Gwe a new route Reading to Westbury with Iet and class 60? Or Reading Swindon? NTP Manchester to Liverpool or Leeds to York 1983 with a class 56 reused HEAs , cargo wagons and some mk1 coaching stock? TVL Tyne to Darlington? Reused updated livery 56, 47 and a Pacer? Should licences get in the way, defer the affected rolling stock and wait for future arrangements or the editor.
Some good ideas there. It makes me sad seeing the line to Whitby leaving the main line at Middlesbrough, or the line to Boulby at Saltburn, and apparently from what I've read, no possibility of extending the existing route. On the Trans Pennine the Bury platforms are there complete with third rail electrification, the Calder Valley line and the Oldham loop either side of Newton Heath depot, but extensions aren't going to happen so I've stopped thinking about it.
You'd certainly think so, even if it's left to a third party to create such content. But they'd need the thing we don't mention.
Routes in TSW can be infintely long if you have infinite non-volatile memory, and plenty of RAM. For consoles, this is difficult as they are limited, "cooked", systems. This is why routes cannot be so long, however routes are becoming longer.
The whole route isn't loaded in one go. That's why if you do a free cam and your train drives off into the distance, when you re-join it, there's a loading screen as it loads in the bits of map it needs. Shouldn't theoretically be a limit to route length on consoles either, as long as it fits on your storage.
Yes - you are right. On UE, the map tiles are streamed, with respect to the load-in of graphical assets, etc., to your viewpoint, in game. The simulation also keeps tabs on other assets that are floating around the entire map of the route, say, AI trains and signal status, and you can see this when you "load" the map (and there is a delay when this happens, as it calls the full position data). This ability to look across all of the tiles, in a map widget, is probably not that resource heavy ( the expected "timetable" will just be a data array, like a spreadsheet), and this minimal whole route data is (presumably) only called to memory when you look at the map. So, I believe that you are correct, that there is no limit on route length, at all, from the perspective of a compiled route on your PC/console, except for (principally) the storage of the asset data to be streamed (say, about 100Mb per route mile). Now I am not 100% sure of the next bit.... but... I suspect that in order to keep, say, a 300 mile route open as a single instance when you are developing it, could require considerably more dedicated hardware than a 30 mile route. It could require a potentially significant capital investment (high £10,000s, and possibly low £100,000s). If this is the actual reason why longer routes don't get deployed, then I wish that DTG would just say so, rather than be vague about it, because this route length issue seems to rile so many people, and there's absolutely no need for it. There is also the development cost per mile/tile, although the distance metric isn't a reliable guide to overall "value" or "cost". NTP includes miles and miles of very basic (and fairly badly built) tunnels that go through completely empty voids, for say four or five miles in total, which is a really big chunk of the route length. It would probably have taken more time to line up the tunnel portals with the rest of the route, than to build the tunnels themselves (which I doubt took more than a few hours.. in total).... NB: With all that said, there is also a default setting in UE for maximum extent for a "world", but you can switch off this default and go to unlimited. It is possible that TSW is designed to work with this default setting, and they've chosen not to go to "unlimited" for a reason (and perhaps a good reason, for now). I don't know if this is what they've done. I personally don't care about route length (within reason). I would rather they employ and train two extra people to develop great intensive content, rather than spend the money on a large bunch of octo-core servers, and pay the rent for the space they take up.
