the fly.
That's true of much of the journey mode of TSW for years throughout most routes that I've played. It's almost always raining/foggy/dark because those make it "challenging" in their view. Not fun mind you, but journey mode is the "challenging" mode so that's the only ways they can think of to throw difficulty in.
You only "need" to download the routes you want to play in TSW too. You kinda just made the other guy's point for him, pretending to be against it.
Thinking beyond the DTG side of things, I wonder if Direct will announce anything new from the third parties over and above what’s already known? So what could we see from the likes of Firefly, AABS, ATS (ho hum) and TSG. Also whether the Dutch and Czech developers are bringing something new to the table.
It turns out the Dutch track wasn’t built by a third-party developer after all, but by DTG. Or am I getting that wrong?
TSS raised an interesting point, the direct starts this year at absolutely useless time (22h CEST), but follows directly after gamescom opening night live. I'm pretty sure that being featured during ONL is incredibly expensive (Blizzard/Microsoft used it last year to announce new WoW expansion and they still bought maybe five minutes at the very end), but maybe it could be a hail mary move to buy a 30 second clip of the new Thomas game there to try to generate some sales and help with the studio struggles? I doubt it would be TSW though, those who wants to play train sims know that TSW exists. Unless a completely new series reveal..?
While I personally agree with you, people do like modern stuff. I first started going on Holiday Dawlish in the late 80s and early 90s so at the tail end of class 50s, but still plenty of 47s, 37s, HSTs, First generation DMUs etc etc. I go Dawlish every year now for a holiday and while the Rail scene isn't as exciting for me. We are now in the era of kids/teens growing up with 150/2s, 800s, 66s etc
Might've been a 2nd party. Either way, there's developers out there that have experience with creating Dutch routes and trains. Plus there's now a library of Dutch assets ready to use as well as 2 trains commonly seen throughout the country. Zwolle-Groningen was chosen specifically to build up assets. Would be a shame not reusing those in another Dutch route.
Personally, I don’t mind at all, as I’ll be on the night shift on the shunting locomotive anyway, and I’ll have to keep an eye on a trainee driver – who’s actually doing a very, very good job. So I can watch it on my tablet. But I do wonder what DTG had in mind with this timing, or why DTG is letting it start so late. After all, lots of users have to go to work or school on Wednesday, so DTG could surely have chosen a better time for it.
That will be my strategy anyway. Get the free starter pack and install only what I am playing at that moment. Now it's Nurnberg, Thames Valley, Medway Valley and Cargo Line v6. But maybe in 6 week's time it's someting different .
You also need to download the routes with content that layer onto them too. I do, certainly, not playing without my layers. (Now, if they could separate rolling stock in the downloads...)
True. But that would still make it doable IMO. Plus, you can download stuff in the background while you play the first thing(s) you've downloaded
Unless there is some sort of pre reveal, like election night I will be checking the details on Wednesday morning. IMHO somewhat ludicrous timing for the UK and European markets who probably form the bulk of the customer base. Or is what they’re offering going to be so dire, they want a firebreak before the reactions start appearing on here, Facebook and Discord?
How long has RSSLO been on the list as a third-party developer? And if you look at RSSLO’s DLCs for TSC, you can see that as soon as one DLC is finished, work on the next one has already started or is already underway. That’s why, personally, I don’t really think RSSLO will finally get round to making a DLC for TSW just yet. That would be very welcome, as RSSLO tend to create a lot of OBB-only content. It would certainly go down very well in TSW, but personally I don’t believe it’s going to happen at the moment.
It was auto dubbed into English on my iPad - The comedy accents are gone but I got to understand it. I had the auto translated subtitles on as well for bits that the auto dubbing missed. It’s very funny.
Yes, but that also depends on the route. There's lots of layers on routes that I don't bother with since they don't add much for me personally.
